The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis -- because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modeling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere.- Mark Simpson, Meet the metrosexual, Salon.com, July 22nd, 2002 - http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/07/22/metrosexual
A response to an insulting e-mail to EjectEjectEject.com in which a Dutch Pacifist ranted about America's Cowboy Mentality -
I spend a great deal of time in the Netherlands and immediately recognize the whiny bickering tone of the sender's email. You would not receive this wanton crap from a Dutch woman, only a Dutch man. This is a country where feminism began and then ran amok, not only did women gain their deserved rights, they then proceeded to turn the men into the women they once were, one has to see it to believe it. The women run the country, and the men have assumed the persona of an American fifties housewife: Complaint ridden, disoriented, they whine and cower and are generally selfless and confused, and when they get angry, well look out for the silent treatment. Pointedly the most direct, energetic, and courageous thinker/politician to appear on the Dutch scene in a generation was the very gay Pim Fortuyn who began questioning what they hell were they doing with their country. He was shot in the head last year by a straight Dutchman who described himself as an animal rights activist.
Posted by: James Croak on January 30, 2003 11:29 AM (http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000028.html)
and...
Recent federal testing data show that what starts out as a modest gap in elementary-level reading scores turns into a yawning divide by high school. In 12th grade, 44% of girls rate as proficient readers on federal tests, compared with 28% of boys. And while boys still score slightly higher on federal math and science exams, their advantage is slipping.
Most startling is that little is being done to correct the imbalances. All of the major players schools, education colleges and researchers largely ignore the gender gap. Instead of pursuing sound solutions, many educators merely advocate prescribing more attention-focusing Ritalin for the boys, who receive the drug at four to eight times the rate of girls, according to different estimates. ''Too often the first reaction to an attention problem is 'Let's medicate,' '' says Rockville, Md., child psychologist Neil Hoffman. ''Some schools are quick to recommend solutions before they've fully evaluated the problem.''
For instance, as part of an ongoing 20-year dyslexia study focusing on Connecticut schools, Yale neuroscientist and pediatrician Sally Shaywitz discovered that schools were identifying four times as many dyslexic boys as girls. Yet when her team entered schools to screen children, it diagnosed just as many dyslexic girls as boys. Shaywitz found that the mostly female teaching staff was quicker to identify rambunctious boys than quiet girls.
The results are just one example of what might be learned about the role gender plays in education, especially in elementary school, where 85% of teachers are women.
Girls Get Extra School Help While Boys Get Ritalin,
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/972970/posts
Experience
My work experience C.V. reads like an overview of the Department Of Labor's Index Of Occupations. Working dozens of different jobs over the years has taught me many diverse and invaluable skills.
Managing an Ice Skating Rink taught me both how to maintain a great ice floor with a Zamboni and how to deal with parents, kids, skates and roughneck hockey hoodlums.
Building Log Homes in a mountain community gave me chainsaw construction savvy and the ability to blend into and thrive following a rural, blue-collar work ethic.
Writing Accessibility Guidelines for emerging software at Microsoft showed the limitations of our physical and cognitive perceptions and how special small, interest groups can hobble a mega-corporation (despite our attempts to meet their unending demands).
There were many other jobs that also broadened my point of view, shaped my ethic and sharpened my senses.
But the most life-changing lessons were learned in a darkened barroom, in front of a crowd of strangers, with a light in my eyes and a microphone in my hand.
Stand-up comedy is the journey inward of enlightenment from which the seeker must return a profoundly changed person.
A small part of this character change occurs while onstage, making a case to the audience that a series of seemingly innocent observations add up to a rationale-busting and laughter provoking a revelation, if you will.
This is the exciting, successful performance that would-be comedians crave. It's addictive and, if you are successful at it, can drive your career in film or on television.
Or weather reporting.
The other, darker, more headache-producing change happens as you search the daily news, every bit of pop culture, the canon of common beliefs literally every bit of information we are exposed to everyday to create and maintain a comedy act - a routine.
This ceaseless demand for information forced me to become an obsessive fact sleuth with my main interest in cause and effect relationships, personal interaction idiosyncrasies, outrageous analogies and the outlandish realities we cloak in euphemism and misdirection.
So, for thirty years, I've been absorbing every bit of information I can get my hands on, pulling it apart, identifying discrete elements and reassembling it into interlocking pieces for my act. And now that same information is pulling my perceptions apart and re-assembling my ideas about the world's last 10,000 spins.
Here's what I've found:
In the early seventies, about the time of the debut of Ms. Magazine, there was a call by feminist writers for more sensitive men to replace what they thought were extraneously masculine guys. The media picked up on the outcry and the bra-burners demands became topics for both discussion and ridicule.
The unacceptable, unsensitive men were called macho-jerks who, for a variety of reasons, wouldn't listen to their girlfriend's or wife's endless chatter or, more damningly or join them in watching costume epic films or Merchant/Ivory chickflicks.
So, although they were damned by some and championed by others, the line in the sand had been drawn for men by the feminists - "intelligent women, self-respecting women don't have sex with macho guys." "Utter nonsense."
Don't think that this damnation of men made extreme cavemen types and criminals less sexually attractive to women. As we saw with O.J. Simpson (and more recently, Scott Peterson), a significant number of women lust after "bad boys" even when they go beyond bad to dangerous, to murderous.
Women are guilty of making the same groin-level fantasy choices they have accused men of lusting after for years. Pretty boy, basket-bulgers are prime fantasy objects, but for day-to-day relationships, paycheck and parenting, the same women reward passive, feminized men who are compliant and submissive.
Silver screen bad boys rose to the top of the Sexiest Star list: Brad Pitt, the stud/scumbag in Thelma and Louise, Robert Downey Jr., L.A.'s premiere Urine Test actor, Christian Slater, the drugged slugger, Sean Penn, the midget pacifist firecracker - every one of them seething with macho sexuality on the screen. But, in reality, they are all neutered males - powerful in image, but hopelessly crippled in their everyday lives by their necessary social, political and entertainment industry emasculation. The have no control over their public image.
Punching a reporter doesn't make a guy a man. Mainlining a speedball doesn't make a man. Rippling abs and Clinique, despite all the homoerotic fashion advertisements, doesn't make a man. Whining about politics, espousing quack utopia sentiments, gossiping and spreading conspiracy theories, prattling about personalities, or strutting like a policy welterweight in the safety of a television studio certainly do not define the man in manhood.
The confusion lies in the systematic destruction of the word man by the feminist writers, reducing it to mean no more than physically male. Yet, this mis-application of the term, meant to gut the spirit and strength of manhood, did little more than create a new subclass of genderless men. These neutered males, eager to abandon their natural instincts, basked in the favor of men-hating women - women who wanted less to rise up than they wanted to push men down.
In fact, the concept of Manhood was forced into a single definition noun: penis owner.
For the last 700 years, manhood meant 1 - the condition of being a human being, 2 - qualities associated with men, 3 - the condition of being an adult male as distinguished from a child or female.
More commonly it was used to express strength and virility.
But, under the pretense of seeking equality, feminists chose an easier path than side-by-side competition with men: they chose to redefine strength and virility as brutality and sexual harassment. This perversion was lead by an elephantine Lesbian named Dworkin who considered all sex to be rape.
A quasi-human preaching about human behavior - curious, but ultimately worthless.
To the Feminist faithful, manly men were a retro-relic of the past: cowboys, policemen, construction workers, bikers, Native American warrior.
I pause at the realization that many readers, at this point, have a crystal clear picture of the Gay Disco group, The Village People. When these human caricatures rose to popularity, their image literally turned the uniforms and behaviors of these vocations into drag. And dragged down the concept of manliness.
If you think that I'm flogging a minor point here, remember that these vocations provided role models for young boys as they matured into young men and take another look at this promotional photo from the late `70's:
To this day, the Village People's music - songs composed solely of encouragements to engage in Gay Sex - are still promoted as fun sing-a-long tunes for young children.
The result of this identity appropriation drove many straight men to distance themselves from any display of manly behavior - conduct that was being degraded by Feminists while simultaneously being eroticized by Gays.
Paradoxically, the shame and guilt fostered by incessant accusations of macho or chauvinist attitudes had driven some men to reject themselves and the behavior of other men, while adopting the very submissive personality traits that the feminists hated in themselves.
This self-hate and transference of guilt to men, left many women in the unenviable position of being surrounded by more examples of what they saw as mainstream female submissiveness. They were turning Tom Cats into kittens. Ball-less, neutered and de-clawed.
This had a dramatic effect on relationships during the late `70's where neither the man nor woman had the faintest idea who they were in relationship to each other. As in other cases where this mutual confusion kills communication, the core of the relationship became an out-of-kilter dance of avoiding offense to the other person while attempting to present a coherent personality.
For men, common kindnesses and courtesies were viewed as suspicious behavior: holding a door open for a woman to pass through could be interpreted as a callous, chauvinistic insult, buying a gift for a female friend or wife became a task of avoiding any item that could be interpreted as condescending, alluding to sex or out-of-touch with her deepest desires. So gardening tolls could be viewed as being relegated to menial work, clothing (especially provocative) could be seen a gift for the giver, and anything that smacked of traditional female roles or interests was suspect.
The saddest disappointment in many marriages was when, after months or years, the women finally shaped her husband into what she thought she wanted him to be, only to find that he had willingly become uninteresting to her and that the excitement was gone.
(Part 2 to follow)
