ORIGINAL ARTICLE

By John Hawkins

Men have it rougher in America than most people realize. In part, that’s because they’re one of the few groups (along with white people, conservatives and Christians) it’s cool to crap on at every opportunity. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a non-stop assault on masculinity in America. Just to give you an idea of what I mean by that, here are articles written that show up on the first three pages of Google when you do a search for “masculinity.”
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• Mass Killings in the U.S.: Masculinity, Masculinity, Masculinity
• Die Like a Man: The Toxic Masculinity of Breaking Bad
• Why We Need to Reimagine Masculinity
• Masculinity Is Killing Men: The Roots of Men and Trauma ...
• Journeys Through Trans Masculinity - BuzzFeed
• Toxic masculinity - Geek Feminism Wiki
• Masculinity U | Rethink Masculinity.
• How Feminists Can Do More to Fight Toxic Masculinity ..

Masculinity isn’t toxic, doesn’t cause mass killings and it doesn’t need to be reimagined or rethought. Furthermore, this “masculinity is bad” mentality is driven by failed “men” and more importantly, liberal feminists. These women want men to be easily-controlled, neutered lapdogs and then they wonder why they keep getting bored with beta eunuchs who are supposedly everything they want.
Meanwhile, good women who haven’t turned into bitter, hyper-sensitive, man-hating witches end up wondering where all the “real” men have gone and why they’re stuck trying to sort through guys who have no ambition, play videogames eight hours a day or don’t seem to care about anything other than getting in their pants.

The sad truth is that men, like all people, tend to do what they’re rewarded for doing and avoid situations that punish them. The cultural changes over the last fifty years have hit “real” men particularly hard.

There was a time when a man without a college education could work hard and make enough money to take care of himself, a wife and a couple of kids. He might not have had much, but his wife treated him like a king and he could take pride in the fact that he was taking care of his family.
Fast forward to 2015 and because of computers, automation, shipping containers and the lowered cost of world transport, those men can barely take care of themselves, much less a wife and kids. Furthermore, because we dole out so much money in welfare, in many cases a woman and her kids may be better off  without a man in the house.

Then what happens to those young men who are struggling to grow up without a male role model in the house? How many punks are there in street gangs today who will spend their whole life in and out of jail? Now, how many of them would have grown up to be good and decent men if they had a “dad” who cared in the house? It’s hard to say, but you have to think more than half of them would have turned out to be productive citizens if they had a strong male role model watching over them.
Getting beyond that, what women want out of a man has changed. It used to be that they wanted a “good” man who’d take care of them financially and treat them well.

Now, more women are going to college. More women have careers. More women don’t need a man to take care of them. Those are all good things, but they also undercut a woman’s need to get married and more importantly, stay married.

Suddenly, a man may find that a woman he once would have married, won’t talk to him because she’s more educated. She also doesn’t need him to take care of her. She’s making her own money and even if she loses her job, the government will take care of her. Even if they do make it past that and get in a relationship, he finds he’s not the king of the castle; he’s in a partnership. That’s certainly not a bad thing, but even as someone who loves strong, successful, intelligent women, I have to admit it’s a step down from what most men used to have. Not every man will admit it, but with all other things being equal, the overwhelming majority of men would vastly prefer to be with a humble waitress who thinks he’s the best thing walking than an accomplished female CEO who just sees him as an acceptable man to have as a partner in marriage.

Additionally, there’s no longer a big stigma against divorce and the courts are slanted against men.
So imagine dating a woman who’s making as much money as you, who just decides she doesn’t want to be married anymore, takes your kids away from you and then to add insult to injury, you have to pay this woman who broke your heart and took your kids, your hard earned money every month while she sleeps with some other guy in a house that the two of you used to share. Almost every man reading this knows other men in this situation and because it’s so common, it makes the potential cost of entering into a marriage considerably higher for a man than it used to be.

Even if you navigate that minefield, which a lot of men do, we now live in an overly feminized society. At any time, some pathetic losers who spend their time obsessing over “microaggressions” and “trigger” words can ruin you if they hear a joke they don’t like. Imagine that: a whole lifetime of blood, sweat and tears ruined by one joke, one comment, one Facebook share that a bunch of miserable failures don’t like.

Meanwhile, you and a woman both do a little drinking and have consensual sex; then, Uh-oh, you “raped her” because both of you were drunk, but you’re the “rapist” because you’re male and she changed her mind about whether having sex with you was a good idea.

If you buy a gun legally and learn how to use it because you want to be ready to protect yourself and your family, then you’re a dangerous bad guy responsible for the actions of criminals and mental cases because liberal w*ssies wet their pants every time they look at a gun.
Want to hunt? Then you’ll be chastised for killing an animal by a bunch of idiots who’ll probably go eat a hamburger right after they’re done.

Are you a poor man? Then politicians treat you like an idiot who needs to be led around by the hand because you’re too stupid to take care of yourself. Are you a successful man? Then you're one of those greedy, evil people who are supposedly ruining America.
Turn on the TV? Then you’ll find most dads presented as hapless bumblers who are led around by their wives or saved by their kids.

Are you a man who thinks you should get paid more than a woman who doesn’t work as hard as you, doesn’t work as long as you, or doesn’t produce as much as you? Well, then, you’re a sexist pig who’s trying to keep women down.

Do you think real courage that deserves to be admired is watered down by lauding every chubby model, every man who wants to pretend he’s a woman and every celebrity who kicks an addiction as courageous? Then not only are you sexist; you’re insensitive!

Do you think a woman should have to meet the same standards as a man to do the same dangerous job? Again, sexist pig! What if you think that even if women meet the same standards as a male policeman or soldier, they shouldn’t be put in the line of fire because there are going to be very few of them who can do it, they’re more likely to be injured and other men will take suicidal risks to rescue them because it’s a man job to protect and shield women? Well, that’s even worse! You’re really sexist if you go there.

Meanwhile, as all of this is going on, we live in a country where the government is spending so much that it’s practically a given that we’re going to have a debt-driven depression in the future, Medicare and Social Security will cease to exist in their current form and it seems like we’re taking in any and every uneducated, illegal third-worlder who wants to come here, have a kid and get on welfare so people like you can pay more in taxes to carry them along on your back for the next 18 years.

That’s the world a 20 year old millennial man is growing up in and there’s no point in complaining about it. After all, what are you going to say? “Life’s not fair.” That’s the ultimate loser’s complaint. “Life isn’t fair” for anybody; so forget about complaining, but it is worth taking the time to understand what you’re going to have to deal with to achieve the successful, productive life you’re going to want as a man.

Some “men” will just give up, play video games for 40 hours a week and live in their parents’ basement for their whole lives. Others will spend their lives mired in mediocrity waiting futilely for someone else to lift them up to a better life. More guys will give up on being real men and will be the pathetic neutered “men” liberal feminists want them to be.

That’s their choice, but as the great Abraham Maslow once said,

“If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.”

People’s desires and potential are different. You don’t have to be Chuck Norris, John Wayne or Steve Jobs to be a real man. Everybody can’t be rich, a CEO or famous. Most of the best men you’ll ever meet will never be heroes to anyone except a handful of people. They also won’t be perfect. Life knocks all of us on our ass at times, but the guys who persevere in the face of adversity, have a moral code and set an example by acting like real men will be remembered after they’re gone. It may only be in the hearts and minds of their families and friends, but in the end, aren’t they the ones that matter most? So keep fighting; keep working; love your country, your family; stand for what’s right even when it’s hard. Be that man of honor, that man who raises his kids right, that man whom people call for advice on something. Do your duty, be a real man and do what you can, with what you have, where you’re at. If you’re reading this, no matter what your failings, no matter how hard it gets, you can do it.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

By R.S. McCain

“Each time a woman is catcalled, publicly humiliated, and forced to ignore it, the psychology of female objectification becomes evermore seared into the brains of all actors and bystanders involved. We’re already conditioned to look at a woman and see the raw sum of her physical components before we consider her brain. The more we reinforce this subconscious thought process, the more ingrained it becomes in our psychology.”
— Lily Calcagnini, Harvard Crimson, Oct. 6, 2015


“In contrast to young women, whose empowerment can be seen as a process of resistance to male dominated heterosexuality, young, able-bodied, heterosexual men can access power through the language, structures and identities of hegemonic masculinity.”
— Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson, The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power (1998)

“The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those discourses which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality. . . . These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.”
— Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 1978


The “discourses of heterosexuality” described by French lesbian feminist Monique Wittig are probably not the catcalls described by Lily Calcagnini, but the underlying idea is the same: Male sexual attraction to women is inherently oppressive. The “empowerment” of women requires “resistance to male dominated heterosexuality,” as Professor Holland and her colleagues explained in a book based on feminist gender theory, which regards heterosexuality and male domination as synonymous, two ways of saying the same thing. Heterosexuality reduces a woman to “the raw sum of her physical components,” as Ms. Calcagnini phrases it, and any man who would impose this condition upon her can do so only through the “power . . . of hegemonic masculinity.”

When a college sophomore asserts that we are psychologically “conditioned” to take for granted the “objectification” of women, she thereby invokes a feminist theoretical understanding of sexual behavior that extends far beyond the subject of catcalling. Consider first that Ms. Calcagnini wrote this column in the Harvard Crimson, whose readers are enrolled at arguably the world’s most prestigious institution of higher education. Next consider the sort of behavior she describes:

To the candid man who approached me, rubbing your crotch and murmuring that you could make love to me all day and night, Baby: I could probably call the cops on you at any hour, Buddy.

To the two sirs who, from the safety of your car, hurled cries of Chica, Beautiful Lady, Sexy, Mami, Honey, and Pretty One out of your windows: You made me want to cry.

As you pounded the center of your steering wheel with the palm of your hand, commanding the attention of additional passers-by with each honk of your horn, you encouraged others to join in your objectification game. Powerless, I waited for your traffic light to change, so you would speed away towards the next corner and the next girl.

Are we to believe that these lecherous brutes are Harvard students, so that by writing about their uncouth behavior in the Crimson, Ms. Calcagnini thinks she is addressing the perpetrators directly? Of course not. There might be men at Harvard who occasionally get a bit rowdy, but they are not honking their horns while yelling chica at girls.

In 2015, no man smart enough to go college would ever dare express sexual interest in a female classmate for fear of being accused of “harassment.” Feminists have made university life in the 21st-century a Danger Zone for heterosexual males, who are at risk of expulsion if they even attempt to become intimate with a woman on campus.

She does not need any evidence in order to accuse him of sexual assault. Once accused, a male student will discover he has no due-process rightsin the Title IX hearings where accused males are automatically presumed guilty. These accusations may be made long after an alleged incident. A male student may find himself accused of sexually assaulting an ex-girlfriend whom he continued dating (and having consensual sex with) for many months after whatever incident she may claim was non-consensual whenever a desire for post-breakup revenge strikes her. In other words, your freshman-year girlfriend could wait until your senior year to accuse you of having raped her three years earlier, and thereby quite possibly prevent you from graduating. This is “equality” in 2015.

Feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology promotes a sexual paranoia I call “Fear and Loathing of the Penis,” and this in turn has helped incentivize false accusations of rape. At Harvard in 2014, there were 33 reports of sexual assault, of which six were “determined to be ‘unfounded,’ i.e. ‘false or baseless.’” This climate of anti-male fanaticism has led to the enactment of so-called “affirmative consent” policies, with the practical result that is never safe to assume that any sexual activity on campus is legal, as Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner has explained. At an elite school like Harvard, where tuition is $45,278 a year, a male student would be a fool to take the risk of becoming sexually involved with a female classmate, since Harvard women evidently are willing to make “false or baseless” rape accusations.

Analyzing the Harvard sexual assault data, Reason magazine’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown determined that a “worst-case-scenario assumption means that about one in 114 female undergraduates reported rapes at Harvard last year” — a far cry from the 1-in-5 rate of campus sexual assault claimed by radical feminists (a claim promoted by President Obama, among others). If more than 99% of Harvard women are not at risk of rape, however, this doesn’t prevent Ms. Calcagnini from indicting all male heterosexuals as complicit in harassment:

Catcalls are arresting because they decontextualize the language of physical attraction that might be meaningful when exchanged between lovers. I’m flattered to know that someone who cares deeply about me also finds me beautiful, but this is only because I know that they appreciate my personhood more than my biological ability to have sex.

Using the same language, a catcall is vapid. It reduces my worth to that of my appearance. In the public context of the street, coming from the mouth of a stranger, a catcall exploits the verbiage of intimacy and makes me feel both objectified and powerless to rebuke my objectification.

Moreover, there is implicit sexual intent in a catcall by nature of the fact that it is spoken aloud. Since anyone can enjoyably objectify me without my knowing, I must take a man’s brazen expression of arousal to mean that he’s hoping for some favor in return. Hoping that he’s singled out a woman whose self-esteem is low. Hoping that I’ll forget I’m en route to Spanish and will instead fulfill his sexual fantasies in an alley. Hoping that, to quote the gallant young man who followed me around Harvard Square yesterday, I will “suck his d–k.” . . .

Perpetrators of this kind of objectification may not realize how many women they undermine when they insult one. Their comments dismantle the significant, but clearly still inadequate, social progress that feminists have made for all women.
Who was that young man who followed Ms. Calcagnini around Harvard Square, soliciting her to perform oral sex? You could safely wager $100 that he is not a Harvard student, that he does not read the Crimson, and thus is not confronted with her accusation that his crude behavior is dismantling “social progress,” about which he almost certainly does not give a damn. No, this denunciation of catcalling is a signifying gesture which affords Ms. Calcagnini the opportunity to inform Harvard men that “objectification” — a feminist term for normal male appreciation of female beauty — is unacceptable. She describes how men “enjoyably objectify me without my knowing” (i.e., she is aware that men derive pleasure from looking at her), but is offended by any vocal expression of male sexual interest, because this “reduces my worth to that of my appearance.” Rather than this type of interest, she desires instead “someone who cares deeply about me,” and who therefore will “appreciate my personhood more than my biological ability to have sex.”

Did anyone besides me notice that Ms. Calcagnini uses gender-neutral language (“someone who cares deeply about me . . . they appreciate my personhood”) to describe the sort of attention she welcomes whereas, by contrast, it is “a man’s brazen expression of arousal” and “his sexual fantasies” that she makes clear are undermining “social progress that feminists have made”? While there is no specific reason to suspect that Ms. Calcagnini is a lesbian — other than the fact that she attends Harvard and calls herself a feminist — why else would she use the pages of theCrimson to excoriate heterosexual males this way?

Permit me to confess that my wife’s “biological ability to have sex” was so high on the list of qualities that attracted my attention, I could scarcely comprehend her “personhood” otherwise. If I may be allowed to “decontextualize the language of physical attraction” here, exactly how does Ms. Calcagnini suppose a heterosexual man experiences “arousal”? What aspect of her “personhood” does any woman expect a normal man to “appreciate” more than her “biological ability to have sex”? Is this not the sine qua non of heterosexuality?

Civilized men do not yell crude comments from car windows at women on the street, but if we assume that readers of the Harvard Crimson are civilized, what is the point of lecturing them about this? Quite clearly, Ms. Calcagnini’s column had some ulterior purpose, perhaps to guilt-trip any heterosexual male reader who might “enjoyably objectify” her — i.e., look at her and like what he sees — because she is disgusted by the thought that he is aware of her “biological ability to have sex.”

Have I been “conditioned to look at a woman and see the raw sum of her physical components”? If so, who “conditioned” me this way and how, and at such an early age that in kindergarten I developed a crush on Priscilla Yates, a slightly plump brunette with a gap between her front teeth and freckles on her nose? Early and often did I “objectify” girls — Janet Howton, Joanna Richardson and Carol Purdy, to name three objects of my elementary school crushes — before I had even a remote understanding of how “the raw sum of her physical components” related to the “biological ability to have sex.” The idea that male admiration for female beauty is “conditioned” is as ridiculous as the assertion that this entirely natural “objectification” precludes men from being able also to “consider her brain” or appreciate her “personhood.” Are men at Harvard so stupid that they cannot likewise differentiate these concepts? Why does Ms. Calcagnini presume she can accuse the Crimson‘s highly educated male readers of stupidity without anyone answering her insulting imputation? Is it because she knows that no man at Harvard would risk the feminist outrage if he dared publish an answer?
SCANDAL: Man Likes Good-Looking Women;

Expelled by Harvard for ‘Objectification’
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‘These Discourses of Heterosexuality Oppress Us!’
Normal male behavior is now a human rights violation. The man who expresses a preference for beautiful women could “dismantle the . . . social progress that feminists have made for all women.”
Used to be, you could get locked up in a lunatic asylum for spewing that kind of deranged gibberish. Now they send you to Harvard.