Further thoughts on the Emasculation of America.

My last post on the subject got quite a few posts, which in turn stimulated some more random thoughts, and helped me to help understand some of my own reactions. Before I get to the meat though a couple appetisers.

Jeff over at the conditional axe, made an observation that I think in many ways, underscores the damage feminist philosophy has done

I do have a hard time envisioning her in any kind of Donna Reed
role.

Now think about that. Granted Barda was a hardcore, bad ass, take no prisoners warrior. But why should that preclude her from also being a Donna reed type? If we assume that by "Donna reed type" Jeff meant a stereotypical 50's housewife who cooks, cleans, and manages to do so wearing pearls, then perhaps there is a case to be made.However she wasn't portrayed as any such thing in the comic. Rather both Scott and Barda were portrayed as two people who shared in the domestic chores, and in fact used their day job, to determine the split of said chores. So i am left to interpret Jeff's comment as meaning he can see Barda ever stepping in a kitchen at all, as it somehow contradicts with her "warriorness"?

But does it? The Israeli army was among the first to not only allow women to assume combat roles traditionally reserved for men, but to actively encourage it. Yet many full time active duty Israeli women are also mothers and wives, and many return home to cook and clean for their families. They see no contradiction between warrior credibility and domestic bliss, because there isn't one. Only when one has drunken enough feminist kool aid does one even see such a contradiction. Only when one assumes that traditional domestic roles are somehow incompatible with more "progressive and gender neutral roles" does that opinion even form.

Let me put it this way, I am a very "manly" man. I don't merely mean this in a behavioral way but also in a purely biological way. I have an extremely high sperm count, (more on that in a minute) am quite large, with a full manly beard and thick dense hair. I have very bushy eyebrows, thick bones, and a fairly well developed musculature for a guy who spends 10-12 hours a day in meetings and negotiations. Nothing about me reads as feminine, a gay friend of mine once described me as " a perfect fantasy of masculine virility" The language people usually choose to associate with me is across the board traditional male, IE "cowboy" "ballsy" etc.

However none of this precludes me form helping out around the house. Every weekend I wake up and cook my wife and I breakfast, usually consisting of fried eggs, bacon and sausage. I don't do so because she asks me to, or because I feel obligated, I do it because I enjoy it. I pend 5 days a week doing Biz-dev for my firm, talking to, and negotiating with, high level corporate execs, usually VP or higher, and every conversation is a power struggle. So on the weekends its nice to spend some time on something simple and easy that gives me instant gratification. It doesn't make me any less manly than it does a cowboy who cooks on the trail, or a firefighter who cooks at the firehouse. So why should Barda's domestic activities make her less in any way shape or form? Hell you know what? Just go read Scipio's comments, over at the absorbsacon, for all i know he/she may well be be meaning this post as sarcastic, but even if so Scipio gets it right. Just as Stephen Colbert occasionally says something in his parody of conservatives that we actually believe, even if this is sarcastic its dead on accurate.


Meanwhile Anon, A mouse, who has been consistently impressing me by the way, pointed out a very telling, and very important trend. While femi-fans manage to pull the old misogyny gun with a speed that would make Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday do a double take, how often have you every heard them praise any issue, no matter how "womyn-positive" or "gender neutral" the portrayal is? Yeah I've never heard them do it either. Which goes back to Vince Moore's often referenced post as well. When someone only criticise's and never praises, it causes the opposite effect intended. Doesn't matter whether the subject is dogs, children, or the comic industry, if you only use the stick, you gonna get in a lot of stick fights, while a little carrot can go a long way.

Also an Honorable mention to Yonatan bryant for very succinctly pointing out that the same people who scream the shrillest when a female character is being "objectified" engage in the exact same behavior themselves.

Meanwhile a beaucoup kevin, (who I might add deleted my first comment on his blog because it was "flame worthy" despite the fact that at least 2 other posters said the exact same thing I did, and used more inflammatory language to do so) makes a joke pretty much equivalent to the "crankshaft" joke which caused so much uproar. The difference being that instead of joking that old women don't get raped, he instead furthered the stereotype than all men are rapists. Of course that wont get any attention at all.


Now in the last post of this series, Vince Moore over at the Omnium gathering, referred me to an article than has lit my random thoughts with a madman's fire. The article, which postulates a link between the increase in phthalates and the decline in male fertility and virility since the 50's. I had been aware of this trend previously, but I had always assumed it was a psychosomatic reaction to the feminising of our culture. By which I mean that I had always hypothesised that as men began acting more feminine, their bodies simply read their subconscious motivation and manifested a sympathetic physical condition. I had always half assumed the same reaction led to the (seeming) correlation between homosexual "catchers" and body sizes/styles. (by which I mean it seems to me that most of the homosexuals males who act the most feminine also seem to be smaller and more lightly built, as if their bodies were trying to make them more feminine. Although perhaps Mad Thinker Scott can shed some light on whether he has made similar observations, as he has far more experience than I)

The idea that the cause could be environmental led me to some other observations. First let me preface by saying that I have a very high sperm count. Even by 50's standards its high. From the beginning of my sexual adventures at 15 (yes I was a late bloomer) to my 28th year of life, I had never had unprotected sex. I had had quite a bit of sex, but I ALWAYS wrapped my willie. Primarily this was because of my mom. You see my mom was a dental hygienist for years, and as such, had to take yearly re-education courses on blood borne diseases. Suffice it to say, I was told horror stories of the effects of STD's regularly. Surprisingly however there was no effort made to demonise my young sexual urges. In fact on those occasions when my mom found my collection of adult reading material, she never even commented. Years later when I asked why she was so cool about it she said "you were a boy, it was natural" As a result, I never had any real hangups about sex itself, I didn't ever view it as a potential source of fear, but I knew the risks and figured that if I didn't know a woman well enough to trust her with my wallet, then trusting her with the health of my dick was probably not a good idea. As a result, the first woman I ever had unprotected sex with, was my fiancee (now wife). Within a 2 months of us beginning to have unprotected sex, my wife suffered an ectopic pregnancy, which ruptured her fallopian tube. The doctors told us afterwards that the fetus was approximately 2 months old. I later did the math and realised that she must have gotten pregnant pretty much the very first time we had unprotected sex. (which made me very thankful for my previous care in sexual encounters, had I behaved like many men my age, I would have been a father several times over by 18) This is despite the fact that she has an oddly shaped uterus which makes her only about half as fertile as the average woman, and the fact that she was on the pill at the time. I've since had my sperm count tested and was told I'm in the top 1% worldwide. Naturally I found this quite validating. (the test, not my wife's ectopic pregnancy, in point of fact her fear and my guilt led to us having a quite reduced sex life for a while) All of which is a very long winded way of saying that perhaps the reason I can see the feminising of our culture so clearly, is due to the increased sperm count? Perhaps it is this very feminsation of the male body which has blinded so many men to the process of feminising on a societal level? Could it be that rather than being psychosomatic, the physical trend is actually causing the societal trend?I don't know. What I do know, is that when we do decide to have kids, the wife and I ain't letting them drink out of plastic.