For those who’ve been living on another planet for the past two decades, I once wrote a screed called The Pussification Of The Western Male, which took about an hour to write and was a stream-of-consciousness rant against the demeaning of men in Western society. The piece garnered an immediate and voluminous online response (thank you, Insty), caused my host’s (website and email) servers to crash and necessitated finding a new host because they kicked me off. The responses I got in the mail — I didn’t allow comments at that stage — were interesting. A large number, of course, were vituperative squeals from feministicals and their girlymen cohorts, and included death threats and threats of violence against me and my family. (Most of those disappeared when I responded to them by email with my home address, and an invitation to take their best shot — and to bring a gun, because I surely would.) All sorts of liberal websites climbed on, garnering me awards such as “Worst Blogger On The Internet” (although, upon recollection, that award may have been for Let Africa Sink, another crowd-pleaser).
Almost all the hysteria was pure projection, for example: “He wants men to go back to being cavemen!” when even a cursory reading of the essay would have noted that I wanted precisely the opposite.
Another example: “OMG! He wants to take the vote away from womyns!” when all I actually wrote was that giving the vote to women may not necessarily have been a Good Idea because since that time, government has become increasingly nanny-ish and intrusive (which is true in almost every country in the world, and not just in the United States). I even offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who could find — anywhere in my writings, not just in Pussification — an instance where I’d actually advocated disenfranchising women. Crickets.
What was also interesting was that I got several thousands of emails from men who agreed with me — and well over five hundred from women who likewise felt the same and were either married to Real Men themselves, or who wanted real men to come back.
What I didn’t write in the essay, and should have, was to predict that if men continued to be marginalized, they would eventually quit the game altogether — because men, accustomed to playing competitively, have a keen sense when the rules of the game are tilted against them and just quit as a result. In modern-day parlance, this would be the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement. Here’s an old joke about just that:
Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl “Will you marry me?” The girl said, “NO!” And the guy rode motorcycles and went fishing and hunting and played golf a lot and drank beer and Scotch and had tons of money in the bank and slept with lots of different women and left the toilet seat up and farted whenever he wanted and lived happily ever after.
The End.
I also didn’t predict — because, as I said, I wrote the piece in an hour and didn’t think through the process — that men would start using the outcome of feminism to their own advantage: that if women were entitled to be like men and have casual sex like men, then men could take advantage of that mindset and design a process to make the whole thing a lot easier (because men build systems; it’s what we do). Thus the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) movement, which basically teaches Beta men how to simulate being Alpha and score with women. (Alpha men already know how to seduce women, and don’t need to have it systemized and codified.) Here’s an example of how a PUA turns a situation around:
She: “You’re not my type.”
He: “You’re not my type either. But you’ll have to do until someone thinner comes along.”
It’s a masterpiece: using a prime part of female negative self-image (all women think they’re overweight, regardless of actual tonnage) to throw her off-balance and make her vulnerable to his next approach. Another classic, this time in a debate or argument:
She: A man shouldn’t date a woman for over a year without making some kind of commitment.
He: I guess I missed the memo that gave you the power to decide how I should act.
At some point, of course, men were bound to rebel against this crappy status quo; my little rant was just a precursor to the reaction. (Note that I’m not claiming any kind of authorship of, or responsibility for that rebellion — I’m not that big-headed. But I think that my rage was indicative of what was to follow.) And if those feminists and liberal girlymen had listened to what I was actually saying and not projected all their silliness onto my words, they would not have been at all surprised by situations like GamerGate, Sad Puppies, the alt-Right (an interesting take on the last can be found here), and the like.
There was also bound to be a reaction against political correctness as well as to the pussification of men — the two are linked, albeit tenuously at times. It seems clear, however, that the liberal establishment (which included feminists and academia) were blinded by their own arrogance and feelings of moral superiority. Well, guess what? Not everyone was going to submit to their little control-freak games, and now we have an interesting cultural polarization which rivals the political polarization. It’s the same phenomenon: don’t minimize me and set me apart, then complain when I create my own rules for my own game. When the rules are tilted and people feel slighted, they are inevitably going to withdraw from the process, whether it’s Brexit, MGTOW or electing Donald Trump as President.
(For those who are curious to see what all the fuss was about, I’ve re-published Pussification under the fold. Bear in mind that this was published in 2003 so many of the references are pretty dated by now, but the main thrust of the argument is still relevant today. And by the way: I’d also like to thank all those assholes out there who published the piece in its entirety without my consent and despite my complaints / requests to desist, and who even bowdlerized the fucking thing so as not to offend the tender sensibilities of their few readers. Did I already mention they were assholes?)
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