One of the most effective tells that your significant other is cheating on you is their accusation that you are cheating on them.
Feminism's assault on the patriarchal model has now arisen to a tacit admission of the accusations that feminism has covertly laid upon men.
Feminism does not have to say that men are stupid, monolithic, unchanging or incapable. It has already moved the goalposts to define men as stupid, monolithic, unchanging and incapable. Women, generally unable to grasp the masculine mode of thought, see male competition and the desire to excel as preposterous, the intransigence of male judgment of beauty as slavish devotion to cultural norms, that male steadfastness is a vice rather than a virtue, and that male inattention to aesthetics or social decorum or a hundred other mechanisms of female accomplishment are evidence of lunkishness.
Women define the standards by which men are judged by.
Feminism has moved the goalposts (a sports-related term, how lunkish) by which harassment and assault is defined. Men cannot stop themselves from assaulting and harassing because feminism has redefined 'assault' to be drunken sex between an intoxicated man and an intoxicated woman, and 'harassment' to asking a woman out on an elevator or telling her to smile. The further down the rabbit hole we go, the further the goalposts get moved. Men will always be assaulters and harassers, because there is always a way to define men as assaulters and harassers.
Decent, normal men do not assault and harass, as we know. But women define the standards by which men are judged by.
So feminism has made a pathology of male behavior, and now seeks to be its redeemer. As a teenager your natural, developing sexual desires were criminalized by God, and your sins were redeemable by the suffering of Jesus. As an adult your masculinity is criminalized by feminist thinking, and is redeemable by the rejection of that masculinity. Shed your masculine behavior, the promise goes, and you'll be free of the chains of the patriarchy that bind both men and women.
Except where does it end? Hugo Schwyzer was a casualty; his public self-emasculation did nothing to raise his stock in feminist circles, and in the end his dissolution into his own neuroses brought him no sympathy for all his posturing. As a man he was yet no victim of his own traitorous psychology, and his self-admitted mental disorders earned him no sympathy from the crowd he so desperately sought validation from. Yet the progression marches onward toward ever stronger behavior policing for men, while simultaneously loosening restrictions on behavior for women; the second is a story for another day.
Patriarchy does hurt men - of this there is no question. But that's like saying that surgery hurts you because they cut you open. If the patriarchy was nothing but a cancer to society, patriarchal societies would fail. Yet consistently throughout human history, only patriarchal societies have succeeded. Bemoaning the evils of the patriarchy is akin to wondering about how the rhino evolved such an ugly horn on its head.
That you are being gaslighted is a well-known feminist trope. However, as we have seen in relationships, the accuser is frequently the guilty party. Not much has changed.
Feminism's assault on the patriarchal model has now arisen to a tacit admission of the accusations that feminism has covertly laid upon men.
Feminism does not have to say that men are stupid, monolithic, unchanging or incapable. It has already moved the goalposts to define men as stupid, monolithic, unchanging and incapable. Women, generally unable to grasp the masculine mode of thought, see male competition and the desire to excel as preposterous, the intransigence of male judgment of beauty as slavish devotion to cultural norms, that male steadfastness is a vice rather than a virtue, and that male inattention to aesthetics or social decorum or a hundred other mechanisms of female accomplishment are evidence of lunkishness.
Women define the standards by which men are judged by.
Feminism has moved the goalposts (a sports-related term, how lunkish) by which harassment and assault is defined. Men cannot stop themselves from assaulting and harassing because feminism has redefined 'assault' to be drunken sex between an intoxicated man and an intoxicated woman, and 'harassment' to asking a woman out on an elevator or telling her to smile. The further down the rabbit hole we go, the further the goalposts get moved. Men will always be assaulters and harassers, because there is always a way to define men as assaulters and harassers.
Decent, normal men do not assault and harass, as we know. But women define the standards by which men are judged by.
So feminism has made a pathology of male behavior, and now seeks to be its redeemer. As a teenager your natural, developing sexual desires were criminalized by God, and your sins were redeemable by the suffering of Jesus. As an adult your masculinity is criminalized by feminist thinking, and is redeemable by the rejection of that masculinity. Shed your masculine behavior, the promise goes, and you'll be free of the chains of the patriarchy that bind both men and women.
Except where does it end? Hugo Schwyzer was a casualty; his public self-emasculation did nothing to raise his stock in feminist circles, and in the end his dissolution into his own neuroses brought him no sympathy for all his posturing. As a man he was yet no victim of his own traitorous psychology, and his self-admitted mental disorders earned him no sympathy from the crowd he so desperately sought validation from. Yet the progression marches onward toward ever stronger behavior policing for men, while simultaneously loosening restrictions on behavior for women; the second is a story for another day.
Patriarchy does hurt men - of this there is no question. But that's like saying that surgery hurts you because they cut you open. If the patriarchy was nothing but a cancer to society, patriarchal societies would fail. Yet consistently throughout human history, only patriarchal societies have succeeded. Bemoaning the evils of the patriarchy is akin to wondering about how the rhino evolved such an ugly horn on its head.
That you are being gaslighted is a well-known feminist trope. However, as we have seen in relationships, the accuser is frequently the guilty party. Not much has changed.
Check out my occasionally updated travel thread - The Wroclaw Gambit II: Dzięki Bogu - as I prepare to emigrate to Poland.