The Male Feminist Speaks

Most of my good friends are women.

Strike that. Let me say it a bit differently.

All of my friends, with a single exception, are women. There is a very good, very prosaic and basic reason for this. Men are dopes. That's the reason.

Not every individual man is a dope, per se, I admit. But Men, in terms of an aggregate whole, a stereotype and a demographic, a section of the pie-chart of humanity, are. They are self-centered, mildly deluded, insensitive, trivial, oafish, unhealthy, muscle-headed, pointlessly vain, and (this is the key) deliberately superficial little humans. They have very little, if anything at all, to offer the world in general, not to mention any self-respecting woman.

Of course, this is an opinion based on admittedly limited experience (read the first sentence of this blog again).

My female friends, however, tend to agree with me (and not nearly as shrilly as you might think). The thing is, they want to believe otherwise. They want for men to be better than all the evidence seems to suggest they are. They, being for the most part single and hetero, have a vested interest in it. And it is this fact - the fact of these beautiful, smart, glorious women and their continued, valiant but increasingly hopeless search for one decent, manly example - that proves to me the wasteland that modern masculinity has apparently become.

So what is the problem with men today? I'll answer that in a moment.

It may surprise you, dear anonymous reader, to know that while I consider myself a male feminist, I also consider myself (only slightly cheekily) the defender of male liberation. Let me 'splain.

For years, all through the forties and fifties, culture (television, radio, advertising of all kinds) treated women as silly, frilly, bubble-headed but ultimately necessary accoutrements to the obviously superior male lifestyle. Without the men in their lives to guide them, to chide them, to occasionally sit on them and steer them through life, women would obviously just degenerate to giggling lathers of inane uselessness. This approach to the culture obviously resonated with something deep in the psyche of the country, because it was incredibly pervasive.

And then, in the mid-seventies, things began to swing the other way (so to speak). By the early nineties, gender attitudes in popular culture had not just rebounded, but had completely reversed. If you are a woman reading this, you will be most likely incredulous at the suggestion, but before you get ramped up about it, spend some time paying attention to the way men are portrayed in advertising. Men, according to Madison Avenue, are brainless, silly, lumbering dolts. Without the women in their lives to watch over them, to mold them, to prod them through life, men would degenerate into grunting, clumsy (and probably dangerous) cesspools of uselessness.

And this brings us back to the question: So what is the problem with men today? The problem with men (today and always) is that they are simply all too willing to live down to their expectations. Society says you're an idiot? Fine, says the man (who beneath that overconfident shell is usually a mess of insecurity) I'm an idiot. I'm an oaf. I'm a useless tub of bad, bad testosterone. I can't be better because the thing that makes me useless has nothing to do with my actions or my attitudes. It has to do with the fact that I was born with testicles and I pee through a penis. I can't be better because I can't not be a man, no matter how hard I try.

And frankly, a lot of men try pretty hard to not be men. It's sooooo pathetic.

Back in the day, when femininity was being denegrated in the popular media, women said "Whoa there bucko. You can't say that about us. You don't know who you're messing with, do you? Call us useless? Call us silly? We'll show you, you just watch." And we did watch, and they did show us, thankfully. But now that popular culture has caught up and, as usual, overcompensated, men just hang their collective heads heads and proclaim (a la Homer) "You're right! You're right! We're SO LAME!"

I wish I had a neat way to end this. I was actually intending this to be sorta funny, sorta thought-provoking, and to end on an up note. Now that I am here, I realize it ain't funny.

And I can't think of an up note to end on.

(sigh)