Be Afraid

If you want a good example of how and why some men get to a point where they hate women, or distrust women, or decide not to look for a wife, or decide to insulate themselves from relying on a woman for anything, then check out this entry (and the comments) at MarkyMark's Thoughts. His blog gets a lot of traffic, and taking that into account along with the comments, it appears that this kind of experience and thinking is familiar to a lot of people. Your father, uncle, brother, or son may have had to or may yet face experiences just like the ones described. Notice that these men have the reactions they do because of what they have experienced themselves; whereas so many of the women on the other side of the coin are hostile towards or paranoid about men because their single/divorced/overbearing mothers, the media, and academia have told them to be.

For the men I'm talking abut, this isn't just a matter of "guilt by association" or prejudice along the lines of dismissing all African-Americans as criminals because you've seen a few African-American people in the news for being convicted of crimes, and you've never known an African-American on a personal level very well. Skin color does not induce criminal behavior. For some of these men, it is the women they do know personally who have sent them over the edge, with their sex (and associated ways of thinking and emoting) and socialization as a sex being an integral part of why the women behaved the way they did.

It seems that the differences between men and women are real, and it really does matter how boys are raised and how girls are raised, and it is important how men and women socialize separately and with each other. Treating men and women identically (which is not necessary in order to treat them equally) in every way makes both miserable or angry. Showing favoritism towards women while or after insisting on equality fosters bitterness. Some of the traditions we have abandoned were doing a lot of good, and haven't been replaced by suitable substitutes – perhaps because, in some cases, none exist. Walls were removed and now we're finding out in a very painful way why some of those walls were there in the first place.

In the blogosphere - one of the few places where men (and sympathetic women) can feely speak about their experiences with reasonable protection against retaliation along the levels of firing, lawsuits, divorce, false accusations of crime, assault, vandalism, etc., - you can find an awful lot of horror stories about how the culture has denigrated and penalized masculinity (and femininity as collateral damage), chivalry, men, husbands, fatherhood, and marriage, and what the consequences have been.

We can't survive as a healthy society if this is the norm for male-female interactions; when irresponsibility, incivility, and malignant narcissism are rewarded and their opposites punished. Not when it happens in gender relations, not when it happens as government policy in general. Many would say we already lost our societal health long ago.

I pray that good women and good men can somehow raise enough good women and good men in the next generation. I want each of my kids to have a realistic option of having a happy marriage, if that is what they want - and a healthy country.