Are we males supposed to save ourselves or are the terrible females going to save us?
I suppose that Kathleen Parker's take is that you need women to save men from women, but I'm not sure because the book isn't out yet. The other guys may have other plans.
aimai
I've been wandering around the net today and I wrote this post after reading the stuff on purity balls, but I wanted to revisit it and add this quote from the purity ball/patriarchy movement which I think explains so much of this "endangered male" stuff, too.
Here's the quote:
Her father, Jim, said he brought her to show her how much he cherished her after almost losing her in a car accident two years ago.
Loss tinged many at the ball. Stephen Clark, 64, came to the ball for the first time with Ashley Avery, 17, who is “promised” to his son, Zane, 16. Mr. Clark brought Ashley, in her white satin gown, to show her that he loved her like a daughter, he said, something he felt he needed to underscore after Ashley’s father left her family a year ago.
Mrs. Wilson, the organizer, said that her father abandoned her family when she was 2, and that Mr. Wilson’s father was distant. One father said he had terminal cancer and came with his two daughters. Others were trying to do better in their second marriages.
“I’ve heard from fathers that this challenged them, to guard their own eyes, for example,” Mr. Wilson said. “It is a call to covenant which basically says I as my daughter’s father will be a man of integrity and purity.”
In other words these families/fathers were all already failed by their own fathers, or have already failed some families and daughters and are making up for these "sins" by creating and acting out an artificial fantasy of the appropriate, never failing, father. I get the same feeling from reading all these "save the male" paens to the "way things used to be" because the closer you look at the lives of the authors the more you see they are utter fabulists, creating and trying to enforce an imaginary and fugitive eden of correct sex roles on the rest of a failed humanity. But what if we don't suffer from their central wound? I've got a fantastic father and I sure don't think he needs lessons in anything from the depressed losers of the purity ball movement. And ditto for the lost boys movement. I don't know any boys lost because of feminism, though I know of plenty that were saved.
aimai
Wow, that is just an amazing roundup of toxic craziness. Well done, aimai...and better you than me.
(cross-comment from Eschaton)
The guy for item C) is a Unitarian Universalist minister, a true feminist, and in an egalitarian marriage with another UU minister, Carolyn Owen-Towle. He does not belong on the same list as the crazies. His goal to improve men, _not_ to attack women. I don't have the book, but a quote from http://www.uumen.org/MaleCall%20...pring%2006.pdf:
Since I began men's work 30 years ago, my bedrock premise hasn't altered much, indeed it's been fortified: changing men changes the world! And why do men need to change? For our very own good and for the well-being of all living entities that we touch. And it will be "change that comes out of foundation, not fireworks," to use a phrase from Gail Godwin's Evensong....When men change-soulfully and prophetically, internally and externally - everyone will benefit.... The majority of women and children will leap exuberantly.
I agree, not too many people have read this book, since it is #3,550,091 in Books on Amazon. It is published by one of the UU seminaries. Owen-Towle seems to be active in the denominations men's movement.
Dale P,
Again, I apologize, the book has no description at all at Amazon, can't be searched inside, and has no reviews. I should have looked harder to figure out who this guy was.
aimai
An article about a guy who ustabee a feminist in the seventies before discovering how terrible women were who was then not invited back on Phil Donahue to explain how terrible women are.
Hey, according to the Men's Rights troll at LGM, that guy's still a feminist. A great feminist. And if any of us were feminists, we'd be like him, and realize that the worst things in the world were Amanda Marcotte, the Duke case (which was bad, but not as bad as unjust prosecutions where people wind up in jail), and that Maryland ruling that rape is rape even if it only lasts five or ten seconds.
Hey matt weiner, I noticed that too. If that guy can still be considered a feminist because of something he did or thought in the seventies do I still get to be a teenager? Because there have been a lot of changes since then that I categorically reject if everyone will join with me in closing their eyes and pretending.
aimai
Heh.
The Salon article is actually really good. Oh, and the parenthesis about the Duke rape case in my previous comment was me speaking in my own voice.
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