These fragments may one day become whole pages, so link to them by name, not hash-name.
Men and women have different brains with the same capabilities but very different inclinations.
I’ve had my ass kicked by women way too many times at HarveyMuddCollege to think otherwise – I guarantee: women can do high math, computer programming, engineering, all these things perfectly fine, better than men, if they want to.
That said, I think there are brain differences that lead to very different interests, inclinations, and behaviors.
Some things that I think are relatively hard-wired:
Historically, I have strived to be egalitarian in every respect.
Now that I’ve grown up and live in a SexlessMarriage, egalitarianism is losing its charm. If sexiness were divorced from power relationships, I’d be happy as a clam. However, this is not a case: Equal division of chores and income seems to destroy romance. Couples marry, divide chores & respects, go to work, raise kids together, and the relationship goes to hell. I am now of the mind that sex relationships are rooted in difference, not similarity and buddy-buddy friendship. Thus, preserving those differences is necessary if we believe that sex is an essential part of a relationship.
(See also: OnMarriage, by KahlilGibran?.)
This has nothing to do with what is “fair,” and everything to do with what is sexy and worth living.
I have no idea what this means for our society. I remain firmly convinced that women should do whatever work they please, and wish them to continue to explore and earn nobility in spirit by the Valkyrie way.
Men have serious problems with this though. Our hearts only beat so that women will find us exciting, and admire us. Women, us men do not want either brotherly love, sisterly love, friendship, or (gag) motherly love. We do not date for these things. “Intimacy” is not what we want, either. We want the love of a maiden, and we despise you when, even with your sincerest efforts, you cannot bring yourself to love us this way.
Update 2008-05-17: I continue to believe that it is the egalitarian nature of marriage relationships that is the primary cause of sexlessness. I’ve also noticed that we turn a completely blind eye to power imbalance during dating. Just look at the movies, you see it all over the place. Power imbalance is sexy, and you don’t need to be a D/s or BDSM pervert to find it exciting; It is the sexual form in all movies, which is why radical feminists hate the movies so much.
On occasions, I fall to spells of misandrony, or “man hating.”
My daughter has heard me say bad things about boys and men, (masculinity in general,) and has argued, “Wouldn’t that mean you hate yourself?” Well, yes, on occasions, that is exactly what happens.
Men are territorial, petty, egotistical, petty, and seek domination. They are forceful, and take without asking. They bark, shout, rape, and are otherwise cruel, wearing a thin veneer of respectability to cover brutality. Their excuse is, “If I didn’t, someone worse than me would,” and that’s the male sense of goodness: Someone who will take power and do good with it – but not so much good, that someone will think that they can freeload, or not so much good, that people think they’re weak. There you have it: The male code, the logic of domination. Not too pretty, is it? It’s basically evil.
There are plenty of other excellent reasons to hate men; They’re ugly, for one. That’s usually sufficient for me.
Update 2008-05-17: Not any more. I’m completely and thoroughly against our culture’s misandry now. We need to get onto a spiritual program to value men’s lustful sexual nature; See SexAndSpiritInMen and SexualWorld for ideas on these things.
If porn changes a person, I believe it’s because they have found something about themselves that was always there, and just hidden – not that they’ve been “perverted” somehow. That this may shock the person’s social system is where the phrase “perverted” comes from. But no such thing has actually happened: The individual just learned something about themselves.
Porn is under attack in our society, because people are (gasp) discovering things about themselves, thank you Internet, that they & the people around them probably didn’t want them to know. The women’s union doesn’t like the idea that men have sexual desires that they don’t approve of.
I use the concept of “kekales” (KalesAndKekales) to say, “Look, women, you do not own men’s imaginations– men’s imaginations belong to men. When you try to ban porn, or (basically) silence the sexual imagination, you are trying to shut out men’s hearts.”
I envision the kekale as something of a spiritual creature living within a man, or floating around a man, that reflects his sexual desires. When I view men this way, I find something redemptive about men, (an ability to create true beauty,) rather than just the usual misandrony I feel.
See also: Text001, SexAndSpiritInMen
“Paper for Gold,” a gambit from the author of Cerberus:
Emphasis is mine.
To state that men can make “progress” or have “made progress” is to assume a goal.
Let me put the discussion about PostModernism? to the side, and just go naively forth, as if there is a goal, the archer seeing the mark in infinity, that the arrows are flying towards (to quote KahlilGibran?, OnChildren?.)
Many MensMovement advocates want a RetreatToThePast. They want men to become barbarian gang-leaders again, to become "real men," and so on.
Well, Einstein and Isaac Newton must be just pussies, then, no?
Obviously, I don’t think that’s the way to go.
I don’t think feminism was bad. At all. In fact, I think it was in the direction of progress.
I don’t think the men, women, and way of relationships of the future will or should be the same as the way of relationships of the past.
I give a vision in SexualWorld; But I don’t really know what it’ll be like.
In keeping with TransHumanism, I see a future of more complexity, not less. Men don’t lose or subvert their nature, rather they fulfill it. This doesn’t mean so much that they’re transformed, as that they transform the world around them.
The crude man is a seed, it’s not bad, and has essential elements of the end-point in itself. But the tree is different than the seed.
I’ll need to revisit this later, when my thoughts are clearer.
Presently, men are in crisis. Women made a leap, and men are stuck behind. We’re now in turmoil, we’ve been so since the 1970’s, and the MensMovement is reshaping itself in radical flux, every single decade, even within the decades. Future unknown.
Placeholder; For now, see: MensMovement.
This will be a story about both the Men’s Movement and the Women’s Movement. It starts with roughly 1st wave feminism, and then end somewhere ~2050.
It may also be called: TheStoryOfMenAndWomen?.
Humorously, self-depreciatingly, I’m thinking of calling it TheStoryOfMiddleClassWhiteMenAndWomen?, to reflect that much of this centers on MiddleClassWhiteSociety.
One of the most important people in the MensMovement.
He started in NOW. He’s absolutely pro-feminism; He’s just also pro-masculinism as well.
He’s treated like shit by NOW and 2nd wave feminists everywhere because he’s the real deal, a genuine threat: a new idea, and they cannot argue against it, because they genuinely cannot (will not) understand it.
He’s plays straight out of the feminist playbook, which he helped to author.
2nd wavers refuse to debate him publicly, and are doing everything the can to marginalize him. It’s horrible, and more so, because he’s not against them.
When men feel bad about being men (see: OccasionalMisandry,) they try to find traits inside themselves that they believe are feminine (and therefore good, redeeming.)
So you get men who are trying to be sensitive, caring.
Or they dismiss sexual desire – they now are now more interested in the “more evolved” intimacy. (see: TheProblemOfMaleSexuality.)
“Honorary Females” tend to have problems getting dates, because, contrary to what 2nd wave feminists acknowledge, (see: TheStoryOfGenders,) women want stoic men (as NorahVincent so clearly discovered & elucidated.) This is a source of great frustration and confusion for honorary females.
A sign of progress in society would be, “Is it getting easier and easier to meet your basic needs?”
Basic needs include:
If it’s easier for grandkids to meet basic needs than grandparents, then I think it’s fair to call that progress.
If it’s harder, then I believe it’s fair to say, something has gone wrong.
Here’s the thing: Our entire system of housing is set up to guarantee, by hook or by crook, that housing prices go up.
When I say “guarantee,” here’s what I mean: Our entire mindset, from the smallest child to the adult just before debt, between both male and female, from the poor to the rich, is predicated on the notion that the cost of houses and land shall go up. Like a force of nature.
This is bewildering and unbelievable to me, just how deeply and consciously we have imbibed and reinforced this story.
And yet we are astonished that houses cost a lot of money – like, 20-30 years of high pay labor, to pay for.
When I say “guarantee,” I mean: Newspapers freak out if housing prices go down, even just a little (say, 5-10%.) Every newspaper lights up with the signs of doom. And everybody commiserates. “Oh, how horrible. Oh, the poor people, oh, how horrible for them. Oh, this is devastating.”
And at the same time, people go, “Well, housing costs too much. People can’t afford homes.”
Unbelievable.
This has got to be the whiskey shot of our society. What I mean is: It’s a situation that people don’t want to look at, don’t want to think about, are themselves deeply invested in, that absolutely does and will have repercussions, and that is so painful to think about, that people just – down a shot of whiskey.
“Hellooo, big problem here!” “Nah… Just buy a house. It costs a lot, sure, but – the price will go up. We’ll see to it that it does.”
Ways of making house prices go up:
As far as I can tell, and maybe I’m wrong about this – correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I can tell, there’s hardly anything, except perhaps food, that is more controlled than the pricing of houses.
Real estate appears to me to be entirely and thoroughly corrupt. Maybe I’m wrong on this, and I’d like to be, but I’m just calling it as I, an uneducated real estate bumpkin, see it.
So many of my friends got into Kiyosaki. “Oh, we should all be doing real estate. We should all be getting rich making proper real estate decisions.” Hmm… It doesn’t feel right to me. The whole scene seems broken. If “rationality” is put to the purpose of bilking others, behind the veil of an “invisible hand,” and it’s a systematic playing around with necessities of life – I’ll have nothing to do with it.
I read Rich Zubaty somewhere talking about housing in Germany. He said hoards of families live in housing that costs them $100 a month, – and it’s a normal, middle class thing to do. These aren’t ugly houses, in bad neighborhoods. And you can still buy your own home if you really want to make big fat payments for it.
Take the whole game out of the speculative market: It’s a corrupt den of thieves and manipulators and controllers. “But that’s socialism!” Well, the key question needs to be, really: “What works?” And this really seems to work for them.
We need to completely detach life savings from living somewhere. Everyone’s treating homes as savings / investment vehicles, and thus want them to go up and up and up.
No duh, then, that housing is totally unaffordable.
There are other things that work against us as well, such as the way that clustering houses together causes things to go crazy: The more people around, the higher the value of the house. “So get in early?” No, just build more housing. Build higher, build systematically, etc.,. “But then our value goes down!” It shouldn’t have gone up in the first place! “But I want the money! Life is unfair, and we’ve got to get it however we can grab it! You’ve got to be smarter than the rest!” sigh
“Transcending the Ego” seems easy.
Just open your heart.
Does it need to be any more complicated than that?
Things to understand:
Men needing sex accounts for, I’ll just wager, 70-80% of the psychology of men that women complain about. Things like:
None of these things are unwarranted, because from the man’s perspective, it is absolutely true. Which is not to say that it needs to be this way (see: SexualWorld,) but rather, it’s this way because women make it this way.
See also: SexAndSpiritInMen
as a mask for talking about their sexual needs
I would guess that 40-70% of the MensMovement has taken the strategy of retreat to the past.
What I mean here is:
Strategies taken:
This is the retreat to the past.
I don’t believe in this motion at all, but the motion is understandable: “Go with what you know.”
The simple fact is: We’re not simpletons any more, and we don’t want to go back.
And good reason: The last peoples to try this approach were called (truthfully!) Nazi’s and Fascists.
Think liberal enlightened society is beyond this? Hell no: The Nazi’s & Fascists were pagans, and went through all sort of pagan traditional love of land and country revival.
I don’t want to become what these people are advocating for: Clear hierarchy, “get in your place,” war, patriarchy, and so on.
It is my sincere and strong belief that Feminism was not a mistake.
In fact, the super-narrative I go with, of which gender is just one facet, is that humanity is evolving intelligence and wisdom, co-arising forces. We are becoming more human, less violent, more intelligent, wiser, and so on.
Feminism was part of this. The MensMovement is now part 2.
(more later)
I’m something of a communitarian. I believe societies are healthiest when there is actually an integration between myriad functions that society performs, and the people in them. What I mean is: Work, play, childhood, adulthood, old age – all the people, mixed together, with a sense of what they are doing, and so on.
For the last century (I guess, at least,) of life in America, and “civilization” in general, we’ve been atomizing society.
The “nuclear family” is 2 parents, 2 kids, living in their own place, and only seeing relatives and family occasionally. The work crowd is different than the friends crowd is different than the daily life crowd, etc.,.
(Very different than a tribe, say, in Africa.)
If you hear the keyword “community” being raised, you have a sense about what I’m talking about.
I used to joke, “Yeah, we all live in 3 person households…” (mother, father, child) “…because it’s the smallest possible unit that children can possibly be raised in.”
Ha ha! So funny, so true, …
Well, no, it’s not true.
2 is the proper number.
2 is the smallest possible unit that children can possibly be raised in: It just takes a single parent (almost always a mom, by how the law discriminates against men; – don’t want to do any EqualityWashing here…) …to raise a child.
I would be sad but not shocked if we, as a society, figured out how to make that number 1.
Update: Is there a new code for mothers that “thou shalt not mention men & husbands?”
Where are the men?
There’s one article: Taking the kids: Squeezing in some adult time – which very briefly talks (obliquely) about husbands. It briefly says, “That “me” time doesn’t necessarily have to be about romance either. In fact, two-thirds of those polled for the Kayak.com survey, said that sex was secondary to simply relaxing with their significant other. “I’m just happy to sleep and not to cook,” jokes Laura Davidson, a busy New York businesswoman and mom of two young sons.”
Chalk up another for SexlessMarriage.
see also:
“Eudaimonic Society” is a term I borrow from SidMeiersAlphaCentauri.
(At least one other person has, as well.)
Basically, a human or trans-human (see: TransHumanism) society that has reached the end stages of society’s development. (By a model of development that I basically trust, give my life to.)
In such a society, creativity, virtue, joy, life, vitality, inspiration, technology, invention, environment, communication, and so on– have all developed to such a state, that life is a continuing existence of joys, wonders, a vigorous peace, and love.
The next stage for such an organism, provided that it does not fall, can only be Transcendence.
Transcendence into what? Well, since it is, by definition, the greatest, most purposeful thing that we can imagine, … …we can’t really know.
“Something more awesome.”
CS Lewis was stumped; In TheLastBattle?, he could only envision a few more worlds further in & higher up.
It’s a mystery!
It might take 100, 1,000, 10,000, or even a million years to get there. It doesn’t really matter how long.
See also:
A system with visual object systems typically…:
At some point, the user clicks on an object. For example, the object might be a circle, and then the user clicks on the circle that was drawn to the display.
The question arises, “How do I know which object was clicked?” On the one hand, we have a list of visualized objects. On the other hand, we have an x,y coordinate on the screen. Which object from the list, corresponds with that x,y coordinate?
The typical way I’ve done this in the past is:
I’ve recently discovered a far simpler solution to this question.
The trick is to paint objects to two buffers.
So let’s say that we’re drawing object #1. It’s a red circle, with a black border.
On the first buffer, the object draws a red circle, with a black border. This is what the user will see.
On the second buffer, the object draws with color #1 (associated with drawing object #1.) It draws the circle in the exact same place, with the exact same radius, with the exact same border width, and so on – but it just uses color #1 for both fill content color, and for border color.
When the user clicks at an (x,y) position, the program looks at the second buffer. It finds color #1, which is then associated back to drawing object #1. Ta-dah!
Advantages:
It’s a very easy answer to, “How do I know if this text was clicked on?”, in a way that resolves perfectly. Take your font, and then duplicate it. Call the duplicate the “mask font.” In the mask font, fill in any holes (such as the center of the letter “a”,) and feather the outline out a little bit. When you render text, render to the display with the display version, and render to the second buffer with the masked font. Bam! It’s perfect detection, however you like it, and requires absolutely zero advanced curve mathematics.
aka HiveEntities
I’d like a double-approach towards two things:
Both are highly misunderstood. These misunderstandings need to be clarified in the post-modern era.
Group Entities tend to be demonized for “group think.”
However, every group has (must have!) boundaries, assumptions built into it, and so on. So shouting “Group think!” or “Fascist!” or “Censorship!” or whatever – is basically moot.
Second up is reason. Reason is not the linear beast people make it out to be: It is creative, multi-fasceted, both error prone and error resistant, and so on. Point-blank rejection & closed-mindedness are absolutely features of reasoning (see: SelectivelyOpenMinded.) Post-modernists know how to disassemble pretty much any line of reasoning, what we need to learn to do is how to piece it back together, warts and all, into full identities.
And so the subjects are deeply related.
If we’re trying to participate in a group, and it’s rejecting us, we need to realize that the process isn’t entirely linear and “rational,” that we can’t just “prove” our way into the group, and force it to accept our rationality (see: ImposeRationality?.)
And just shouting “Group-Think!” at the people doesn’t really say anything. Because it’s all just think. Think is full of tension and omission and error and virtue the world over, whether in an individual or a group. We can all quickly think of both groups and individuals that we strongly disagree with (“so fascist and unthinking!”), and both groups and individuals that we strongly agree with (“so free and open minded!”)
Everyone will come to understand that the structure of thought works this way. We will then develop a cosmopolitan ethic of thought.
Chris Rock. Searching for the YouTube? video.
See Also: SexAndSpiritInMen
Men’s successionists, women’s successionists, …
Here’s one article:
It’s by a mom who thinks women need to be free of criticism.
The EqualityWashing in the article is false, and it is not fair:
We know that this does not apply “to men as well,” because criticizing men for the last few decades has been enormously effective.
Here is an article that is actually Feminist:
For decades, men have:
1. Men have heard women’s criticism.
2. Men have seen women’s suffering.
3. Men have understood women’s crticism.
4. Men have felt shame for sinning.
5. Men have apologized for sinning.
6. Men have changed, to sin no more.
Men do this as a class (as statements from group bodies,) and men do this as individuals representing their class (“yes, men are like this,”) and men do this as individuals (“yes, I am like this, and I am working on changing.”)
To be sure, the process is still incomplete.
Now, Feminists, as a class, and as individuals representing their class, need to hear men’s criticism, see the suffering they are causing, understand it (study it,) feel shame for it, apologize for it, and change with us.
Feminists who do not do this, are betraying Feminism. One author called them “PheminIsts,” to designate phony feminism.
Continue on, to PheministsDeflectCriticism.
A “pheminist” is a Phony Feminist.
A pheminists does not act in accord, with the intention to seek equality between men and women.
A pheminist wants men to change, but will hear nothing critical of women.
But FeministsMustAcceptCriticism.
There are many ways PheminIsts deflect criticism.
Most of it has to do with asymmetric behavior, support, defence, etc.,.
Here are some of them.
If women are serious about Feminism, then FeministsMustAcceptCriticism. They must stop exercising these crude tactics, they must let go of these privileges.
In as much as women use these tactics, they reinforce: “Women are a separate class of being. They cannot be criticized, they must be served.”
If this is true, (and I do not believe that it is,) then Feminism is false. And if men believe that feminism is false, then they will seek a RetreatToThePast.
I do not want a RetreatToThePast.
see also: InteractingWithFeminists
YouTube: Where I stand: feminism and the men's movement.
see also: TranscendGender
A spiritual aim for every individual is to experience the lives of others within him or her self. This is in the phrase, “To walk inside someone elses shoes.” This study extends across race, class, gender, personality, age, and so on.
A person who does this references ideas from many different perspectives.
There is no “done” point here.
Part of this happening, is that we live past gender stereotypes. The man is stereotypically rational, the woman stereotypically emotional. But if we live past the stereotypes, if we strive to see things through others’ eyes, then we live differently.
This is “transcending gender.”
This is a work in progress; It is rare that I interact with Feminists. If you have more clarity on this subject, or ideas, feel free to let me know (ContactInfo.)
My idea here is that “Feminists” are not all at the same place.
If the Feminist in question can TranscendGender, then have a fair discussion. Listen to her experiences, share your own, and so on.
Feminists who are like this:
Such a Feminist is a treasure, not just to her cause, but to humanity as a whole.
But, not all Feminists are there; If not, what then?
You have someone who:
Here is the strategy I am putting together & testing for now:
The theory is that you still need to get through to her, but there are thoughts that she is not prepared to internalize. In her eyes, women can do no wrong, men hate women, “this is war,” and so on.
In all cases, hold genuine respect for your partner.
This review of Ceacefire is one I resonate strongly with:
The reason we can’t “enlighten” past the gender war is because there are very serious wrongs (that continue to be commit,) and women aren’t just going to “stop nicely,” upon request. It’s going to take a few decades to reset the laws (both written and unwritten: cultural) that presently work so strongly against men.
I believe that there’s a positive end to this (TheStoryOfGenders,) but it’s not just going to be resolved instantly in a puff of mutual enlightenment.
Nope; Men are going to have to form their collective body, just like women did, and men are going to have to struggle to get their rights acknowledged in the legal system and cultural framework.
If “just playing nice” would work, there would have been no need for Feminism. But there was a need for Feminism.
There’s no easy out here. If you need some time out to have your life, fine. But the situation is a reality we can’t just wish away.
The Spiritual is Social.
When people agree to spiritualize a place, and to hold it sacred, as a place for worshipping higher forms, then that is a social thing. If one person holds it sacred but others do not, then “it doesn’t work.” It has to be held sacred by sufficient people to keep it defended from sacrligious behaviors in that space, as required by the nature of the sacred form in that space.
Compare: If you want to keep the living room clean (a light form of sacred,) then people have to not be dumping stuff into the space.