stories

I hear a lot of stories. Hundreds, probably, over the past two years. I hear from men and women, married, divorced, single. There are lot of second wives and grandmothers in there, dealing with the fallout of divorce. If there are amicable divorces these days, I don't hear about them. It seems more likely that if there are children, the whole thing is going to go bad, and quick, because that's the way things are set up to work.

I also hear from men suffering from domestic abuse, that constant, daily anxiety that sometimes escalates into full-blown attack.

No matter which situation it is, the thing that is the same is their level of frustration, of weariness, and often there's a very clear thread of fear running in the background. Their worlds have been shattered, or their lives are continuing battles they never signed up to fight. For whatever reason, they are trying any way they can to find a place of peace for themselves.

They come to me because they've heard somewhere I might have some answers or directions to that safe place they figure has to be there somewhere. Almost always, I have to tell them no. No, there's nothing there for them. The best they can do for themselves is keep themselves out of jail if possible, or if they've got sympathetic friends in other states or other countries maybe they can just disappear. Sometimes the men I talk to are so angry and in such pain they really can't hear any suggestions, if there were any to make, anyway.

They've already had their basic choices of where and with whom and how they're going to live arbitrarily made for them by strangers, so sometimes it's a real surprise to them to find they have nothing and nobody left to depend on but themselves. They want that lady in the desert to have a magic wand, some arcane secret that will save them from the abyss that their future has become. But I have nothing. All I've got is a website and a listening ear. By the time they get to me maybe an act of God is the only thing that might help.

When I first got into the movement, there would be times when my husband would come home from work and he could tell by one look I'd had another one of 'those days.' I used to cry a lot, and he'd wonder why on earth I'd let myself get involved with those people. I really wasn't sure myself a lot of times. Then he changed jobs and started working in a place where there was time to listen, and now he knows. He sees lots of men every day now, and he's hearing their stories, too.

There probably won't be much I can do for the guys who are right 'in it,' right now, but I do know there will be something more in days to come. Don't ask me how I know this, I just know. We'll just call it feminine intuition and leave it at that.

Right now we've got people in several countries working hard for legislation that will help even things out. But writing bills and passing laws is only one small portion of the thing. What we need to do in addition to fixing some badly skewed legal issues is fix the ideas. We need to disprove the lies and clear up the misconceptions. We've got an entire societal dynamic to deal with.

The personal is NOT political. Gloria Steinem and company somehow managed to assign their own individual neuroses to an entire generation of women, who accepted these things as not only truth, but as an agreeable truth, because it made them feel special. It also gave these women permission, of a sort, to blame all their problems on somebody else, and expect that somebody else would take care of their dysfunctions, their malaisetheir ever-present needs.. And because Gloria, Betty, Andrea, and the rest of the girls blamed men, so did many other women. So much of what was being said by these women seemed reasonable, and possible that it was accepted. Women swallowed it whole without realizing that there behind those reasonable ideas of equality lurked a vicious agenda of hate.

I remember feeling uncomfortable, and vaguely unnerved with some of what was being said in the pages of MS Magazine in the 70s. I'd read the 'zine and toss it away. Often I thought they were kidding. But what they were doing back then was planting seeds. Seeds of suspicion and division. No longer were women going to look at their husbands, their fathers, their brothers and sons, in the same way, if they had anything to do with it.

Today those seeds have emerged full bloom, into the outright fear and hatred for men so often projected now as correct and proper. Women who want to manage their homes and take care of their children are derided as lazy, or somehow deficient . Or else the feminists say women should be paid for their 'valuable' work as mothers and homemakers. I dunno. There's a lot of discrepancy in this malicious form of neofeminism. They keep talking about oppression, when in fact most of those girls wouldn't recognize actual oppression if they stumbled over it at high noon coming out of Bloomingdale's. They whine nearly constantly about their 'struggles,' and when you get right down to it, you discover their 'struggles' consist of not being given -- being handed-- something they want by somebody else. They don't want to work to earn anything like respect or success in business, they want it presented to them, and they will continue to whine and stomp their feet until they get it, no matter how often they change their minds. They've created a cult of the worship of the trivial. Even that's a big smokescreen

They work with a fanatic, obsessive zeal to cause as much damage and actual oppression to men as they possibly can. (I do consider things like indentured servitude and false imprisonment to be oppression.) But, really anyone who disagrees with them is fair game. Their public behaviour so often resembles that of an abusive personality I'm amazed anyone listens to them at all. There's one group in New York now that goes out and attacks men who look at them wrong. They gang up and start shrieking at some poor unsuspecting dude, spray him with spray paint, and think they're entirely justified in doing it. Though they don't run their gang business in the upscale neighborhoods, but the low-rent district, where maybe they think they're immune from lawsuits. These days, it's like any WOMAN has carte blanche to do any damn thing she well pleases anyway.

These girls -- these feminists -- are so self-absorbed and conceited they don't realize they've set themselves up with a heartless, soulless ideology that will eventually get them nowhere.

When you live outside of a small town in AZ as I do, you can't help but be up to your eyeballs in nature on a constant basis. In the mornings before it gets too hot, I spend an hour or so outside with my two dogs before settling down with the computer. I like to watch the sun rise because if I get outside at the right time there's an instant where it's daytime on my right and it's still night on my left. On the right you have the sun, blue sky, clouds, and on the left the stars are still out, and sometimes the moon, too. So right there you have an unmistakable demonstration of the balance of nature. It's quite lovely to see. Then it's repeated while we watch the birds, building their nests, taking care of their families. We've got bees around the Mexican bird of paradise bushes, doing their cross-pollinating and taking nectar back to the hive. Everything has a balance and is all part of a larger balance, and if the balance is upset things stop working as they should.

People are far more complicated than the birds and the flowers, but if you believe we can overcome the forces of nature you are either very arrogant or very much uninformed. In 1993, people all over the United States were reminded of the sheer power of nature when the Mississippi River rebelled against 100 years of human engineering and tinkering. We had the same in AZ, when the Gila River flooded at the confluence with the Colorado. They're both big rivers, when they've got water in them. In both places crops were ruined, people left homeless. It's taken years to recover from an event that only took hours and days to happen, and some places will never be the same.

Feminism today is like a slow leak in a badly-engineered dam. The leak started in the 60s when the principles of equality that had already been established earlier were corrupted and forced on society again as new ideas. We didn't see it then, because we were confident in the abilities of our social engineers. Hey -- how much trouble can a girl cause, after all? That was the attitude. We didn't realize the goals of sex equality had already been attained, but it takes time, sometimes decades and centuries for a whole society to alter its perceptions.

The basic goals had been attained, they were there in the form of laws and government policies, but the girls didn't think it was fast enough, or far enough for them.

We didn't realize that feminism, by its own nature, cannot be about equity. It's right there in the word. The word isn't equalitarianism, it's feminism. The word itself suggests concentrating on women -- that they should be elevated in recognition, somehow. That can only be lopsided and unnatural.

What needs to be done is to restore the balance. Women who felt uncomfortable with feminist ideals have been browbeaten and bullied by the girls with the nasty attitudes so long a lot of us are beginning to get sick of it. We recognize there can be no future for a society that values half its population so little we allow them to be humiliated, physically and emotionally tortured, even incarcerated for no crime beyond being themselves. We need a return to ideals of self-reliance, where nobody else is responsible for your personal life, we need a return to honoring our men for their irreplaceable value in society. Most of all, we need a return to the natural roles men and women play in the world, so we can all stop fighting each other and learn to love each other again. Then I'll start hearing stories with a happy ending and they're so much more satisfying.