This image and behavior neutering is meant to destroy the validity of committed Male-Female relationships and deprive pre-pubescent children of the parental gender balance needed to integrate their personality and sexuality. Can a gay couple have a gender-balanced child? I'm sure it's possible. Can a heterosexual couple have a gender-confused child? Of course, otherwise the first question wouldn't be an issue.
Children are remarkably self-correcting and adaptable, but as role models change, they are compensating and adjusting to newer and far different images. Some of which are created to serve commercial and political ends without regard to societal and family needs.
The other reason I delayed posting this second halve, is an article I read in the New York Times on Sunday 09/28/03 entitled, On TV, Men Are the New Women by Alessandra Stanley. I suggest a full reading of her thoroughly researched assessment of TV and the further humiliation of manliness which, as she states, portrays male characters as either "Dads or Cads."
"The effect of 30 years of feminism on television is a little like an old folk legend: a crippled peasant asks God to make both his hands the same and awakens to find that both are shriveled.
"Women on television are still sometimes squeezed into demeaning caricatures (or at least inappropriate clothing: surgeons, homicide detectives and high school teachers all wear low-cut tank tops to work). But increasingly, so are men. The new fall season shrinks the number of belittling stereotypes they may occupy to just two: cads or dads...
"...It is not surprising that the feminization of the television industry would give female characters more prominence, but it is a little disconcerting to see how men have waned in the process. Suddenly, sensitive shows are dealing with men as an oppressed minority group. Television writers who once focused on women's dilemmas are now exploring the emotional difficulty of being a man in today's world.
"...Tonight, Showtime will broadcast a documentary, "The Boys of 2nd Street Park," which is an insightful, affecting look at a clique of Jewish men, now in their mid-50's, and how they came of age playing basketball in Brooklyn (8 p.m. Eastern). But what is most remarkable about the film, which takes its subjects through the psychedelic 60's, Vietnam and other milestones, is how the subjects view the male condition: a little like Wellesley alumnae discussing what the housewife's life was like in the days before Betty Friedan. The boys of Second Street Park share their feelings about the burden of becoming men under the twin pressures of their immigrant parents' expectations and the confusing, sometimes oppressive sexual freedom of the 60's.
"...From CBS to the WB, the fall shows depict men the way women were once depicted: as supporting characters propelled by their biological imperative. And perhaps because science has made it so much easier for women to conceive children without a partner, these television fathers do not know best."
I shot my television with a deer rifle this morning. I would have loved to see the old unblinking CBS Eyeball, myopic to its enormous damage to artistic creativity and objectivity, while simultaneously exhibiting the thousand yard stare of a viewer who has simply seen too much of the horror that streams into our livingroom, every moment of every day. I was aiming for the Eye, but the Peacock and Alphabet networks, the cable- and satellite-casters, the disease-of-the-week producers, reality regurgitators, geek and goon gameshow hosts, sob-sister / slob-brother specials, have also worn out their welcome.
I wanted to draw a crosshairs bead on the pupil of that eye, that empty hole, and send a single bullet into its emotionless phosphor vacuum from which untold millions of rounds have fired toward me and the people I love. But I had to settle for the Morning News, during a field report about the alleged "outing" of a female CIA agent by a high-ranking White House Official.
Bang. But the Eye's Spy field report continued.
It's no mistake that the alleged leak is being called an "outing," a phrase lifted directly from the lexicon of Gay identity, inferring that the victim's life and livelihood was put in jeopardy. The overtones of this bit of gay-or-not-gay slang are guilt and shame - guilt that the victim was leading a covert hidden life, and shame that , once "outted" the victim can never fully achieve the pride of having been self-proclaimed; forever a loner between two exclusive worlds that are themselves covert in disowning the reluctant him or her.
But why would this slang term be pressed into service to describe the public identification a CIA operative or analyst? (At this writing, the exposed CIA employee who may be in jeopardy is working as an operative [spy], but virtually would be completely unaffected by the identification if she is working as an analyst [report writer]. The CIA and the Press have refused to say whether the agent was battling Goldfinger or sitting at a workstation typing up a field operative's fluff-and-fold laundry list.)
When a word is used in a sense that stretches it's original meaning, it pays to ask who's doing the talking. In this case, it's being bandied about by the usual political suspects: special interest entrepreneurs, stealth socialists, sociopathic anarchists, and conspiracy mongers of every ideological stripe.
And, without saying the word homophobe, without mentioning fear, loneliness, insecurity, without ever warning that "The CIA employee could be killed by enemies of America!" the accusers have set the stage for a vicious backlash against whomever they can implicate in whatever may or may not have happened.
They have triggered a conditioned response in fairly large segment of the public to pre-manage sentiment toward the accusation. Even if the allegations prove spurious, the sheer distaste and foul associations with the concept of "outting" will seep into the sub conscious of the status quo, linger in the onslaught of innuendo and character assassinations and, returning to the message of this post, do nothing but lower the status of all parties involved.
A major reason we are seeing a new class of lifestyle eunuchs and nail-polishing metrosexuals is because we have been voice-trained, like a pack of Circus Schnauzers, to jump through hoops and roll over when trigger words are used in otherwise normal conversation.
Here's an example: "Although the number of 'Deadbeat Dads' has been on the decline for the past few years, it is impossible to excuse Al's abandonment of his family for weeks or months at a time. His absence - often coming and going in the dead of night - is nothing but a recurring hardship for his wife and children."
Got it? Deadbeat, abandonment, recurring hardship - trigger words. We've got this guy's number, right?
Is this "Al" a drunken, spouse-abusing, carousing, reprobate who deserves our self-righteous scorn for unacceptable behavior?
Or is it Al Sharpton on the campaign trail? Or Al Gore on a political junket?
Or Al Gonzales who slips over the U.S. border every once in a while to take a job with a forged I.D.?
It doesn't matter. The details, the content of the accusation isn't the message. The emotional and cultural associations to the words and their resulting impressions on our perception of All are the currency here. People who master this trigger word crowd-control technique - never yelling fire in the theater, but affecting the same reaction by whispering "Rats! There are rats in here!" In this way, they play out their power games without ever offering a coherent insight, strategy or solution. Again, the goal is misdirection and manipulation. Not honesty.
Having said that, I'll now compile all the trigger words in Ms. Stanley's NYT article. Not because she uses them to degrade men or manliness, but because she had the clarity of mind to see the trend to demote males and, needed to resort to the very trigger words used to implement it: old, rumpled, sleazy, annoying, smirking, unrepentant, meek(ly), fat, discontented, angry, anxious, unemployed, insecurity, silly, unreliable, shallow, seedy, neurotic, wimp, cad, incompatible, odd, prissy, and overprotective.
Female role models, so necessary to the Feminist Plan to elevate girls into powerful women, have evolved into emaciated sextoys who act like... well, like male CIA operatives: scissor-kicking, knife-brandishing, sharpshooters, who administer devastating beatings. But, because they are female, manage to emerge from the slugfest or rooftop chase just-tossled-enough to look hot and ready for hotter sex.
From Bond to Blonde in two generations - both impossible caricatures, both insulting and demeaning to male and female alike, both sold as sex = immortality fairytales, larded with preposterous role-reversals for immature and powerless girls and soft-focus lasciviousness for aging and sexually irrelevant women.
Net gain for elevating women? Forty years of being manipulated. Supposedly, manipulated by men in the Pre-Greer and Friedan days, but now deluded and misguided by the anti-male activist progeny of Ms.'s G & F.
And contemporary male role models? Scrupulously neutered and de-clawed, these self-conscious appeasers, these styling-gel coiffed, catalog model appointed shlubs, these effete bystanders who are neither frowsy Dad or blowsy cad, offer what to boys who must become powerful men?
Lessons in living out the agony of chaffed elbows? Guidance in shopping for hair products and cosmetics? Cliff Notes re-caps of Howard's End or Steel Magnolias? Protocol tips for gently declining gay pick-up lines?
Who will be manly when men have been feminized into Neuts? Although many women can imitate men, without the benefit of perpetual victimhood, legal and social advantages, lowered performance expectations and pre-menstrual, post-partum, mid-life excuses, only a scant few can be counted on to perform traditional male tasks and function when restricted by a traditionally masculine ethos.
When given a choice of heros after the Iraqi War, they chose PFC Jessica Lynch over Specialist Shoshannna Johnson. They chose a blond amnesiac who merely totaled her HumVee (the Army's SUV) and was taken, unconscious, to a hospital bed. They ignored the Black single-mother who jioned the army to learn how to cook only to wind up wounded during a firefight, taken prisoner and held captive at gunpoint by Republican Guard soldiers
The Lynch's family home has been improved and enlarged as a welcome-home gift by grateful community contractors, Jessica is being represented by ICM's Amanda Urban (who also represented Jay Leno) , her $1 million book has been written by Rick Bragg (or one of his uncredited interns) and a film production / TV movie deal is in the works about the event she cannot remember. Her life story and non-memories will be sprinkled onto a couple hundred pages, her pixie-like grin on the cover will sell hundreds of thousands of books and as many girls will be told how very brave she was. A new role model will be rolled out.
Meanwhile, last month, Shoshanna Johnson was unable to pay her apartment rent, She and her daughter have been evicted.
So, the unconscious girl is deemed heroic and lavishly rewarded, while the wounded woman who stared down her captors for nine days is broke and homeless. This re-definition of hero, which started by classifying survivors as heros, continues to ignore strength, committment and sacrifice while rewarding passive participants.
Elevating an amnesiac to the status of illustrious warrior is a stretch, the NYT and virtually every other news source simply ignored the bravery of a soldier who was busy at work in a Field Kitchen, doing an essential chore that Feminists find degrading: cooking.
A friend of mine, a great stand-up comic (and former cigar-smoking Party Clown) has a great bit in his act: "Someday there will be a woman President of the United States." Big applause from the women in the room, "You know why I'd like a woman President?" He has every ear in the house, "Because no woman leader has every taken her country to war!" Big applause from women, whistling, stomping and ululating
"Except for Helen of Troy and Cleopatra..." Laughter from a few men, less applause from women...
"Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette..." More laughter from the men, silence from most of the women...
"Evita Peron, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and every other women who has ever held office." Gales of laughter from the men, scowls from the women...
(Part 3 to follow)
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