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- Forget about hostile feminists (or anyone else male unfriendly).
Don't waste energy and peace of mind getting angry. It is demoralizing. If we focus on them, they own us. Our actions are really reactions shaped by what they do (Aikido 101). They control us. They are driving the car and we are the whiny backseat driver. We need our own car.
- Pay enough attention to identify and make friends with male-friendly feminists (there are more and more all the time).
Love them. (A man-friendly woman President for example could be a real good thing. Elizabeth Dole?).
- There must be a coalescence of the various men's issues organizations.
Numbers mean power! Power means we'll get our damned issues addressed (fathers' rights, circumcision, men's choice, false accusations, whatever); no numbers, no power. No power, we will have to rely on people feeling sorry for us after listening to us whine.
Once we get the numbers - through coalitions - come up with a short list (no more than three) core wedge issues designed to increase men's clout in society (i.e., equality for men in the home concomitant to women's in the workplace). Man-o-man are we going need numbers! But the numbers are there.
We must embrace the big picture. Rally around three good universal wedge issues with an eye to power (through numbers) and we will be successful. It's like the laws of physics. Working on a small number of well-selected issues, with numbers we can, without being angry or touchy about everything, gently terrorize politicians, the media and corporations.
With gentle pulls of ballot levers and quiet choices of what we buy and don't buy. In two years of coalition building, we can begin feeling good. In ten or fifteen, we'll be sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette and saying ahhhh...that was pretty good. But if the numbers are not united then we may as well snip off our nuts and offer them to Kali now. Men are currently divided and conquered. Hear it? Big numbers, by the way, will bring people out of the closet, making bigger numbers.
- Find a major corporation (after you unite the numbers) that is sufficiently male-unfriendly and hit hard with a boycott.
Pick one and hit financially. Hurt 'em. Pick one that has a majority or at least very significant number of male patronage. (How about Microsoft?) It will terrorize the other other male-unfriendly suits. Concomitantly, buy excessively from male-friendly companies.
- Gain the support of as many man-friendly women as possible; this means giving up all your selfish little resentments and working for genuine justice in affairs of gender.
Focus on loving women who love us and ignore those who hate us. Do whatever you can to give up your chronic, deep-seated, icky little resentments (that doesn't mean if your wife does something to genuinely piss you off you don't confront her - I'm talking about old shit about your mother and stuff like that). Meditate, pray, get therapy (careful), workout, radical Nintendo, spend a year in Tibet, primal scream - whatever you bloody well have to do to get over your little resentments.
Don't worry, be happy. Come together - it's the law of political physics; get the numbers. If you want to attract lots of sympathetic women (not to mention get a date) give up on all those crusty little bristling resentments.
Another thing - I won't push it, but I believe in: don't have sex with a woman you don't sincerely love - not pretend, self-delusional 'I want to get laid' love. but real love. Nearly all healthy women feel at some level abused by this. They do it anyway - and even enjoy the orgasm or whatever - then slowly begin resent and hate. That may be the way they're wired, bless their heart. God made women to be loved - they're our sisters on this earth. And watch out for the unhealed, twisted up, viscous ones. Watch out, avoid - but don't resent.
- Along with the core power wedge issues, pursue a "positive" issue.
Something everybody would be ashamed not to get behind (except for the most bitter, twisted women's studies creature).
The promotion of the health, education, careers and general esteem and welfare of boys and young men (my personal pet peeve male issue), for example. Boys and young men are functioning under tremendous, grotesquely shaming and demoralizing pressures and assaults from various establishment institutions, especially schools. It's tantamount to child abuse. This must be changed. These are our precious sons. Let's get with some Boy Power! (Don't get me wrong, Girl Power is cool too.).
By the way, there is a website put together by some teens called Boy Power!. It's pretty cool - send them encouraging E-mail, won't you?
- Love, support, encourage and help bring stability to other men - just because they are other men.
Stop being so foolishly (and oh so often cruelly) competitive with other men. Stop being neurotic, needy and biased toward women - they don't like it and they really, really don't respect it, though they are very tempted to manipulate it, which is mostly our fault. You know why? Because they generally don't need it. Why? Because they support each other. Why? Just because there are other women.
Of course women fuss and fight and are competitive with each other - but when the chips are down they support each other. They know if they support another woman, they'll get support back when they need it. Men go stupid on this subject and we leave each other flopping on the dock like dirtfish carps. This is the single most significant thing, I think, we men can learn from women. It may well come naturally to them. But we had better learn it!
- Push the pain.
Pain is a great motivator. This may sound like a contradiction to the above, but really it's not. We men are raised and take a great deal of pride in taking pain - often to the point where we kill ourselves, literally and spiritually. Pushing the pain of our current condition as a gender will knock us out of our fear and denial, obsessions and addictions.
If it starts to hurt badly enough, we'll do something. This is the impetus behind all social movements, anyway. I don't know how many times I've heard a woman say, "Why does he put up with it." Life is not an endurance test.
Men need to be pushed out of their denials. We need to make changes in ourselves as well as in society. The male malaise I keep hearing about is the depression caused by this denial.
Some women really think we are stupid; we aren't stupid, but we are in denial about our current state. Which looks a lot like stupid. This might be especially effective in helping these bristling, needy, woman-pleasing momma's boys, who are really as angry as hell at women and do more harm to any legitimate men's movement than N.O.W. ever could.
- Apropos to point #6 (and including the girls, of course) we as adults must encourage - but not proscribe - thinking among young people about a strategy for some kind of healing and reconciliation of the tremendous harm that has been caused by the "gender wars" (which we adults have caused).
This because, one: they have been the most wounded by it; two: we old people are too hopelessly resentful and screwed up on the subject to really bring about a healing (hell, I'm waiting for the Christian apocalyptics and the Aquarian narcissists to get busy and start their civil war).
Finally, if some kind of reconciliation is possible from the old folks (after we men get our act and numbers together), we will all be too old or dead to really complete any kind of healing. It would be wise to leave it to the young to complete the process - they'll teach us. But it must start with our encouragement to healing. As opposed to our propaganda and rhetoric.
- Men need to reconnect and reaffirm our reason for existence.
This starts with turning off the television and cutting back on the beer. Men's higher purpose (as opposed to our procreative purpose) is to figure out what the universe is about. Not in a funky cosmic way, necessarily, just that we are born to figure things out. Women, too, but on the whole it seems more in the male DNA.
A man must have something, achieve something that is a function of his natural masculine curiosity and creative impulse; his natural search for meaning. A man must find it for himself; whether through painting, inventing, writing, climbing a mountain, discovering a new species of plant, sighting an unknown heavenly body, or restoring old cars. Whatever, a man must achieve something that brings meaning into the world.
This activity, by the way, is not a compensation by men because of our jealously about women's Ability to Create Life. To suggest otherwise is a tremendous conceit. Women do not create life. Nature grabs them and uses their bodies to create life.
A pregnancy, although more stressful for sure, is in principle no more creative than growing hair, digesting food or beating a heart. You don't do it, nature does. On the other hand, Beethoven did create his 5th symphony. It was unique to him (as was Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to her).
If there is any creativity in reproduction in humans it is the work that goes into getting a woman into bed and, not directly related to procreation, but important to the subsequent children, getting men into marriage.
The point of all this is to say that men are uniquely creative beings and must express it, some way, some how. Women are uniquely creative too, but by nature, generally express it in shaping the environment and personalities of their young children (not to suggest that fathers don't play an important role, too).
If there is a psychoanalytic thing involving creativity with regards to men caused by woman it is men's creativity as a function of breaking away from mom's personality shaping creativity. The first step is breaking from mom; then we have to cheat on our wife. But we do this by fucking the universe, not other women! (Listen to Beethoven's 5th sometime, he's fucking the universe.)
If we do not express our highest creative purpose we will fall into our second one: sex. Which will cause us to cheat on the women we love (deeply abusing them) and in the process fucking women we don't love - which we have no business doing because it abuses them. Causing both women to hate us, and then it turns into a goddam "gender war."
Then the women get sick of being abused and they want to be like us, in our abusive mode. They start cheating and worse (pop feminism). Then when we get done screwing everything with a hole in it, we become dissipated couch potatoes, if we are lucky to not degrade into isolation, addiction and suicide.
A model for real men, in our highest mode, is the Renaissance man: Galileo, Shakespeare, Dante. And nowadays, a little Machievelli might be needed too (numbers). After we have killed the matriarchal Medea (that we have shamefully created), the men's movement should move toward a thing better described as a men's renaissance - a renewal.
If you're such a couch potato and addicted that you can't make the jump up, just get a biography of a great man's renaissance or some more modern equivalent: Martin Luther King, Jr., James Joyce, Einstein, the Wright brothers, whomever. Get some inspiration.
If you have it together seek out other men to help - stop woman-pleasing and focusing on helping women. They don't need it that much anymore. In fact a lot of women are really irritated by the way men are always running to help them, while neglecting other men who are in distress.
Don't let anyone get in your way (don't neglect your family by the way, perhaps you can involve them - it is one of the greatest gifts a father can give his sons and daughters). You are humanity's source of curiosity and creativity. Go!
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