a #NotallMen reaction to #YesAllWomen, or how to deal with "mansplaining"

The #yesallwomen hashtag has gotten some circulation as of late because of some situations involving misogyny, massacre, and mental instability.  It is a reminder that in our culture, women are the object of lust and discrimination, ingrained victimhood and systematic shaming in a society of supposedly liberty and justice for all.  When confronted with such a situation like a sorority shooting, the conversation goes to the individual involved and not the underlying consequences of our culture and motivations, and we miss the point that there is something foul and rotten in our culture that we would rather not be associated with or acknowledge. I had an associate post a picture of his solidarity with women by taking a selfie with a notebook page, stating:  "This is not about you;  Stop mansplaining, check your privilege, Show empathy" and closed with the not all men hashtag.  With it was a tagline taunt about being a penis having American who will listen.
Now, as I read this, my blood started to boil.  It had nothing to with having to show empathy, nor with the fact that women are treated like fuckposts with coin-op slots.  My rage came from the "mansplaining" and the "check your privilege" cliche articles included in his call to somehow garner solidarity.
   Checking your privilege is an attack phrase invented by well meaning white man folk to make sure that other white man folk are reminded that they are part of a discrimination problem.  If you only give up your privilege in a society you can make a better one.  I take issue with this because, though the motivations are coming from a progressive angle, the end result is anything but equitable.  Checking privilege is, like most "cultural sensitivity" methods discriminatory.  It states that the only way a minority, a gender, a belief can have any sort of authority is by garnering it from the dominant race, gender, or belief system.  It is no less bigoted than "separate but equal" and still forces the dominance paradigm, it just does it in a more politically acceptable manner.  It seems to even reverse what the idea of privilege assessment is supposed to facilitate.
Privilege analysis is to become empathetic of others by realizing that there are some things afforded by your gender, race, tallness,attractiveness, and other natural traits that others do not.  It is to take inventory of what sort of things in one's own life that has given him or her a boon.  These are not things you can consciously "check" as the catchphrase would have you believe; you cannot take these off.  they are just there as a feature of who you are in society.  Yet the idea persists that somehow a person can take off the trappings of natural things and operate as though advantages do not occur.  This is just silly, and it is corrosive to those to whom these boons do not apply.  Assuming privilege is something that can be relinquish it to attribute privilege to a right that someone has been offered, but can freely refuse.  It is a moment for white men folk to say "now, without all the good things about being white and a man, I am just like you.  Take away the awesome that I am, and I become a minority and a woman, at least until I take privilege back from the coat check girl."
  At any rate, I was mad at the idea of checking my privilege and so I addressed it.  See, privilege is reciprocal.  As one demographic gains a privilege, and equal and opposite privilege occurs in the disadvantaged realm.  White people can always purchase culturally relevant items, supplies, and literature.  Black people can say the word "Nigga" without rebuttal.  Even Mexicans who speak English can mutter Spanish and have people leave them alone.  There is positives to every classification out there, though whites just seem to have more of them when it comes to opportunity and class placement.  So, I asked about what privileges would be given up by women if I "checked my privilege" as a man.  Would women be required to sign up for selective service when they turned 18?  Would I not always have to pay for the date?  Would incarceration rates even out between women and men?  Would I not have to lose half of my shit in a divorce settlement?  I played devil's advocate to prove my point on the fact that I think privilege checking is a farce, a token gesture, and must go both ways in order to be truly fair, the response to which was an article was cut and pasted about how Devil's advocacy is a deflection.  So, I adjusted my line of reasoning from dramatic satire to explaining my point of view directly. this followed with a prompt excommunication from his facebook friends list.  Shucks.
  Fine, forget my diabolical client here.  The issue I have is now on the idea of "mansplaining"  or what I can only conjecture to be the practice to fallaciously dismiss the experience of a woman by describing the experience of a man.  This derailment of real conversation and empathy comes from a strange place in our society which I feel qualified as a man to illuminate.  When a woman says "I was raped by a man,"  a man makes the idea of rapist ambiguous.  our first reaction to being included in the idea of "a man" is to then distance ourselves from being a rapist.  Most of us would rather not concede that they are a rapist, I suppose, and it is natural given our upbringing in a society that encourages men to be dominant possessors.  Our reputations are being called into question as a women says "a man molested me."  Our reputations correlate directly with our ability at conquest, and so if our reputation is insulted, we try to save face by distancing ourselves from the undesirable classification.  In no way is a man saying that a women's experience is invalid, nor is he trying to maliciously silence a woman for speaking her mind.  He is trying to preserve his dignity.
This is the rotten part of the culture as I see it.  As men, we are still seen as the providers, as the bread winners, as the conquerors.  We are expected to still provide for everyone, while the role of women has been in slow flux for a few hundred years, becoming more autonomous while we still occupy our full role along with new responsibilities once considered "women's work".  We are still expected to pay for the drinks, to fight over the bill with other men, to prove our worth with our wallets and possessions to make more money, to be successful, to still crave women and treat them as something to be conquered, payed for, or won.  When a man does not do these things, he is shunned, berated, called impotent and weak. This is the reciprocal nature of the rape culture that we have instilled:  Women are defaced morally by sex and Men by refusal.  This means that when a man is rejected, our culture decides that man is worthless.   Most learn to cope and move on to a new conquest.  Some go to great lengths to change this.  Some kill, some rape, some stalk, some relentlessly pursue until they wear a person down.  We are encouraged to take things by force, to push for what we want.  We are also sold the lie that all one needs for success is determination and persistence.  It is a moral failing on the man's part that he has no women, because if he only tried harder he could have anything he wanted, a modern superstition perpetuated by over-privileged men talking down to the beta-males in our society.  So, paradoxically, it is morally corrupting to maintain our corruption free reputation as a man.
     This leads to the breakdown of empathy in a number of capacities.  For one, imagine you were a man who has traditional male values an this success delusion and wants to have sex with a woman, so he asks her out.  To the man, the woman knows this expectation that in exchange for proof of assets, he might be deemed worthy of copulation, and by agreeing to go out and consume his money, there is a transaction being carried out.  This is the toxic masculinity that we have been embroiled in since we were given a name.  We are consistently tallying the relationship in terms of possessions, purchases, and payout.  We see only cuddling at the end of he night as a women getting 100% of what she asked for in the relationship and equitably less for the man, a swindle, a rip off.  It destroys this man.  We feel used, we feel violated, we feel angry, but most of us move on.  when many of us that cannot cut the "Alpha-Male" stereotype then learn that we would rather have relationship over sexual conquest and take the shunning of those who are more attractive, wealthy, and privileged for one reason or another.  Those who succeed with this toxic male outlook then can evoke the envy of those who still want the power and the women, those who have yet to find the beauty and eventual coupling of relationship over transaction, and because of the perseverance fallacy we are fed, those willing to perpetuate the culture of misogyny.  There is no concern for the women in this, no reason to take her side in the argument because in this world view, the woman is chattle.
   Now, empathy then is broken by those beta-males as well, when they want to distance themselves from toxic masculinity.  We do not want to be included in the title of all men, but we understand we cannot be separate.  The M&Ms metaphor comes to mind.  if 10 percent of the M&M's are poison, would you have a handful?  Though the idea of conquest is weeded out of our behavior through experience, our sensibility to have our reputation untarnished still lingers.  We absolutely abhor the idea of being included with rapists in these anecdotes, so the natural reaction is to save face.  We reply with seemingly non-sequitir rebuttals like "I am not a rapist" and "it is tough for men too" without thinking we are derailing any justice.  We refuse to see ourselves the way the victims see us because we feel it is unfair to say that all men are like this.  The disruption is severe here.  We normally cannot go any further because to a women, the term "Man" is perfectly accurate to what they are going through, while we as men see a cline in behavior among us, a pile of shit on the top with the rest of us avoiding association.  Men, in essence see the face side of the cards when it comes to men and their intentions, while women only get the backs, and so it is natural that all men be included in the experience.
  The end result is the men trying to pull away from the association and feeling rejected, like their reputations are being hurt.  Once again, reputation relates directly to possessing and conquering, and even though most of us grow out of including people in our conquest, we are still ingrained to look at our moral worth through our possessions and by extension our reputations as possessors.  If our legacy is then tarnished by being unable to avoid the classification of rapist, we feel morally broken.
    So we combat, we diffuse, we derail any conversation as fighters, as combatants, as virile masculine stock.  And we silence empathy.

    This is my simple analysis of the situation, but it would be disingenuous not to offer advice to keep this derailment from happening.  I have one thing that can be done to produce empathy.  Simply acknowledge that the defensive men are not rapists.  A women cannot be sure of the intentions of a man, this is true, but those of us who wish not to be included with rapists will rally with you if you just acknowledge that this man replying to you is simply trying to save face.  Once that man is let off the hook, his masculinity preserved, then two things are bound to happen.  The first is the man can finally introduced to the constant shit storm that is modern femininity.  It is absolutely horrendous and for the love of God I wish that it could be another way.  I cry for every woman that has ever questioned if her rape was her fault, for every girl that felt guilty about her curves or lack there of.  I have utter disdain for every man that could ever decide that no was not clear enough of an answer, or more to the point, refused to take no as an answer to the modernist bullsh it of following your desires regardless of the consequences.  I hate the idea that children are denied nutrients because of prudish ass hats claiming breast feeding is indecent because of some wide spread mammary fetish.  I wish I could personally neuter every man who ever blamed unwanted groping on the cut of a shirt or the length of a hem.  I hate that when I tell my wife she is beautiful she can list 20 things wrong with her.  This is not whining.  This is constant, unadulterated fear that women have to experience every second of everyday.  It's something that I do not wish for my daughter, and likewise, I do not wish on my son, the future recipient of this toxic notion of chivalry.  I wish for a day that a woman could hear the words "you are beautiful" from a man and not reach for her mace or attempt to sabotage the compliment with some bull about cellulite and cup size.  I wish for a day, where cat calls could be replaced by compliments, not laced with the empty sexual repression of a toxic masculinity, but as affirmations of feminine beauty.  I wish that if my son were to stare at a body, admiring it, he would not be seen as a predator.  Hell, I wish that for me.  I wish that my eyes did not translate into lust and malice towards the opposite sex. I wish that eye contact was flattering and not frightening.  Once you can move beyond defensiveness and into empathy, there are things that a good man cannot turn from.
     The other inevitable event from acknowledging innocence from being a rapist is that you gain an ally.  You gain all of the force of original chivalry, the defending of your honor.  You gain a person that will tell a pushy egregious asshole to leave.  After being introduced to the cesspool female discrimination on a personal level, you also have a male friend that is not doing the interaction math when you share your story, cry on his shoulder, borrow his ear. If he is really trying to avoid the label of being a "man" in your story, he will also be fighting the same corrosive masculinity that you are constantly subject too.  Though he is far from a victim, he still suffers from this type of discrimination.  About the only person that is unaffected is the Alpha-male prick who, unfortunately becomes the object of envy and therefore the pattern of modern masculinity.  Once a man is confirmed not a rapist here, he is free to point out the emperors nudity and free others.  I think that this is slowly occurring with movements like #yesallwomen or the subreddit 2xchromasomes.  The problem is that conquest is still encouraged among men, and these things are an affront to that sense of conquest.  To d-bag alphas it is a challenge on their influence and power, to us betas, it is an association with those we would rather not be associated.  Getting "mansplained" does not mean the conversation has ended.  The shitty ones will walk away or continue with how "unfair" it is, and those of us with maturity and a conscience will be reasonable once we know you don't think we are the bad guy.  It is the second group that will become your allies here.
     In the end, this is a struggle for both genders, and both genders need to know they will be safe.  Both genders suffer under these obsolete and corrupted views of masculinity and if those genders squabble between themselves, this gives the advantage to the bastards benefiting from the discord, the defamation of character that the abusers rely on for their power.  It happens both ways. Women, if you are patient with us, the non-poisonous M&Ms, you get our motivation, our rage, our passion and our tenacity wasted on our false calling as possessors, and have it channeled against your abusers.  By no means do we as men need to assume responsibility for violations we have not done, nor do we need to "check our privilege" which I have demonstrated hopefully to be impossible anyway. I don't show my solidarity but not defending myself, but by simply saying I do not know your struggle, but I am willing to listen, not out of guilt, but out of common decency and my own scars from this terrible system of stagnated manhood.  I will lend and ear, a shoulder, or a fist if necessary.

Why Literally should not ve used figuratively (religiously)

Every word in the bible is literal and true.  Samuel made the sun sit still, the world was made in a 24 hour period regardless of the presence of a sun before day 4, and placing a penis into a man's anus is an abomination.   Every word is god breathed and is useful for rebuking... well that is the important one.  Of course, this only happens until we have to describe our pains, our struggles, and our perceived agonies.  When jesus said "I have been sent to those in prisons"  it can mean a spiritual prison, a prison of finances, a personal prison of poverty, a prison of bad habbits and addiction.  However, on the topic of Noah, there were dinosaurs on the ark.  We can make things like work a graven image in our lives, like football, like women, pornography, drinking addiction, poverty can be our idol if we worship SNAP and medicaid.  Also, if you believe in anything other than Jesus is going to come back and burn the edifices of those people we judge and dislike, you are a decieved ignoramus who refuses to accept the literal word of God.  Swearing, not in it's literal sense of swearing oaths, but in being profane, using God's name in vain, and using the replacements for those words like heck and gosh.  You may as well say those profanities and cursings.  A fetus is murder because the bible literally says "I knew you when in your mother's womb" no interpretation issues or anything,  and if we let gays get together, we will be showered with fire and brimstone.  There is no other interpretation.  However sometimes we are being opressed by philistenes like the government, philistines like not wanting read your bible and giving your offerings and tithes, philistines like poverty, and addiction, and abortionists.  It's not literal philistines and I should know, my pastor told me and I dechiphered the poetic language of my bible.  The poetic words of the Psalms is the literal wod of God.  You have to be familiar with it to understand it.  There is a literal valley of the shadow of death that I walk in, and I think it is in Huston.   Now, someone's figurative valley could be taxes, abortion, addiction, sadness, gossip, depression, abortion, poverty.  That is not literal, and you have to be able to be discerning in these matters.   Take it fom me; I know the pastor.  My uncle is the pastor, my cousin married the pastor and I went to youth group and had a bible study during lunch. 

Tell me, why can we fudge literal interpretations just because it justifies our grace and defiles those we are to love?  When we have that selective play with definititions, we run the risk of defining what we wish and not what is.  If the bible is literal, let it be literal, but do not turn and say that literal, clear things , mean something they do not because we ironically think that by inventing a definition, we support the undefined and literal interpretation of a book with no modern context. 
Morally, it is all allegory.  It is mythology.  It is Entymology.  It is a window into the insights of prior generations of humans with a view into where our ideas comefrom and where our values originate.

The goal is simple

I recently attempted to write a novel instead of growing a beard.  I failed in both despite the amount of shaving I did not do.  Camp Nanowrimo has begun and now I am 3 days behind.  I have decided simply to finish the novel I started.  Is that a cop out or a cheat?  Perhaps, but perhaps it is an oppertunity to finish the last leg of the marathon.  I used to write everyday in my younger days, and now I find that I write less for me and more for arguments on social media and other such nonsense.  Why should I waste my genius on those people?  A few things toconsider though:
1, I can only write when I am not at work.   I ran into this issue when I was doing nanowrimo.  I was letting my work slip so I could write.
2.  I need to avoid drama.  My last nanowrimo was enveloped in bullshit by the 3rd chapter, when thkngs became difficult in my real life.  Since then I have got my house in order and hopefully I can make some progress outside of having the bottom of maslow's pyramid cave in.
3.  Weekends are ideal.  This means that I have 34000 words to mash out in between laundry, sleeping, and watching my 5 year old son at home.  34000w/30 gw/m= 11333 words which comes to 11333. (((11333/60 min/h) /24 h/d) /2 d/weekend) /4 weekends a month) comes to about 2 days a week of solid writing to finish Dissolution.  If I write from midnights to midnights.  So, as ideal as weekends might be, I have to put in some sweat during the week, leaving very little time for anything else.  I'll at least finish it sometime.

Optimism in seeing a half empty glass

If I convey one thing to my children before I die, it is this:  optimism is not the opposite of pessimism.  When you are young, you are a slave to circumstance.  You must comply.  If you do not comply with the world that is created to keep you safe, you comply to chaos and entropy, which insures your decay and cooling.  Either way, the lack of freedom creates a notion that insists that all courses of action are worthless, all hope is dispair, and you must succumb to a world that is cold and cooling...  this is the essence of pessimism and you wallow in it or are oblivious to it, creating a sense of wonder, curiosity, or simple smiles and glitter of having everything taken care of.  Oblivion and pessimism are then the dichotomy, not optimism.  What people must forget is that optimism and pessimism are diametrically opposed.  Pessimism, by virtue of this quick blurb, is entropy, natural decay and a belief in the inevitability of disaster.  Optimism is something else entirely.   Where pessimism or oblivion is an attitude, optimism is a discipline.  Optimism is not just thinking good things in bad situations, which is of course oblivious behavior, but a cultivation of finding solutions to problems that seem impossible.  Optimism has nothing to do with your attitude in fact.  The most basic form of optimism is the will to live, and the will to live at all costs.  As one cultivates an optimistic skill set, people become creative, analytical, passionate, not always happy or even successful.  The reality of optimism is that you can still be classically pessimistic and still retain your optimism, as well as be happy with everything and lose your optimism by stagnation.   It matters not the water level on the glass, half empty or half full, an observant optimist will look at a half full glass of water and fill it with a pitcher if she wants more water, drink the water and leave an all empty glass, pour out the water for a glass of scotch, or pour the half glass into a thirsty plant to keep it from dying.  Optimism is a dicipline of resourcefulness, not the liquid level in a cup.

Why do I believe?

I am finding, the more I locate the people who shared the same world as I did when I was young, that many of them have discovered religion to be a caustic form of collective ignorance, destructive attitudes, and a smug sense of superiority that supersedes rational thought.  As a fairly "religious person" I painfully have to agree with them on all of these markers.  Then I have to answer them at every turn "Why I still believe?"  The answer is simple, yet gets me flak from my religiously inclined acquaintances, elders, and fellow believers:  solipsism, and probability.  Notice the order I have indicated these, and do not think that is unintentional that solipsism begins this list.  No one can sympathize with my situation, my life, my world, my existence, so no one can truly understand the world that I perceive.  In my world, because of what I have seen, experienced, been blessed with, and struggled through, the probability of God existing is higher than his chances of not being there.  My world just has the edges filled in with a creator who guides my path, and expects me to make choices based on what I understand about being faithful in everything and being kind to others, and what I can empirically understand about my world.  It has nothing to do with science, nature, evolution, politics, economics, or society.  It has everything to do with the observation that either entropy or Love has gotten me to this point in my life, and for those things that are not certain, I have a vocabulary and a system to categorize that which is unknown or imperceptible.  Christianity, or being Christ-like, for me then is not about having the truth and being right, but about being a good father, a forgetter of debts, a person willing to do labor and sleep on the ground, though I have been blessed with divinity, to be alone in hard times, to as Paul put it, work out my faith with fear and trembling, as beads of blood run down my brow in the garden ready to die for the very person killing me, to prevent the stones be thrown on the marginalized, to prepare my intellect for conflict instead of shying away with smug superiority, to recognize sacrifice before generosity, to be a peace maker, a gracious guest, to be one who re-purposes tradition to no longer be a form of discrimination, but a method of inclusion, to subvert power from those who oppress, to pay taxes to Caesar because his face is on the coin, but remember that I am made in the image of God himself, and to contemplate what I must give of myself with that face on me.  To rationally dissect the world and appreciate it's elegance, whether or not a creator made it at all, and to challenge my brothers and sisters in faith when their actions do not align with the doctrine they prescribe to others, to point out the white washed tombs and the dens of vipers.  My job is not to make followers of our tract of beliefs, but to teach the disciplines of what I know to people willing to hear, not to "prove" empirical evidence wrong with fallacious reasoning, but to acknowledge that God is a crafty fellow who designed a complex world that runs on its own.  Perhaps in another mind, not like my own, what I have attributed to God is actually nothing but cosmic coincidence, a happenstance of a spontaneous generation from a single point in space, expanding without uniformed dispersion until we gained the ability to think up God, and Heaven, and Hell, and all of these things to explain the unknown.  That's perfectly fine with me, to the utter frustration of many of my less tolerant brothers.  I don't expect everyone's brains to create the thoughts I do.  I expect that they understand what they believe, not because church screwed them up when they were younger, or they still want that smug sense of superiority without the moral contract of being sent to Hell.  I simply expect people to exist, persist, and end, where that takes us, I am not so concerned.  I live for those now, who need me, as Christ did, and that is simply how I live.  The short answer is simply "because I do."

Merely a speed, not a vector

"We are all going to die screaming, so why would you not fill it with wonderful experiences?'  -Kevin Smith...  abridged.

I am trying to figure out something that has struck me as odd.  I didn't think of it as odd at first but now, as I spend all of this time watching TEDTalks and Kevin Smith Q&As and other miscellanea  that is geared to my intellectual self, I see the oddity.  They talk about passion; they talk about a drive; they talk about a force that pushes those smart folks, and they talk about goals.  I have had goals; oh I have had goals.  I have wanted to be a teacher, a musician, a game designer, a good father, a writer, a transient bum living out of my car.  I lack direction, something that intelligent people seem to have.  I have no direction.

I have had this consistent concept of moving for a long tome.  Since I was a washout C student high school student, up until I am a washout C college student, I have had this concept of moving on, marching though the mire and muck until one day I would be somewhere.  It kept me patient, easy going, and really, it kept my life in perspective that anything I felt was struggle was actually just resistance, a thing to push through until I got what I wanted...  This brings us back to the previous paragraph,  What good is all of this shit wading if I'm not going somewhere?  So here I sit, at my computer at 5 am, trying to figure out my life.  I am tired now, but I cannot sleep.  I need to get these thoughts down to someplace, to someone.  It is unfair to my wife, to my family, to my friends and to my parents that I embark on this quest to make me an adult, only to find I have been walking in a pit of muck and walking in a snazzy pentagram pattern.  Perhaps the problem has always been direction, and I can only think of one time I really had any direction at all.

I can remember being driven by only one thing.  I was a 6th grader and hanging out with a guy with a crush on a girl.  I followed him and his girlfriend, and I met someone else,  a redhead, to be exact, her name was S.  Now S. was an odd duck, an awkward seeming young lady who had a pension for X-files trivia.  She became a friend of mine, nothing too serious, since a friend of mine consisted of someone I talked to about every 3 weeks or so (Really introverted I was in those days.)  The less I saw her, the more I thought about her.  Now compile this against what I can only can describe as teenage angst and depression.  This turned into a full on fixation that I was consumed by.  S. was a stain on my brain, a scorch mark on my psyche, a nagging noise that could not be auto-tuned out of my soundtrack.  I never acted.  I never told her that I liked her.  Not until I was a freshman in highschool, and I left her a note before Spring break.  She shot me down promptly.  This killed me.

Now, when I say killed me, I mean killed me.  I realize that I experienced grief in all 5 cliche steps.    I bartered, got angry, etc. for about 3 years.  I actually had girlfriends during that time, which amounted to just mind games and guilt for a few months.  I could not break this idea, this pattern, but I was passionate about this loss.  I filled notebook upon notebook of poetry; I wrote songs and stories about S. and my pain and anguish.  This is laughable to me now just because I realize most of this navel gazing was my own damn fault, and I should've let it go, but I couldn't. I had to resist the release.  After that, I was careful about anything that required any sort of infatuation.  This lead to the concept of muck walking.  If I pushed on, no passion, only the monotony of every day, I had no space to be lost in something, no space to be passionate, no space to follow things, only the space to plan the next stride and fuck the direction.

So I walk around, but not in a direction.  I push on, but not toward any means.  I will be thirty in less than a year, and I am set up for nothing.  Jesus started his life at thirty, and as we all know, that ended well for everybody but him.  I need to find my passion again, and place it in unattainable things.  I need to find how to give myself over to what I love.  Loving my family is not enough.  Loving my wife is not enough.  I do love those things, but my pushing into nothing is so destructive to myself, that I cannot take care of them, those people to which I have legal, financial and spiritual responsibilities.  Loving them is not enough; I have to find a goal.  I have to find something that I can pursue.  I need something that I can push on with so that I can support my family.  That conclusion I guess can wait, It's 6 am and I have yawned for the first time in 6 hours.  I figure that when I get all of this out, I will sleep like a fuckin' baby.  Until then I intend to contemplate this shit on this blog.