We Are Not a Project

I found a column by Suzanne Fields at conservative site Townhall. With a headline of "A Good Man Is Still Hard to Find" I took notice. [This entry has been bumped up.]

Women have been complaining since the original Adams family was evicted from the Garden of Eden that "A good man is hard to find."

Whining, complaining, nagging... yep.

Despite radical feminist mockery of the very idea of manliness, that men are natural sexual predators, most women -- with very few exceptions -- still want one.

Of course they do! It's nice to have the cash flow, the bodyguard, an errand boy, and a receptacle for your whines and gripes and thoughts.

The #MeToo movement has nevertheless changed a lot of things in the wake of the sexual harassment-scandal season. One of them is the regard in which men are universally held by women. It often seems we're back to the '80s, when there was a similar assault on the idea of manhood and some women decried all sex as rape.

Radical feminist activists Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were widely credited with saying that "all sex is rape" and "all men are rapists." They both deny the statements, but Dworkin conceded that she did say, "Penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent."

No wonder men are choosing to To Their Own Way (see MGTOW).

We hear versions of the sentiment in #MeToo accounts of women talking about their encounters with boorish men.

A lot of that is true, and a lot of women have legitimate complaints. However, a lot of women facilitated these encounters. Regardless, it's a reminder why some men are avoiding women as much as possible, especially in the workplace.

Sebastian Junger, in a perceptive op-ed in National Review magazine, recalls how a friend once told him: "(B)eing a man meant two things: taking care of your loved ones and burying your dead. Everything flows from that."

How about being 18 or older and having a penis? Women aren't defined by what they do for others. Why should we define men by that?

"The definition of a man," says anthropologist Joyce Benson, "is someone you can count on when the enemy comes."

Again.

Throughout history, men have demonstrated they are willing to put the safety of others above their own, usually their wives and children, but sometimes strangers. This is a male instinct that often emerges at an early age.

If we don't have wives and children and if we perceive a culture as misandrist, we're a lot less likely to sacrifice ourselves. Which is probably some of the reason why people are so desperate for men to marry and have children, and to fool us into thinking society unjustly privileges us.

A British experiment in 2015 found that when women looked at photographs of men, they consistently chose men with combat medals as the more attractive. In a different study, women were attracted to men with facial scars.

Women like to see that men get hurt. What does that tell you?

The good news, as Mansfield sees it, is that the steady march of gender neutrality is slowing. The change is not always pretty. Neither are manly men -- sometimes ribald, often roughly cut and ornery. But they can usually be tamed over time. Let's hope.

Ah yes, a woman will "tame" a man. Most men should say, "No thanks!"