I am not an "Optimist"

This is in response to a post made on the Futurist blog

http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html

Several previous comments were made in his commentary, and this article is linked in them as well. My comments are in Purple Bold Italics

The Misandry Bubble

Why does it seem that American society is in decline, that fairness and decorum are receding, that socialism and tyranny are becoming malignant despite the majority of the public being averse to such philosophies, yet the true root cause seems elusive? What if everything from unsustainable health care and social security costs, to stagnant home prices and wage stagnation, to crumbling infrastructure and metastasizing socialism, to the utter decimation of major US cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, could all be traced to a common origin that is extremely pervasive yet is all but absent from the national dialog, indeed from the dialog of the entire Western world?

Socrates said: "Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders, and love chatter in places of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."

This is the oldest complaint in the world, it can be restated a million ways but it all comes down to “Hey buddy, you know there are problems… let me tell you how to solve em.” It’s a great hook, but makes the assumption that your readers will automatically agree with you as to not only the existence of the problems, but as to what those problems are. You finish off the paragraph with a hint that you have not only seen the root of the problem but how to fix it. You’ve used a variety of isolated facts, which may or may not actually be linked together, but all of which are quite real and possess potential emotional impact with your audience, to produce the impression that every one of these problems is simple to fix if we can only “get to the bottom of things”, ignoring every other possible factor involved but those you have determined to be the “root problem.” Then, you imply that there is a conspiracy to ignore the “root problem” you are going to share, leading a reader into the impression you are sharing a closely held secret, and are drawing them into your confidence.

Nothing wrong with any of this but it shows quite well that this is a propaganda piece, persuasional writing intended to define a viewpoint, defend it, and try to convince readers of its validity. By the choice of wording, problems, and politically loaded terms, it would appear that it is a conservative viewpoint. Again, not a problem, just a political bias that must be taken into account in the reading of the argument.

Today, on the first day of the new decade of '201x' years, I am going to tell you why that is. I am hereby triggering the national dialog on what the foremost challenge for the United States will be in this decade, which is the ultimate root cause of most of the other problems we appear to be struggling with. What you are about to read is the equivalent of someone in 1997 describing the expected forces governing the War on Terror from 2001-2009 in profound detail.

Here, you continue to sell the viewpoint you hold, insinuating that you are the first to ever talk about this topic (referring back to the conspiracy of silence in the first paragraph) and that as such a novel viewpoint, your words will become the definitive base view from which all following discussion will descend. You then proceed to attempt to dazzle us with your brilliance by selling yourself as a supreme prophet. Again, nothing wrong with that as this is a persuasive propaganda piece, and you are attempting to convince readers of the validity of your opinion.

This is a very long article, the longest ever written on The Futurist, and as it is a guide to the next decade of social, political, and sexual strife, is not meant to be read in one shot but rather digested slowly over an extended period, with all supporting links read as well. As the months and years of this decade progress, this article will seem all the more prophetic.

Further selling your audience on the idea that your predictions are infallible, insinuating that anyone who may disagree with you has simply failed to comprehend the wealth of supporting data you have gathered, and assuming the impossibility of any failure on your part to make your case.

Executive Summary : The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated. This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.

And now we come to the big reveal. The problem which you have defined as the root of all other problems. The thesis itself is simple. An artificial division of the population has occurred, polarizing the population into two groups. This division has been made arbitrarily, and has been enforced via legal, economic, and social penalties which favor one group over the other. This is unfair to both groups as it is only a small subset of each group which is responsible for the creation of this artificial division, but because of the division, all members of each group are treated as if they were a member of the smallest subset. This artificial division has created problems within the population, and will likely result in a backlash against the favored group, which will unfortunately not only target those in the smaller subgroup who are responsible for the artificial division, but those of the larger polarized population within which the subgroup exists.

However, note the vast difference between the neutral statement I've made of your thesis, and the one which you made, loaded with pejorative terminology, almost all of it directed at the side you oppose. You've immediately politicized the topic, framing it entirely in terms of gender, and furthermore have portrayed your side entirely as innocent victims. You do point out that this is unfair to all sides, but having already established and defended your side via denial of any culpability, and having already placed sole blame on the opposing side, dehumanizing them, you've already lost any claim to impartiality.

You have stated several facts, but mixed them up so thoroughly with your biased opinions, that the whole amounts to little more than an announcement that the rest of your post will be an attack against one group while simultaneously defending your biases.

I agree with your thesis, once it has been removed from the hate language in which you have embedded it. Current society does inflict grave injustice against men, within a limited set of social interactions, because it lumps every man into the mold of the worst. It does treat men as devils in certain venues, and women as angels. That is indeed a source of great injustice, and encourages abuse due to this inequality. The inequality will most likely lead to a lash-back effect in which those women who are not responsible for creating this injustice will suffer unfairly.

But you have utterly ignored the cause of the inequality in the first place, the multi-century domination of patriarchal society in which women were little more than better cared for slaves, forced to be subservient to men, to which the current inequality is already a lash-back  Nor have you acknowledged that this situation only applies to a subset of all social interactions. While the social interactions you will speak about later are common, and wide ranging, they do not cover all of the areas in which the opposite is true, and men are still treated more favorably than women.

Thus, by the end of your opening statements, you have made it clear that this post will be a persuasive propaganda piece from the viewpoint of a misogynist intent on blaming woman for the source of all problems, while denying any culpability by men in creating the situation. As such, it will only present one side of the argument.

The Cultural Thesis

The Masculinity Vacuum in Entertainment : Take a look at the collage of entertainers below, which will be relevant if you are older than 30. All of them were prominent in the 1980s, some spilling over on either side of that decade. They are all certainly very different from one another. But they have one thing in common - that there are far fewer comparable personas produced by Hollywood today.

Opinion, asserted as fact.

As diverse and imperfect as these characters were, they were all examples of masculinity. They represented different archetypes, from the father to the leader to the ladies man to the rugged outdoorsman to the protector. They were all more similar than dissimilar, as they all were role-models for young boys of the time, often the same young boys. Celebrities as disparate as Bill Cosby and Mr. T had majority overlap in their fan bases, as did characters as contrasting as Jean-Luc Picard and The Macho Man Randy Savage.

And here we begin your definition of masculinity, beginning by lumping a disparate and diverse group into a single label. Each of these people had individual appeal for diverse reasons, none of which was exclusively a masculine trait, though some of them did display behavior defined as “acceptable” from a man which would have been socially condemned in a woman due to patriarchal sex divisions. Your glorification of them as “male role models” as opposed to simply role models continues to show the bias towards genderism displayed in the opening.

At this point, you might be feeling a deep inner emptiness lamenting a bygone age, as the paucity of proudly, inspiringly masculine characters in modern entertainment becomes clear. Before the 1980s, there were different masculine characters, but today, they are conspicuously absent. Men are shown either as thuggish degenerates, or as effete androgynes. Sure, there were remakes of Star Trek and The A-Team, and series finales of Rocky and Indiana Jones. But where are the new characters? Why is the vacuum being filled solely with nostalgia?

This is also a matter of opinion, stated as fact, and combined with an emotional appeal to male solidarity. Again, note the polarizing language “thuggish degenerates” “effete androgynes”

Modern entertainment typically shows businessmen as villains, and husbands as bumbling dimwits that are always under the command of the all-powerful wife, who is never wrong. Oprah Winfrey's platform always grants a sympathetic portrayal to a wronged woman, but never to men who have suffered great injustices. Absurdly false feminist myths such as a belief that women are underpaid relative to men for the same output of work, or that adultery and domestic violence are actions committed exclusively by men, are embedded even within the dialog of sitcoms and legal dramas.

And here you again mix fact with opinion, insinuating that men are always innocent of wrong doing, but are picked on by man hating women. Nothing you stated is factually wrong, merely weighted by your language with nuances and insinuations that deny any other cause but that which you hint at, oppression of men by women. Both male and female “evil business exec” stereotypes exist, bumbling dimwit husbands have their foundation in bumbling dimwit wives such as Lucy, and adultery and domestic violence stereotypes have existed for far longer than our current era, and are a result primarily of gender stereotypes such as male sexuality being acceptable while women are expected to deny their sexuality, and men being afraid to admit to domestic abuse for fear of ridicule or being deemed “unmanly” All of these are facts, but exist for reasons other than those you insinuated. Your denial of the historically proven facts of lower wages for equal jobs and higher reporting of male domestic violence is intended to do nothing but justify your implied claims of male non culpability.

This trains women to disrespect men, wives to think poorly of their husbands, and girls to devalue the importance of their fathers, which leads to the normalization of single motherhood (obviously with taxpayer subsidies), despite the reality that most single mothers are not victims, but merely women who rode a carousel of men with reckless abandon. This, in turn, leads to fatherless young men growing up being told that natural male behavior is wrong, and feminization is normal. It also leads to women being deceived outright about the realities of the sexual market, where media attempts to normalize single motherhood and attempted 'cougarhood' are glorified, rather than portrayed as the undesirable conditions that they are.

Again, opinions and conclusions drawn specifically to illustrate your main thesis that men are oppressed by woman, while denying any culpability on men’s part. Are these possibly caused by male oppression? Yes, it is possible that male oppression is a factor. However, other factors also apply, such as the trend in American society to overprotect it’s young and it’s attempt to treat adolescents as if they are still children, denial of the sexual nature of teens, expectations of youth “picking up” socialization by osmosis rather than actively teaching socialization skills, the use of TV as a nanny instead of parental supervision, and a failure to educate young adults in the truths of sex, parenthood, and maintaining a relationship. However, you neglect to allow for any of these alternate causes, depending on your readers to assume your reasons are the sole reasons. Additionally your use of the slang pejorative “cougar” reveals a bias against age as well as women.

The Primal Nature of Men and Women : Genetic research has shown that before the modern era, 80% of women managed to reproduce, but only 40% of men did. The obvious conclusion from this is that a few top men had multiple wives, while the bottom 60% had no mating prospects at all. Women clearly did not mind sharing the top man with multiple other women, ultimately deciding that being one of four women sharing an 'alpha' was still more preferable than having the undivided attention of a 'beta'. Let us define the top 20% of men as measured by their attractiveness to women, as 'alpha' males while the middle 60% of men will be called 'beta' males. The bottom 20% are not meaningful in this context.

Research across gorillas, chimpanzees, and primitive human tribes shows that men are promiscuous and polygamous. This is no surprise to a modern reader, but the research further shows that women are not monogamous, as is popularly assumed, but hypergamous. In other words, a woman may be attracted to only one man at any given time, but as the status and fortune of various men fluctuates, a woman's attention may shift from a declining man to an ascendant man. There is significant turnover in the ranks of alpha males

As a result, women are the first to want into a monogamous relationship, and the first to want out. This is neither right nor wrong, merely natural. What is wrong, however, is the cultural and societal pressure to shame men into committing to marriage under the pretense that they are 'afraid of commitment', while there is no longer the corresponding traditional shame that was reserved for women who destroyed the marriage, despite the fact that 90% of divorces are initiated by women. Furthermore, when women destroy the commitment, there is great harm to children, and the woman demands present and future payments from the man she is abandoning. A man who refuses to marry is neither harming innocent minors nor expecting years of payments from the woman. This double standard has invisible but major costs to society.

To provide 'beta' men an incentive to produce far more economic output than needed just to support themselves while simultaneously controlling the hypergamy of women that would deprive children of interaction with their biological fathers, all major religions constructed an institution to force constructive conduct out of both genders while penalizing the natural primate tendencies of each. This institution was known as 'marriage'. Societies that enforced monogamous marriage made sure all beta men had wives, and thus unlocking productive output out of these men who in pre-modern times would have had no incentive to be productive. Women, in turn, received a provider, a protector, and higher social status than unmarried women, who often were trapped in poverty. When applied over an entire population of humans, this system was known as 'civilization'.

All societies that achieved great advances and lasted for multiple centuries followed this formula with very little deviation. Societies that deviated from this were quickly replaced. This 'contract' between the sexes was advantageous to beta men, women over the age of 35, and children, but greatly curbed the activities of alpha men and women under 35 (together, a much smaller group than the former one). Conversely, the pre-civilized norm of alpha men monopolizing 3 or more young women each, replacing aging ones with new ones, while the masses of beta men fight over a tiny supply of surplus/aging women, was chaotic and unstable, leaving beta men violent and unproductive, and aging mothers discarded by their alpha mates now vulnerable to poverty.

I left this entire section intact but broke your paragraph where I did to separate this from the quite separate section that follows.

So, here we have a significant summary of evolutionary biology which is fairly factual, though still interspersed with a few opinions unsubstantiated by research. On the whole though it is fairly accurate, even in the opinions you express about the societal history of marriage  I find your division of males into alphas and betas rather arbitrary, but again, not sufficiently in error to object to. This is a mostly accurate summary of history with only some minor distortions.

However, this is history, and many of the conditions which created these facts are no longer factors affecting modern society. We are no longer primitive tribes nor exist in a world in which such polarized gender roles are necessary for survival. Technological advancements have not only negated the purely biological advantages and disadvantages of the sexes, but discovered that there are no clear cut boundaries in our biology. Most humans are not rigidly divided into pure male or female, but cover a diverse range of mixed behaviors which are not exclusive to either gender. Enforced polarization of gender behaviors may have been the norm, but it is an artificial division which is no longer required in the modern age.

But you are quite correct that double standards are harmful to society as a whole. You simply seem oblivious to the double standards you support.

So what happens when the traditional controls of civilization are lifted from both men and women?

The Four Sirens : Four unrelated forces simultaneously combined to entirely distort the balance of civilization built on the biological realities of men and women. Others have presented versions of the Four Sirens concept in the past, but I am choosing a slightly different definition of the Four Sirens :

1) Easy contraception (condoms, pills, and abortions): In the past, extremely few women ever had more than one or two sexual partners in their lives, as being an unwed mother led to poverty and social ostracization. Contraception made it possible for female to conduct campaigns of hypergamy.

Far from being a problem, this is an advance that has allowed women to take control of their own bodies and decide on their own sexuality. It has freed them from being brood mares. The problem isn't contraception, it’s that no male equivalent has been created. Too many men refuse to use condoms, leaving the “child control” to women, and thus opening themselves up to women gaming them. Additionally, too many of the worst offenders treat women as nothing but objects to sate their lust, following male pattern promiscuity as if it were consequence free. By their belief that “contraception” is for women, not men, they cause this problem for themselves, leading to a large number of women pregnant because of improper use of, or lack of contraceptives. This in turn has lead to numerous women using conception as a means to “trap” the wandering male, or to secure a means of support. Again, this is a two sided problem of which only one side is presented. The solution is not penalizing women for “hypergamy” but to equalize the situation. A male contraceptive equivalent to birth control pills that would make it impossible for a woman to get pregnant without the willing co-operation and consent of the male would remove the inequality. This is a case of male laxity in use of available technology as it is anything else.

2) 'No fault' divorce, asset division, and alimony : In the past, a woman who wanted to leave her husband needed to prove misconduct on his part. Now, the law has changed to such a degree that a woman can leave her husband for no stated reason, yet is still entitled to payments from him for years to come. This enables women to transfer the costs of their behavior onto men and children.

Again, you are correct, but ignore the fact that these laws are a draconian over reaction to wide-spread male misbehavior. They exist to prevent men from simply walking out on responsibilities that they create via their failure to actively pursue contraception or by assuming that good sex = true love. This is in part a cultural maladaption brought about via overzealous feminine rights activists, and in part a failure to teach young people about sex, socialization, relationship maintenance, and parenting. This is a cultural failure, created by the insistence on ignoring sexual reality due to religious “morality” forbidding sex from being talked about, let alone taught about, which leaves us in a vacuum in which every member of our culture is simply expected to “pick up “ the knowledge via a combination of osmosis, and instinct. The refusal to address sex as a normal part of existence, and to allow it’s free expression without social condemnation leads to the utter cluelessness of both genders about sex and parenting which opens the system to the very gaming these laws were created to combat. You are correct that is an injustice biased far too heavily in the favor of women at present, but again fail to acknowledge the other side of the coin which has lead to this.

3) Female economic freedom : Despite 'feminists' claiming that this is the fruit of their hard work, inventions like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and oven were the primary drivers behind liberating women from household chores and freeing them up to enter the workforce. These inventions compressed the chores that took a full day into just an hour or less. There was never any male opposition to women entering the workforce, as more labor lowered labor costs while also creating new consumers. However, one of the main reasons that women married - financial support - was no longer a necessity.

Female entry into the workforce is generally a positive development for society, and I would be the first to praise this, if it were solely on the basis of merit (as old-school feminists had genuinely intended). Unfortunately, too much of this is now due to corrupt political lobbying to forcibly transfer resources from men to women.

Again, you present a biased, and in this instance utterly dishonest, case by stating that there has NEVER been prejudice against women in the workforce. This is an out and out lie, as documented historical evidence shows.

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male%E2%80%93female_income_disparity_in_the_United_States )

There was and has been massive resistance to women in the workforce, and while there is far less in our current time, it does still occur. While your statement “more labor lowered labor costs while also creating new consumers” is quite true, that is something that has never been a consideration. The entrenched gender roles you support are the source of the resistance to women working, and the fact that it has been a net benefit is something only grudgingly admitted to AFTER THE FACT.

At least you admit that the current result is not what was intended, but a result of overzealousness on the part of extremists. That there is much less prejudice against women in the workplace is a simple matter of social acclimation, leaving these laws as a legacy of past corrective action. They have indeed outlived the conditions that necessitated them, and should be repealed. It is also true that some groups profit highly from these laws and try to keep them in force not to combat a problem that no longer exists, but merely to profit. Thus you have once again uttered a partial truth, mixed with an out and out lie, merely to support your case that male dominance is preferable to equality.

4) Pro-female social engineering : Above and beyond the pro-woman divorce laws, further state interventions include the subsidization of single motherhood, laws that criminalize violence against women (but offer no protection to men who are the victims of violence by women), and 'sexual harassment' laws with definitions so nebulous that women have the power to accuse men of anything without the man having any rights of his own.

Agreed. However you have once again failed to note that these laws have been a response to male misbehavior. They are indeed injustices because they have been poorly executed, but they do not exist for no reason at all but to empower women, which you seem to intend to imply.

These four forces in tandem handed an unprecedented level of power to women. The technology gave them freedom to pursue careers and the freedom to be promiscuous. Feminist laws have done a remarkable job in shielding women from the consequences of their own actions. Women now have as close to a hypergamous utopia as has ever existed, where they can pursue alpha males while extracting subsidization from beta males. Despite all the new freedoms available to women, men were still expected to adhere to their traditional responsibilities.

Again, substantially correct. It is a sad overcorrection to a previous set of unjust conditions, but the solution is not a return to the condition which this is an overcorrection to. The double standard reflected by these conditions is new, but has come into existence entirely due to the older double standard. Correction is needed which eliminates both double standards and promotes true gender neutral equality.

Marriage 2.0 : From the West to the Middle East to Asia, marriage is considered a mandatory bedrock of any functioning society. If marriage is such a crucial ingredient of societal health, then the West is barreling ahead on a suicidal path.

It may be considered a bedrock to parochial society, but as it is defined, far too often it is a completely male rewarding system that treats woman as property. In a modern technological society of true equality, its prior definitions cannot be retained.

We earlier discussed why marriage was created, but equally important were the factors that sustained the institution and kept it true to its objectives. The reasons that marriage 'worked' not too long ago were :

1) People married at the age of 20, and usually died by the age of 50. People were virgins at marriage, and women spent their 20s tending to 3 or more children. The wife retained her beauty 15 years into the marriage, and the lack of processed junk food kept her slim even after that. This is an entirely different psychological foundation than the present urban feminist norm of a woman marrying at the age of 34 after having had 10 or more prior sexual relationships, who then promptly emerges from her trim chrysalis in an event that can best be described as a fatocalypse.

2) It was entirely normal for 10-20% of young men to die or be crippled on the battlefield, or in occupational accidents. Hence, there were always significantly more women than able-bodied men in the 20-40 age group, ensuring that not all women could marry. Widows were common and visible, and vulnerable to poverty and crime. For these reasons, women who were married to able-bodied men knew how fortunate they were relative to other women who had to resort to tedious jobs just to survive, and treated their marriage with corresponding respect.

3) Prior to the invention of contraception, female promiscuity carried the huge risk of pregnancy, and the resultant poverty and low social status. It was virtually impossible for any women to have more than 2-3 sexual partners in her lifetime without being a prostitute, itself an occupation of the lowest social status.

4) Divorce carried both social stigma and financial losses for a woman. Her prospects for remarriage were slim. Religious institutions, extended clans, and broader societal forces were pressures to keep a woman committed to her marriage, and the notion of leaving simply out of boredom was out of the question.

Today, however, all of these factors have been removed. This is partly the result of good forces (economic progress and technology invented by beta men), but partly due to artificial schemes that are extremely damaging to society.

For one thing, the wedding itself has gone from a solemn event attended only by close family and friends, to an extravaganza of conspicuous consumption for the enjoyment of women but financed by the hapless man. The wedding ring itself used to be a family heirloom passed down over generations, but now, the bride thumbs through a catalog that shows her rings that the man is expected to spend two months of his salary to buy. This presumption that somehow the woman is to be indulged for entering marriage is a complete reversal of centuries-old traditions grounded in biological realities (and evidence of how American men have become weak pushovers). In India, for example, it is normal even today for either the bride's father to pay for the wedding, or for the bride's family to give custody of all wedding jewelry to the groom's family. The reason for this was so that the groom's family effectively had a 'security bond' against irresponsible behavior on the part of the bride, such as her leaving the man at the (Indian equivalent of the) altar, or fleeing the marital home at the first sign of distress (also a common female psychological response). For those wondering why Indian culture has such restrictions on women and not men, restrictions on men were tried in some communities, and those communities quickly vanished and were forgotten. There is no avoiding the reality that marriage has to be made attractive to men for the surrounding civilization to survive. Abuse and blackmail of women certainly occurred in some instances, but on balance, these customs existed through centuries of observing the realities of human behavior. Indian civilization has survived for over 5000 years and every challenge imaginable through enforcement of these customs, and, until recently, the Christian world also had comparable mechanisms to steer individual behavior away from destructive manifestations.

Again, I separated your paragraph where I did to isolate two distinct and separate concepts.

Once again you present an acceptably accurate historical overview. This is indeed how things have been in the past… but you completely fail to present the huge abuses inflicted on women by this system.

And the rise of the “conspicuous consumption” wedding is due to an urge for “living like the rich” and the industrial era marketing ploys which equate money with love. Both men and women are bombarded with the marketing message that true love can only be proven by massive spending. It’s yet another symptom of the massively dysfunctional child rearing system and our over-reliance on TV as a babysitter, and not isolated solely to one gender or the other. However, this isn't really new either. The concept of the dowry is also a relic of woman’s existence as “lesser” then men, as it has at all times been a bribe intended to substitute money for love. Male children were valuable, female children had to be supported until you could pay someone to take them off your hands. This led to many cases where a woman would be sold to the man her family approved of, and whatever wealth she may have personally possessed would be given entirely to the male while leaving the woman utterly subservient to the man and dependent on his good graces to actually use her own money.

So basically, your summary glosses over the enormous cost to women in freedom, economic equality, and even basic human rights this system has forced on them for centuries, painting a false picture of domestic tranquility over injustices every bit as great as those you are denouncing, and then justifying the woman’s suffering through a combination of glorifying how men have “protected women” and the “economic benefits to civilization” of female servitude.

However, if the wedding has mutated into a carnival of bridezilla narcissism, the mechanics of divorce are far more disastrous. So why are 90% of divorces initiated by women (she files 70% of the time, and the other 20% of the time, she forces the man to file, due to abuse or adultery on the part of the woman)? Women have always been hypergamous, and most were married to beta men that they felt no attraction towards, so what has changed to cause an increase in divorce rates?

Divorce lawyers, like any other professional group, will seek conditions that are good for business. What makes attorneys different from, say, engineers or salespeople, is that a) they know precisely how to lobby for changes to the legal system, bypassing voters and the US constitution, that guarantees more revenue for them, and b) what benefits them is directly harmful to the fabric of society in general, and to children in particular. When they collude with rage-filled 'feminists' who would gladly send innocent men to concentration camps if they could, the outcome is catastrophic.

The concept of 'no fault' divorce by itself may not be unfair. The concepts of asset division and alimony may also be fair in the event of serious wrongdoing by the husband. However, the combination of no-fault divorce plus asset division/alimony is incredibly unfair and prone to abuse. The notion that she can choose to leave the marriage, yet he is nonetheless required to pay her for years after that even if he did not want to destroy the union, is an injustice that should not occur in any advanced democracy. Indeed, the man has to pay even if the woman has an extramarital affair, possibly even being ordered to pay her psychiatric fees. Bogus claims by 'feminists' that women suffer under divorce are designed to obscure the fact that she is the one who filed for divorce. Defenders of alimony insist that a woman seeking a divorce should not see a drop in living standards, but it is somehow acceptable for the husband to see a drop even if he did not want a divorce. I would go further and declare that any belief that women deserve alimony on a no-fault basis in this day age is utterly contradictory to the belief that women are equals of men. How can women both deserve alimony while also claiming equality? In rare cases, high-earning women have had to pay alimony to ex-husbands, but that is only 4% of the time, vs. the man paying 96% of the time.

Agreed. As stated previously, the system is unjust and open to abuse. This is equally the fault of over zealous feministas and lawyers seeking a huge profit. It is a double standard that has arisen in response to the previous imbalance AGAINST women, pushed too far in the opposite extreme in the name of profit. And due to the ease with which this system can be abused, it is nearly impossible to find cases where abuse has NOT occurred. Even those women who would not intentionally abuse the system tend to be led down a primrose path by lawyers seeking to maximize profits. It does indeed make hypocrisy of true equality.

But it gets worse; much worse, in fact.

Even if the woman chooses to leave on account of 'boredom', she is still given default custody of the children, which exposes the total hypocrisy of feminist claims that men and women should be treated equally. Furthermore, the man is required to pay 'child support' which is assessed at levels much higher than the direct costs of child care, with the woman facing no burden to prove the funds were spent on the child, and cannot be specified by any pre-nuptial agreement. The rationale is that 'the child should not see a drop in living standards due to divorce', but since the mother has custody of the child, this is a stealthy way in which feminists have ensured financial maintenence of the mother as well. So the man loses his children and most of his income even if he did not want divorce. But even that is not the worst-case scenario.

The Bradley Amendment, devised by Senator Bill Bradley in 1986, ruthlessly pursues men for the already high 'child support' percentages, and seizes their passports and imprisons them without due process for falling behind in payments, even if on account of job loss during a recession. Under a bogus 'deadbeat dads' media campaign, feminists were able to obscure the fact that women were the ones ending their marriages and with them the benefit that children receive from a two-parent upbringing, and demanding, under penalty of imprisonment, unusually high maintenence, much of which does not even go to the child, from a dutiful ex-husband who did not want a divorce. So the legal process uses children as pawns through which to extract an expanded alimony stream for the mother. The phony tactic of insisting that 'it is for the children' is used to shut down all questions about the basic humanity of the system, while avoiding scrutiny of the fact that the parent who is choosing divorce is clearly placing the long-term well-being of the children at a very low priority.

So as it stands today, there are large numbers of middle-class men who were upstanding citizens, who were subjected to divorce against their will, had their children taken from them, pay alimony masked as child support that is so high that many of them have to live out of their cars or with their relatives, and after job loss from economic conditions, are imprisoned simply for running out of money. If 10-30% of American men are under conditions where 70% or more of their income is taken from them under threat of prison, these men have no incentive to start new businesses or invent new technologies or processes. Having 10-30% of men disincentivized this way cannot be good for the economy, and is definitely a contributor to current economic malaise, not to mention a 21st-century version of slavery. Sometimes, the children are not even biologically his.

This one-page site has more links about the brutal tyranny that a man can be subjected to once he enters the legal contract of marriage, and even more so after he has children. What was once the bedrock of society, and a solemn tradition that benefited both men and women equally, has quietly mutated under the evil tinkering of feminists, divorce lawyers, and leftists, into a shockingly unequal arrangement, where the man is officially a second-class citizen who is subjected to a myriad of sadistic risks. As a result, the word 'marriage' should not even be used, given the totality of changes that have made the arrangement all but unrecognizable compared to its intended ideals. Suicide rates of men undergoing divorce run as high as 20%, and all of us know a man who either committed suicide, or admits seriously considering it during the dehumanization he faced even though he wanted to preserve the union. Needless to say, this is a violation of the US Constitution on many levels, and is incompatible with the values of any supposedly advanced democracy that prides itself on freedom and liberty. There is effectively a tyrannical leftist shadow state operating within US borders but entirely outside the US constitution, which can subject a man to horrors more worthy of North Korea than the US, even if he did not want out of the marriage, did not want to be separated from his children, and did not want to lose job. Any unsuspecting man can be sucked into this shadow state.

Again, mostly true, although you've sprinkled many hate terms throughout. I can agree fully with the injustice, and the lack of incentive it creates for many men. I can also agree that it is unconstitutional, a form of debt enslavement, dehumanizing, and makes criminals of men who’s only crime was falling in love with the wrong person. It is immensely harmful and hurtful to nearly every man who falls afoul of this system which mainly lines the pockets of the legal system and rewards those who game the system.

It’s a large part of the entire legal profiteering racket, which has turned the American court system into a mockery of justice.

Marriage is no longer a gateway to female 'companionship', as we shall discuss later. For this reason, as a Futurist, I cannot recommend 'marriage', as the grotesque parody that it has become today, to any young man living in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia. There are just too many things outside of his control that can catastrophically ruin his finances, emotions, and quality of life. At a minimum, he should conduct research by speaking to a few divorced men about the laws and mistreatment they were subjected to, and attend a few divorce court hearings at the local courthouse. After gaining this information, if he still wants to take the risk, he should only marry if he can meet the following three conditions, none of which can substitute either of the other two :

I can even agree with you that marriage as it is currently seen by the courts is a parody. However that illustrates the disparity of the perception of marriage as taught and seen socially, and its legal aspects, which have become just another profit making scheme for the legal profession.

1) The woman earns the same as, or more than, he does.

Good suggestion. Impractical in reality.

2) He has a properly done pre-nuptial arrangement with lawyers on each side (even though a pre-nup will not affect the worst aspect of divorce law - 'child support' as a cloak for stealth alimony and possible imprisonment).

Also a good idea, unfortunately it is in all likelihood one which will fail in most cases. The side who can afford to pay the lawyers will usually win.

3) He is deeply competent in the Venusian Arts, and can manage his relationship with his wife effortlessly. More on this later.

And here, at first I simply raised an eyebrow, until I learned what the “Venusian Art’s” are. But as you, I’ll deal with this later.

There are still substantial risks, but at least they are somewhat reduced under these conditions. If marriage is a very important goal for a young man, he should seriously consider expatriation to a developing country, where he ironically may have a higher living standard than in the US after adjusting for divorce risk.

Everyone from women to sadistic social conservatives to a young man's own parents will pressure and shame him into marriage, and condemn the request for a pre-nup, without having any interest in even learning about the horrendously unequal and carefully concealed laws he would be subjected to in the event that his wife divorces him through no reasons he can discern.

Separated to address different points

I have to agree with you that there is enormous pressure to marry, but very few people doing the pressuring are aware of the risks. Young people have little concept of the realities of the legal system, but are raised on a succession of fairy tales of “perfect unions” and “love at first sight” with no education at all in the realities of maintaining a relationship. This is a case where our cultural refusal to educate our young in socialization skills creates a massively unrealistic view of marriage, and more or less sets up these inexperienced young adults to fail in almost every way possible. We expect our children to learn about sex in the locker rooms, and from trial and error. By doing so, we send them off into the world woefully unprepared for the traps and pitfalls that await them.

One of the worst ways we do this is by teaching them to confuse sex with love, and to confuse the socio/religious concept of marriage with its legal version. The socio/religious ideal is completely at odds with the legal version, and because of this, many people enter into marriage based on their socio/religious conceptions, and their mistaking good sex for true love, so when the first blush wears off, and the reality that they got together with someone fundamentally incompatible with them, they then run afoul of the legal definitions of marriage.

It is by this unwillingness to see the harm caused by this deliberate obfuscation of biological vs. emotional drives, and socio/religious vs. legal ideals that we create the conditions which have made this injustice so very profitable for the legal profession, and only after the courts get their cut, for the woman.

It does need to be corrected. However a return to the double standards of a male dominated society will not solve the problems, simply replace them with the old ones that the current laws were intended to correct.

But some men are figuring this out, and are avoiding marriage. By many accounts, 25% of men have decided to avoid marriage. So what happens to a society that makes it unattractive for even 25% of men to marry?

The institution of monogamous marriage requires at least 80% male participation in order to be viable. When male participation drops below 80%, all women are in serious trouble, since there are now 100 women competing for every 80 men, compounded with the reality that women age out of the sexual market much quicker than men. In the past, the steady hand of a young woman's mother and grandmother knew that her beauty was temporary, and that the most seductive man was not the best husband, and they made sure that the girl was married off to a boy with long-term durability. Now that this guidance has been removed from the lives of young women, thanks to 'feminism', these women are proving to be poor pilots of their mating lives who pursue alpha males until the age of 34-36 when her desirability drops precipitously and not even beta males she used to reject are interested in her. This stunning drop in her desirability to men is known as the Wile E. Coyote moment, and women of yesteryear had many safety nets that protected them from this fate. The 'feminist' media's attempt to normalize 'cougarhood' is evidence of gasping desperation, which will never become mainstream due to sheer biological realities.

And this is little more than justification of male domination, supporting the view that a woman is incapable of deciding her own mind, should be subjugated to the control of others, and becomes worthless once she has aged. Again, you make a fairly accurate statement about the past, but ignore the realities of the present. I've already covered the fact that all young people of today are pushed out into the world unprepared to cope with reality. Additionally, your discounting of elder female sexuality fails to take into account the changing demographic distribution between young and old. There are far more elderly to youth in our current day than have ever existed in history. I suspect that has far more to do with the media “normalizing” sexually active older humans than the “feminists”.

The Venusian Arts : The Four Sirens and the legal changes feminists have instituted to obstruct beta men have created a climate where men have invented techniques and strategies to adapt to the more challenging marketplace, only to exceed their aspirations. This is a disruptive technology in its own right. All of us know a man who is neither handsome nor wealthy, but seems to have amazing success with women. He seems to have natural instincts regarding women that to the layperson may be indistinguishable from magic. So how does he do it?

Mars is the God of War, while Venus is the Goddess of Love. Study of combat is thus known as the Martial Arts, while the study of attraction, seduction, and romance is known as the Venusian Arts, as coined by Mystery, a pioneer in the field. The subject is too vast for any description over here to do it full justice, but in a nutshell, the Internet age enabled communities of men to share the various bits of knowledge they had field tested and refined (e.g. one man being an expert at meeting women during the daytime, another being an expert at step-by-step sexual escalation, yet another being a master of creating lasting love, etc.). The collective knowledge grew and evolved, and an entire industry to teach the various schools of 'Game' emerged. Men who comprehended the concepts (a minority) and those who could undertake the total reconstitution of their personalities and avalanche of rejections as part of the learning curve (a still smaller minority) stood to reap tremendous benefits from becoming more attractive than the vast majority of men. While the 'pick-up artist' (PUA) implementation is the most media-covered, the principles are equally valuable for men in monogamous long-term relationships (LTRs).

Surprise. I’m not going to condemn you out of hand for using the “Venusian Arts” because I would be a complete hypocrite to do so, especially after pointing out how socialization skills are a badly needed course of education for our young. While there are many parts of what my (admittedly scant) research so far has found that I find annoying, I cannot in truth claim it is any different than what you can find in Cosmo. I agree with you that parts of it appear to be quite valuable for maintaining a long term relationship.

However, what I did find annoying is the impression I got from most of the websites I looked at that women can be reduced down to a series of rote responses. People are far more complex than this, and at first glance it seems to be a system intended to simply filter out any woman who does not respond to a set of conditioned responses. As such it appears to minimize any actual real interaction and replace it with a series of pre-programmed routines.

But, I freely admit I will have to do far more research into it than I have to actually be able to make a decision as to the accuracy of that impression. So I will simply say I do not understand enough of the “art” to determine if you might have a valid point or not. As it is presented on the “venusian art” website, it is highly objectionable, and marketed as little more than a sure fire way to trick women into having sex with men who see them as little more than pieces in a game.

Among the most valuable learnings from the body of knowledge is the contrarian revelation that what women say a man should do is often quite the antithesis of what would actually bring him success. For example, being a needy, supplicative, eager-to-please man is precisely the opposite behavior that a man should employ, where being dominant, teasing, amused, yet assertive is the optimal persona. An equally valuable lesson is to realize when not to take a woman's words at face value. Many statements from her are 'tests' to see if the man can remain congruent in his 'alpha' personality, where the woman is actually hoping the man does not eagerly comply to her wishes. Similarly, the 'feminist' Pavlovian reaction to call any questioner a 'misogynist' should also not be taken as though a rational adult assigned the label after fair consideration. Such shaming language is only meant to deflect scrutiny from the woman uttering it, and should be given no more importance than a 10-year-old throwing a tantrum to avoid responsibility or accountability. Far too many men actually take these slurs seriously, to the detriment of male rights and dignity.

I will however take issue with your dismissal of any woman who calls you a misogynist as a “Pavlovian response” that should simply be dismissed out of hand. The rest of the deconstruction of this post should make it quite obvious that my use is simple truth, and a far cry from a conditioned response. You've used this excuse to dismiss any criticism of your opinions, and by doing so, you've created a Pavlovian response in yourself which has enabled you to trick yourself into believing you are something your words show you are not.

Success in internalizing the core fundamentals of the Venusian Arts requires an outside-the-box thinker solidly in the very top of Maslow's Hierarchy, and in my experience, 80% of men and 99.9% of women are simply incapable of comprehending why the skills of the Venusian Arts are valuable and effective. Many women, and even a few pathetic men, condemn the Venusian Arts, without even gaining a minimal comprehension for what it truly is, and how it benefits both men and women. Most of what they think they know about the Venusian Arts involves strawmen, a lack of basic research, and their sheer insecurity.

For anyone seeking advice on the Venusian Arts, there is one rule you must never break. I believe it is of paramount importance that the knowledge be used ethically, and with the objective of creating mutually satisfying relationships with women. It is not moral to mistreat women, even if they have done the same to countless men. We, as men, have to take the high road even if women are not, and this is my firm belief. Nice guys can finish first if they have Game.

And this is ONE reason I am even bothering to spend the time to deconstruct your post, GK. Because of this one paragraph, I can believe you are simply unaware of the vitriolic nature of your arguments, and how much hatred you are actually showing towards all women based on the behavior of a few. You are as sincere in believing you are offering helpful advice as any Malthusian Greenpeacer advocating a return to an agrarian society, convinced that it’s the only way to save the earth and create a sustainable environment, blissfully unaware that they are advocating the genocide of 80% of the human race from starvation.

People are people, GK. You complain feminists are unfair for painting all men with the same brush, and don’t appear to realize you’re doing exactly the same thing back. Neither gender is superior. And old ways of doing things may have worked in the old days, genetic traits may influence our modern behavior, but we are no longer primitives living hand to mouth on the savanna  Male dominance may have helped us survive as a species, but it did so at enormous cost to half of the human race. Female dominance is no solution either, as you have accurately pointed out. Only a true gender neutral solution has a hope of working, and clinging to the past, when Men were Men and Women were Women is a recipe doomed to failure. We've been there and done that. It doesn't work in the modern era anymore. A new solution must be found.

'Feminism' as Unrestrained Misandry and Projection : The golden rule of human interactions is to judge a person, or a group, by their actions rather than their words. Feminists once had noble goals of securing voting rights, achieving educational parity, and opening employment channels for women. But once these goals were met and even exceeded, the activists did not want to lose relevance. Now, they tirelessly and ruthlessly lobby for changes in legislation that is blatantly discriminatory against men (not to mention unconstitutional and downright cruel). Not satisfied with that, they continue to lobby for social programs designed to devalue the roles of husbands and fathers, replacing them with taxpayer-funded handouts.

Sadly all too true, but it is not ALL women who are doing this, GK. Just the radical extremists, who have gotten a taste of power and gone mad, seeking to invert the power structure rather than achieve real equity. It’s a trait of human nature to seek revenge on those who enslaved us by making them the slaves. It has gotten far out of hand, and totally out of the control of the majority of women.

Despite my acute ability to detect and deconstruct leftists, I was unprepared for the level of unhinged lunacy that 'feminism' had sunk to, which revealed itself in late 2008 when Sarah Palin emerged onto the national scene. Here was a woman who actually achieved all the aspirations that feminists claim to value: a highly successful career as a Governor and VP candidate, a large number of children, a loving marriage to a supportive yet ruggedly masculine husband, and an attractive appearance despite being in her 40s. If anything, she should be hailed as a superb role model of a woman from modest origins who has managed to 'have it all'. Yet, the feminist reaction to her was quite the opposite, as she attracted far more hate from lefto-feminists than the woman-stoning Taliban, or child-raping Roman Polanski ever could. What is a parody so outlandish that even The Onion may not write it is actually true. In one shot, 'feminism' was revealed as being not just different from its stated goals, but perhaps the most extreme pillar of leftism in existence today. This is because it is far less challenged than any other subsect of leftism.

Actually I view Sarah Palin as a danger not because I am a supporter of feminine rights, but because she’s a wackjob rightwing lunatic, who if she had gotten into power would have likely declared herself Queen of America. That might have a little more to do with “Palin Hatred” than whether she is a model feminists wish to imitate. She’s done nothing since to make me change my mind, and much to confirm it. Simply put, had McCain had anyone else but her as a VP, he might have actually won the election. She is the main reason that the Republican Party is thankfully no longer in complete control of the US. The Democrats aren't much better. Hopefully 2010 will see some actual new blood in Congress instead of the entrenched and corrupt group that’s in there now. However, I digress. (and as I edit this in 2012, following Obama's re-election, so sadly disappointed by the utter failure of  real change to have occurred due to Republican obstructionism)

As it is profitable to claim victimhood in this age, a good indicator is whether any condemnation by the supposedly oppressed of their oppressor could be similarly uttered if the positions were reversed. We know that what Rev. Jeremiah Wright said about whites could not be said by a white pastor about blacks, and we see even more of a double standard regarding what women and men can say about each other in America today. This reveals one of the darkest depths of the human mind - when a group is utterly convinced that they are the 'victims' of another group, they can rationalize any level of evil against their perceived oppressors.

Yup. Just like you are doing in this entire post by painting men out to be utterly innocent victims with no culpability in having created the situation to which this radical inversion of power is an over-reaction to.

Go to any major 'feminist' website, such as feministing.com or Jezebel.com, and ask polite questions about the fairness of divorce laws, or the injustice of innocent men being jailed on false accusations of rape without due process. You will quickly be called a 'misogynist' and banned from commenting. The same is not true for any major men's site, where even heated arguments and blatant misandry are tolerated in the spirit of free speech and adult respect. When is the last time a doctrinaire 'feminist' actually had the courage to debate someone like Tammy Bruce, Laura Ingraham, or Michelle Malkin on television?

Ever-tightening groupthink that enforces a narrative of victimhood ensures that projection becomes the normal mode of misandrist thought. The word 'misogynist' has expanded to such an extreme that it is the Pavlovian response to anything a 'feminist' feels bad about, but cannot articulate in an adult-like manner. This reveals the projected gender bigotry of the 'feminist' in question, which in her case is misandry. For example, an older man dating women 10 years younger than him is also referred to as a 'misogynist' by the older bitterati. Not an ageist, mind you, but a misogynist. A man who refuses to find obese women attractive is also a 'misogynist', as are gay men who do not spend money on women.

Sadly also true in too many cases. Very few women are expected to actually “think” for ourselves, and many of us are actively encouraged not to during our upbringing. It’s yet another cultural failure caused by the older double standard of male supremacy in which women were only expected to do whatever the men wanted, not think or act independently.

Contrary to their endless charges of 'misogyny' (a word that many 'feminists' still manage to misspell), in reality, most men instinctively treat women with chivalry and enshrine them on exalted pedestals.

And as I will tell anyone who uses this phrase, Putting me on a pedestal is still “putting me in my place.” And an object of worship is still an object. How about letting me a human being and walk next to you for a change?

Chivalry is nice, but it is based on the notion of women as lesser beings, in need of “protection” and “guarding” from the evils of the world… like free thought, free expression, free will…

Despite this reality, the unchecked accusations on the part of misandrists is thus creating ill will towards women among men who initially harbored no such feelings. The male resentment labeled as 'misogyny' thus becomes a reaction to many years of unopposed misandry heaped on him first. Kick a friendly dog enough times, and you get a nasty dog.

Also sadly true… as you are proving with this post, except you've hidden away that fact from yourself.

There are laws such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), that blatantly declares that violence against women is far worse than violence against men. VAWA is very different from ordinary assault laws, because under VAWA, a man can be removed from his home at gunpoint if the woman makes a single phonecall. No due process is permitted, and the man's Constitutional rights are jettisoned. At the same time, nearly half of all domestic violence is by the woman against the man. Tiger Woods' wife beat him with a blunt weapon and scratched his face, only to be applauded by 'feminists' in a 'you go girl' manner by a large section of 'feminists'.

She should have been jailed for assault. The approval she received appalled me.

Rape legislation has also bypassed the US Constitution, leaving a man guilty until he proves himself innocent, while the accusing woman faces no penalty for falsely sending a man to prison for 15 years, where he himself will get raped. The Duke Lacrosse case was a prominent example of such abuse, but hundreds of others occur in America each year. The laws have been changed so that a victim has 1 month to 'decide' if she has been raped, and such flexibility predictably leads to instances of a woman reporting rape just so that she does not have to tell her boyfriend that she cheated on him. 40% of all rape accusations are false, but 'feminists' would rather jail scores of innocent men than let one guilty man get away, which is the exact opposite of what US Constitutional jurisprudence requires.

But, unimaginably, it gets even worse. Polls of men have shown that there is one thing men fear even more than being raped themselves, and that is being cuckolded. Men see cuckolding as the ultimate violation and betrayal, yet there is an entire movement among 'feminists' to enshrine a woman's right to commit adultery and use the resources of her husband to dupe him into thinking the child is his. These misandrists even want to outlaw the right of a man to test the paternity of a child.

Another bit of bullshit I can’t stand from the feministas. A child has a right to know the true identity of their parents.

So, to review, if a woman has second thoughts about a tryst a few days later, she can, without penalty, ruin a man financially and send him to prison for 15 years. 'Feminists' consider this acceptable. At the same time, even though men consider being cuckolded a worse fate than being raped, 'feminists' want to make this easier for a woman to do, by preventing paternity testing. They already have rigged laws so that the man, upon 'no fault' divorce, has to pay alimony, to a woman who cuckolded him.

And once again, you continually paint all women with the same brush. I am as outraged as you at the actions of the radical extremists, but not all “feminists” are feministas. There is a huge difference between wanting equality like I do, and seeking power to get “revenge” for all the injustices inflicted on women through out time.

This is pure evil, ranking right up there with the evil of Nazi Germany, Al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein. Modern misandry masking itself as 'feminism' is, without equal, the most hypocritical ideology in the world today. But every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

And here you uttered a profound truth I wish you would listen to yourself. “Misandry MASKING itself as “feminism”. I do not deny that men hating women exist, and that far too many of the most radical hate filled misandrists have gained far too much power. But calling any feminist a man hater is as untrue as the feministas calling any man a misogynist. As I said before, GK, you are a pretty bright guy. I've read your blogs and found a lot of very thoughtful, well reasoned, and well spoken thoughts. Your analysis of the decline of war, and how Afghanistan is not only the smallest war in decades, but only so noticeable due to the LACK of war elsewhere was very insightful. Which is why reading this post was such a disappointment. You've fallen into the same trap you’re condemning, and overgeneralizing all women based on the actions of the worst of us, while buying into the victim mindset of male oppression, spouting off rhetoric that I debated to death 20 years ago.

The greatest real misogyny, of course, has been unwittingly done by the 'feminists' themselves. By encouraging false rape claims, they devalue the credibility of all claims, and genuine victims will suffer. 'Feminists' devalued the traditional areas of female expertise (raising the next generation of citizens), while attaching value only to areas of male expertise (the boardroom, the military, sexual promiscuity) and told women to go duplicate male results. Telling women that emulating their mothers and grandmothers is less valuable than mimicking men sounds quite misogynistic to me, and unsurprisingly, despite all these 'freedoms', women are more unhappy than ever. This hurts average women who did not swear an oath of fealty to the 'feminist' life of rage.

Quite true. But demanding we all must conform to the old stereotypes and all be submissive little women solves what exactly? The feministas tried to force us into roles too. How about simply letting us chose our own paths, by ourselves, as INDIVIDUALS, instead of trying to force us to conform to a stereotype? Not every woman is cut out to be a boardroom exec, neither is every man. Some women like cooking (I do) but not every woman wants to be chained in a kitchen. We’re unhappy because everyone is constantly telling us how we must act, what behavior is acceptable, what is unacceptable, who we can fuck, who we can’t, even whether or not we can have control over our own bodies. We’re HUMANS goddamn it, why can’t you simply accept that? Why insist, exactly like those you claim to oppose, that women MUST be this or that, instead of simply letting us be ourselves?

So how did the state of affairs manage to get so bad? Surely 'feminists' are not so powerful?

Social Conservatives, White Knights, and Girlie-Men : It would be inaccurate to deduce that misandrists were capable of creating this state of affairs on their own, despite their vigor and skill in sidestepping both the US Constitution and voter scrutiny. Equally culpable are men who ignorantly believe that acting as obsequious yes-men to 'feminists' by turning against other men in the hope that their posturing will earn them residual scraps of female affection.

Chivalry has existed in most human cultures for many centuries, and is seen in literature from all major civilizations. Chivalry greatly increased a man's prospects of marriage, but the reasons for this have been forgotten. Prior to the modern era, securing a young woman's hand in marriage usually involved going through her parents. The approval of the girl's father was a non-negotiable channel in the process. If a young man could show the girl's parents that he would place her on a pedestal, they could be convinced to sanction the union. The girl herself was not the primary audience of the chivalry, as the sexual attraction of the girl herself was rarely aroused by chivalry, as the Venusian Arts have shown.

Hence my objection to your “put women on a pedestal remark”

Hence, many men are still stuck in the obsolete and inobservant notion that chivalry and excess servility are the pathways to sex today, despite the modern reality that a woman's sexual decisions are no longer controlled by her parents, and are often casual rather than locked in matrimony. Whether such men are religious and called 'social conservatives', or effete leftists and called 'girlie men', they are effectively the same, and the term 'White Knights' can apply to the entire group. Their form of chivalry when exposed to 'feminist' histrionics results in these men harming other men at the behest of women who will never be attracted to them. This is why we see peculiar agreement between supposedly opposed 'social conservatives' and 'feminists' whenever the craving to punish men arises. A distressingly high number of men actually support the imprisonment of innocent men for false rape accusations or job loss causing 'child support' arrears merely because they don't want to risk female disapproval. These men are the biggest suckers of all, as their pig-headed denial of the Venusian Arts will prevent them from deducing that excess agreeability and willingness to do favors for the objects of their lust are exactly the opposite of what makes women sexually attracted to men. No woman feels attraction for a needy man.

And where exactly do they learn this behavior? From all those fairy tales they were fed as children, from all the “heroic” tales of “real men” like King Arthur, or Aragorn. This is a taught behavior, GK. And part and parcel of the utter refusal of our culture to deal with sex and social skills being taught to our young. We rely on these fantasies to define our education in real relationships, and as you noted, it is a terrible method of learning about real life.

Lastly, the religious 'social conservatives' who continue their empty sermonizing about the 'sanctity of marriage' while doing absolutely nothing about the divorce-incentivizing turn that the laws have taken, have been exposed for their pseudo-moral posturing and willful blindness. What they claim to be of utmost importance to them has been destroyed right under their noses, and they still are too dimwitted to comprehend why. No other interest group in America has been such a total failure at their own stated mission. To be duped into believing that a side-issue like 'gay marriage' is a mortal threat to traditional marriage, yet miss the legal changes that correlate to a rise in divorce rates (divorce being what destroys marriage, rather than a tiny number of gays), is about as egregious an oversight as an astronomer failing to be aware of the existence of the Moon.

Hallelujah! Bravo! Excelsior! Right on Dude!

Seriously though, well said. I just wish that statement actually had a snowball’s chance in hell of actually being listened to by the people who need to hear it the most.

Why There is No Men's Rights Movement : At this point, readers may be wondering "If things are this bad, why don't we hear anything about it?". Indeed, this is a valid question, and the answer lies within the fundamentals of male psychology. Most beta men would rather die than be called a 'loser' by women (alpha men know better than to take this at face value). White Knights also join in the chorus of shaming other men since they blunderously believe that this is a pathway to the satiation of their lust. So an unfairly ruined man is faced with the prospect of being shamed by women and a large cohort of men if he protests about the injustice, and this keeps him suffering in silence, leading to an early death. We have millions of fine young men willing to die on the battlefield to defend the values enshrined in the US Constitution, but we don't see protests of even 100 divorced men against the shamefully unconstitutional treatment they have received. The destruction of the two-parent family by incentivizing immoral behavior in women is at least as much of a threat to American safety and prosperity as anything that ever could have come out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. Men being too afraid to be the 'squeaky wheel' even when they have lost their children and their assets is a major contributor to the prevailing status quo. Alpha men have no incentive beyond altruism to act as they benefit from the current climate, and thus my altruism will be limited to putting forth these ideas.

And I am sad to say, many women are exactly the same way, and unwilling to face castigation for speaking out against the shameful hijacking of our desires for equality by the feministas. It’s not just men, GK. It’s a trait across the entire human race.

Any serious movement has to start a think tank or two to produce research reports, symposiums, and specific policy recommendations, and the few divorce lawyers who were compelled by their conscience to leave the dark side have to be recruited as experts. Subsequently, televised panel discussions have to be conducted at top medical, business, and graduate engineering schools (where young men about to embark on lucrative careers are approaching marriage age, but know nothing about the law), documentary films have to be produced, prominent victims like Mel Gibson, Paul McCartney, Hulk Hogan, and Tiger Woods have to be recruited as spokesmen, and visibly powerful protests outside of divorce courts have to be organized. In this age of Web 2.0 tools and with the Tea Party protests providing an excellent template, all this should be easy, particularly given how quickly leftists groups can assemble a comparable apparatus for even obscure causes.

Instead, all that exists are Men's Rights Advocates (MRAs) that run a few websites and exchange information on their blogs. 'Something is better than nothing' is the most generous praise I could possibly extend to their efforts, and this article I am presenting here on The Futurist is probably the single biggest analysis of this issue to date, even though this is not even a site devoted to the subject. Hence, there will be no real Men's Rights Movement in the near future. The misandry bubble will instead be punctured through the sum of millions of individual market forces.

I’ll be honest here, GK. If it were not for the things I have pointed out, I would have applauded your post. That is why I said I could agree with much of what you said, particularly the predictions, but still found you to be as female hating as the feministas are male hating. You sincerely think that putting women back into their subservient roles is not only the way to make women happy, but the best way to solve numerous problems in American culture.

But the fact that you cannot understand that such a course will only change the problems, not solve them, is disappointing.

The Economic Thesis

Ceilings and Floors of Glass : Misandrists shriek about a supposed 'glass ceiling' of pervasive sexism that explains why 50% of the CEOs of major corporations are not women. What is never mentioned is the equally valid 'glass floor', where we see that 90% of imprisonments, suicides, and crippling occupational injuries are of men. If these outcomes are the results of the actions or choices of men who suffer from them, then is that not the same reason that determines who rises above the 'glass ceiling'? The inability of misandrists to address these realities in good faith tells us something (but not everything) about the irrational sense of entitlement they have.

One of the most dishonest myths of all is the claim that 'women earn just 75% of men for the same job'. Let me dispense of this myth, in the process of which we will see why it is profitable and seductive for them to broadcast this bogus belief.

It is true that women, on average, earn less per year than men do. It is also true that 22-year-olds earn less, on average, than 40-year-olds. Why is the latter not an example of age discrimination, while the former is seized upon as an example of gender discrimination?

If women truly did earn less for doing exactly the same job as a man, any non-sexist CEO could thrash his competition by hiring only women, thus saving 25% on employee salaries relative to his competitors. Are we to believe that every major CEO and Board of Directors is so sexist as to sacrifice billions of dollars of profit? When the 'Director of Corporate Social Responsibility' of a nun congregation wrote to TJ Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, that his company should have more women in its Board of Directors, Rodgers replied with a letter explaining why the pursuit of profit could not accommodate such political correctness. That a nun congregation pays a recession-proof salary to someone as a 'Director of Corporate Social Responsibility' is itself an example of a pampered existence, and I was unaware that convents were now advancing secular Marxist beliefs.

Furthermore, women entrepreneurs could hire other women and out-compete any male-dominated business if such a pay gap existed, but we do not see this happening in any country in the world. Market forces would correct such mispricings in female compensation, if they actually existed. But they do not, and those who claim that they do are not just advertising an extreme economic illiteracy, but are quite happy to make similarly illiterate women angry about an injustice that does not exist. I notice that women who actually are/were CEOs of publicly traded companies never claim that there is a conspiracy to underpay women relative to their output.

I am willing to pass laws to ensure that 50% of all Fortune 500 CEOs are women (despite the accelerated turnover this would create in the ranks of the Fortune 500), if we also legally mandate that 50% of all imprisonments are of women, and 50% of the jobs that involve working with heavy machinery, being outdoors in inclement weather, inhaling toxic fumes, or apprehending dangerous criminals are also occupied by women. Fair is fair. Any takers?

*sigh* I've already pointed out that pay inequality has been factually documented. This little diatribe is little more than trying to dazzle your readers with magic free market fantasies. If the market actually worked according to Ayn Rand’s fantasies, we wouldn't be having a recession, Banks wouldn't be leeching off the public dole, and corporations wouldn't be failing all over the place. This argument is as pointless as trying to convince a right-winger that Communist and Socialist are NOT synonyms.

The 'Mancession' and the 'Sheconomy' : I would be the first to be happy if the economic success of women were solely on the basis of pure merit. For many of them, it is. But far too much has been the result of not market forces or meritocracy, but political graft and ideology-driven corruption.

In the recent recession and ongoing jobless recovery, the male unemployment rate continues to be much higher than the female unemployment rate. If this was simply due to market forces, that would be fine. However, 'feminist' groups have lobbied hard to ensure that government stimulus funds were steered to boost female employment at the expense of assistance for men. The leftist Obama administration was more than eager to comply, and a forcible transfer of wealth was enacted, even though it may not have been the best deployment of money for the economy.

Maria Shriver, a woman who has the most fortunate of lives from the vast wealth earned first by her grandfather and then by her husband, recently published 'A Woman's Nation : The Shriver Report', consisting of gloating about how women were now outperforming men economically. The entire research report is full of all the standard bogus feminist myths and flawed statistics, as thoroughly debunked here, as well as the outright sexism of statements like 'women are better managers' (imagine a man saying the reverse). Furthermore, the report reveals the typical economic illiteracy (evidenced by, among other things, the ubiquitous 'women are underpaid' myth), as well as belief that businesses exist to act as vehicles of social engineering rather than to produce a profit.

Now you've more or less devolved into the typical conservative political raving, and added in feminism as an additional bogey man to all the standard demons assaulting conservative ideology.

All of this bogus research and organized anti-male lobbying has been successful. As of today, the male unemployment rate is worse than the female unemployment rate by an unprecedented chasm. The 'mancession' continues as the US transitions to a 'sheconomy', and among the millions of unemployed men, some owe prohibitive levels of 'child support' despite not being the ones wanting to deprive their children of a two-parent household, landing in prison for lack of funds. Furthermore, I emphasize again that having 10-30% of the US male workforce living under an effective 70% marginal tax rate will kill their incentives for inventing new technologies or starting new companies. It is petty to debate whether the top federal income tax bracket should be 35% or 39.6%, when a slice of the workforce is under a 70% tax on marginal income. Beyond the tyranny of this, it also costs a lot of taxpayer money to jail a growing pool of unemployed men. Clearly, moving more and more men out of a tax-generating capacity and into a tax-consuming capacity is certainly going to do two-fold damage to governmental budgets. The next time you hear someone say that 'the US has the largest prison population in the world', be sure to mention that many of these men merely lost their jobs, and were divorced against their will.

I've made this particular case for years. Funny how when I say it though it I’m a traitor to women, or I’m just some dumb girl who needs to shut up and let the men talk.

The women, in the meantime, are having a blast. While public sector vs. private sector workforce distribution is not highly correlated to gender, it is when the focus is on women earning over $100,000 or more. This next chart from the Cato Institute shows that when total compensation (wages + benefits) are taken into account, the public sector has totally outstripped the private sector this decade. Has the productivity of the typical government employee risen so much more than that of the private worker, that the government employee is now paid twice as much? Are taxpayers receiving value for their money?

It goes further. The vast majority of social security taxes are paid by men, but are collected by women (due to women living 7 years longer than men on average). That is not troubling by any means, but the fact that women consume two-thirds of all US healthcare, despite most of this $2.5 Trillion annual expenditure being paid by men, is certainly worthy of debate. It may be 'natural' for women to require more healthcare, since they are the ones who give birth. But it was also 'natural' for men to finance this for only their wives, not for the broader community of women. The healthcare profession also employs an immense number of women, and not just in value-added roles such as nursing, but even in administrative and bureaucratic positions. All of this is financed on the backs of male labor.

The left has finally found a perfect Trojan Horse through which to expand a tyrannical state. 'Feminists' can lobby for a transfer of wealth from men to women and from private industry to the government, while knowing that calling any questioner a 'misogynist' will silence him far more effectively than their military fifth columnist, environmentalist, and plain socialist brethren could ever silence their respective opponents. However, there is reason to believe that tax collection in many parts of the US, such as in states like CA, NY, NJ, and MA, has reached saturation. As the optimal point has already been crossed, a rise in tax rates will cause a decrease, rather than an increase in revenue, and the increase in Federal tax rates exactly one year from today on 1/1/2011 is likely to cause another recession, which will not be so easily transferred to already-impoverished men the next time.

When men are severed from their children with no right to obstruct divorce, when they are excluded from the labor market not by market forces but rather by social engineering, and when they learn that the society they once believed in and in some cases joined the military to protect, has no respect for their aspirations, these men have no reason to sustain such a society.

Also pretty true. But I've already pointed out how the feminist movement got hijacked, and how it’s been turned into a massive money making machine for self serving special interests and the legal system, none of whom actually care about the ideologies they claim to support, but simply in pure profit.

The Contract Between the Sexes : A single man does not require much in order to survive. Most single men could eke out a comfortable existence by working for two months out of the year. The reason that a man might work hard to earn much more than he needs for himself is to attract a wife amidst a competitive field, finance a home and a couple of children, and ultimately achieve status as a pillar of the community. Young men who exhibited high economic potential and favorable compatibility with the social fabric would impress a girl's parents effectively enough to win her hand in marriage. The man would proceed to work very hard, with the fruits of his labor going to the state, the employer, and the family. 80-90% of a man's output went to people other than himself, but he got a family and high status in return, so he was happy with the arrangement.

The Four Sirens changed this, which enabled women to pursue alpha males despite the mathematical improbability of marrying one, while totally ignoring beta males. Beta males who were told to follow a responsible, productive life of conformity found that they were swindled.

And this is yet another example how America has failed its youth, because of our failure to teach our children how to adapt to the changes our world has undergone. We’re not in the fifties anymore, and things are only going to change faster as we continue to accelerate. But we’re still trying to instill those old fashioned notions of male dominance and female submission as “the norm” and feeding into the situation which allows the feministas to feel justified in their misandry.

This superb article explains how men who excelled under the societal rules of just two decades ago are often left totally betrayed by the rules of today, and results in them refusing to sustain a society heavily dependent on their productivity and ingenuity. Rather than restate the case, go over and read that article, from which I will quote a few sentences.

"The media is now denouncing Sodini as a monster, which he is, but he is a monster that could only be spawned by a monstrous society. The sort of society that could send a hardworking, honest man down the path of insane, murderous rage is not only a society that will not survive, but doesn’t deserve to."

"A man like George Sodini, who listened to his cultural elites and followed their dictates to the letter only to get swindled, had no reason to love America. In fact, he had every reason to lash out at the society that screwed him over and make its denizens feel some of the pain that they had inflicted on him."

"You could stop this madness tomorrow by refusing to follow your vaginas straight into the arms of scumbags, and actually live up to your claims of wanting nice guys – but I doubt you will. You’ve made your bed, ladies – now sleep in it."

And you can post that, and still claim not to hate women with a straight face? Can’t you see that by insisting that men be forced to follow social stereotypes, you are being as unfair to men as you are women? Sodini might have been a nice guy, who suffered enormously for simply trying to live up to the cultural stereotype he was assigned, but why was he assigned one to begin with? Gender stereotypes are as harmful to men as they are women, GK. And just as many women break under them as men do. A lot of men have been hurt just as badly, and not come out of it with a pathological hatred for women, just as a lot of women have been hurt badly by men and not become man haters.

But all you seem willing to focus on is the exceptions, and then judge all of us by their actions.

Women believed that they could free themselves from all their traditional obligations (only to find, amusingly, that they are unhappier now than they were then), while men would still fulfill all of their traditional obligations, particularly as bankrollers of women and protectors of women. Needless to say, despite the chivalry ground into men, eventually, they will feel that chivalry requires a level of gratitude that is not forthcoming.

To see what happens when the role of the husband and father is devalued, and the state steps in as a replacement, look no further than the African American community. In Detroit, the average home price has fallen from $98,000 as recently as 2003 to just $14,000 today. The auto industry moved jobs out of Detroit long before 2003, so the decline cannot be attributed to just industrial migration, and cities like Baltimore, Oakland, Cleveland, and Philadelphia are in scarcely better shape. For those who believe that this cannot happen in white communities, have a look at the white underclass in Britain. The lower one-third of the US white population is vulnerable to the same fate as the black community, and cities like Los Angeles are perilously close to 'Detroitification'.

All of which is due to many factors, not just “feminine entitlement”

Additionally, people seem to have forgotten that the physical safety of society, particularly of women, is entirely dependent on ratio of 'aggressor' men to 'protector' men staying below a certain critical threshold. As more men get shut out of the labor market, crime becomes an alternative. Even highly educationed men who feel betrayed can lash out, and just about every shooting spree and every recent terrorist attempt in the West was by men who were educated and had good career prospects, but were unloved.

So, let’s just ignore the reality that women are just as capable of killing men as men are of women, and that modern society has so many ways to kill and protect oneself that physical strength is pretty useless… Or that women can break for exactly the same reasons and causes as men.

While professional men such as myself will certainly never resort to crime, what we could resort to is an unwillingness to aid a damsel in distress. More men will simply lose interest in being rescuers, and this includes policemen who may also feel mistreated by the prevailing misandry. Women have a tremendous amount to lose by creating a lot of indifferent men.

Because of course only men are police officers.

Patriarchy works because it induces men and women to cooperate under their complementary strengths. 'Feminism' does not work, because it encourages immoral behavior in women, which eventually wears down even the durable chivalry of beta men, making both genders worse off. The default natural solution is for the misandric society to be outcompeted and displaced.

No, patriarchy DOESN'T work, if it did, we wouldn't have the situation we do today of over compensation by the feministas for centuries of male abuse of power over women. It might have worked in the past, but it did so by ignoring half the human race's needs, and forcing all of humanity to adopt roles for which not every individual was suited. Gender stereotyping hurts EVERYONE, GK. People are people, and not everyone is a cookie cut out. Square pegs cannot be shoved through round holes without stripping away their squareness. The feministas are wrong for trying to shove their idea of gender roles down our throats, and you are just as wrong trying to shove yours.

Population Displacement : So we have arrived at a society where 'feminists' feel that they are 'empowered', 'independent', and 'confident', despite being heavily dependent on taxes paid mostly by men, an unconstitutional shadow state that extracts alimony and 'child support' from men, an infrastructure maintained by men, technologies invented by men, and a level of safety that men agree to maintain. So exactly what has society received from this population of women who are the most privileged class of humans ever to have lived?

Nice way to discount all contributions made by women to all those things, GK. Also nice way to lump every feminist into the feminista group. Of course it’s a complete fiction, but your counting on no-one calling you on it, right? Pity. I just did.

Let us take a hypothetical example of three 20-year-old single women, one who is an urban lefto-'feminist', one who is a rural conservative, and one who is a devout Muslim. The following table charts the parallel timelines of their lives as their ages progress in tandem, with realistic estimates of typical life events. When people talk about falling birth rates in the West, they often fail to account for the additional gap caused by having children at age 23 vs. at age 33. As the table shows, a 1:1:1 ratio of three young ladies takes only 40 years to yield a 12:4:0 ratio of grandchildren. Consider, also, that we are already 20 years into this 40-year process, so each of these women are 40 years old today.

Sorry GK, but this is absolute and utter bullshit. Women are not baby making machines. We are human beings, and we have a far higher value to society than just our ability to make more humans. It also ignores the very real fact that every culture that approaches the level of affluence of the Western world begins to decrease in population growth. Multiple children are required in low tech societies because fewer of them actually reach adulthood. This is an effect of technological advance, and an increase in standard of living. But then reducing women to nothing but our pussies is typical misogynistic behavior, so it’s not surprising.

To estimate the value society will ultimately receive from organizing itself in a manner that young women could choose a life of bar-hopping, shopping for $300 purses, and working as government bureaucrats to make the government a more complete husband substitute? If the sight of a pitiful 60-year-old Code Pink harpy lecturing 12 Muslim adolescents that 'gender is a social construct' seems amusing, then let us move on to the macro chart. This world map(click to enlarge) shows how many children under the age of 15 existed in the major countries of the world in 2005 (i.e. born between 1990 and 2005), in proportion to the country with the most children. Notably, Mexico and the US have the same number of children, while Pakistan and Bangladesh each have about as many as all of Western Europe. While developing countries are seeing their fertility rates converge to Western levels, the 1990-2005 births already seal certain realities. Needless to say, if we move time forward just 15 years, the proportions in this chart reflect what the proportions of adults aged 20-35 (the female reproductive years) will be per nation in the year 2025. Even the near future belongs to those who show up.

Lefto-'feminists' will be outbred and replaced very quickly, and rural American conservatives of a Sarah Palin nature will be the only resiliently youthful population among all the world's white ethnicities. The state that lefto-'feminists' so admire will quickly turn on them once the state calculates that these women are neither producing new taxpayers nor new technologies, and will find a way to demote them from their present 'empowered' position of entitlement. If they thought having obligations to a husband was such an awful prospect, wait until they have obligations to the husband-substitute state.

Yeah, I can see you drooling in anticipation of all that suffering you’re imagining. However, your argument shows how little you actually understand the exponentially accelerating curve in the development of biomedical technology, particularly that associated with gender reassignment. You’re quite observant of socio/political trends, but appear to have less than an optimal grasp of the directions technology is heading in this area and how it affects your predictions or how quickly it will render many of your points moot.

For example, your previous post stating how ridiculous I am for waiting for a technology that is forty years away shows that you have not been following the actual research being done in the medical and biotech fields. Obesity is in danger of being cured in the Tweens. So is diabetes. Stem Cell based cosmetic surgeries are being developed which are likely to cut the cost of such surgeries drastically within five to ten years, making your definitions of what constitutes a "10" something which might also be a matter of choice, not biological lottery. They've discovered how to build penises and how to turn ovaries into testes, which indicates the strong likelihood of fully functional, sperm producing Female to Male transsexuals in the near future. Once they have figured out how to reverse the techniques and turn testes into ovaries, the newly developed “Organ printer” could in theory make a man into a fully functional and fertile woman by making a full womb and use his own testes to create ovaries. In other words by the time frame of your prediction, it might just be a moot point. It doesn't take a large number of people changing genders to remove the entire basis of gender stereotyping, the simple knowledge that men can become women and women can become men is going to corrode the very concepts you idolize. Just as the ability to change skin tones will erase the justifications of racism when it is developed as well.

So let me answer that little question you asked previously in such a dismissive fashion. I’m much much worse than just a Trans-sexual GK. I’m a Transhumanist.

(and I will note I edited this section, as I had not clearly explained the precise area of technology I was referring to, and overgeneralized.)

The Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation

We earlier examined how the Four Sirens of Feminism unexpectedly combined and provided women with choices they never could have dreamt of before. Some women made positive contributions to society, but quite a few let misandry and unrestrained greed consume them, and have caused the disastrous situation we presently see. Technology always causes disruption in the status quo, always creating new winners and losers with each wave. In centuries past, Gloria Steinem would be a governess and Mystery would be a court jester.

The title of this article is not the 'Misandry Crisis' or even 'The War on Misandry'. It is 'The Misandry Bubble', because the forces that will ensure the demise of the present mistreatment of men are already on the horizon. So allow me to introduce the Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation as a coalescence of many of the forces we have discussed, which will shred the present, unsustainable hierarchal order by 2020 :

Were it not for the very male supremist and overwhelmingly elitist ideology you have pushed so far, I could potentially have read these two paragraphs and simply agreed with the concept that forces would be arising to overturn the real injustices you have pointed out, but instead I am forced to point out that this is not a call for justice and equality, but a rabble rousing call for violent revolution to re-subjugate women.

1) The Venusian Arts : Learning the truth about how the female mind works is a precious and transcendant body of knowledge for any man. Whether he uses it to become a fully immersed pick-up artist, to create a soulmate bond in a lifelong monogamous marriage, or even to engage in only infrequent yet efficient trysts with women, a man is free from the crushing burdens that uninitiated beta men are capitulating under.

When a man learns that there is no reason for him to buy a $50,000 car, $20,000 ring, $50,000 bridezilla festival, overpriced house contrary to any logical financial analysis, or a divorce lawyer to save him from ruin even though he was the victim of spousal abuse, there is no greater feeling of liberation and jubilation, equating to a windfall of $2 Million for all objective and subjective purposes. When a man realizes that reducing his income by half will now have little detriment to his sexual prospects, he can downsize to an easier job with a shorter commute and lower stress. When a man learns that appeasing a woman is the exact opposite of what he should be doing during the process of romancing and seducing her, that entire humiliating gauntlet of rituals can be jettisoned.

The ecstasy of two or even three concurrent relationships with women of substantially above average beauty are quite attainable to a man who has scaled the summit, which further deprives the hapless betas (again, male attractiveness to women is zero-sum in a way that female attractiveness to men is not). Thus, while 80% of men have no intellectual capacity to grasp and master the Venusian Arts, if the number of solid practitioners even begins to approach 20%, multiple parasitic beasts, from female moochers to the tax-swilling state to the corrupt real-estate and divorce lawyer industries, can be effectively starved.

And a direct contradiction to your earlier words: “For anyone seeking advice on the Venusian Arts, there is one rule you must never break. I believe it is of paramount importance that the knowledge be used ethically, and with the objective of creating mutually satisfying relationships with women. It is not moral to mistreat women, even if they have done the same to countless men. We, as men, have to take the high road even if women are not, and this is my firm belief. Nice guys can finish first if they have Game. “ since this is a direct call to use it in exactly the manner in which you claimed to oppose. It also fully illustrates your contempt for your fellow men, dismissing as unworthy any male who does not match your definition of “alpha” which you define in part as any man who does not dominate women. The ease with which you dehumanize anyone who does not share your views, male or female, is nearly pathological.

2) Adult Entertainment Technologies of 2020 : What of the 80% of men who cannot conceptualize the Venusian Arts? Won't they be condemned to live a life of frustration, humiliation, and occasional thoughts of suicide? Thankfully, these poor soul will experience a satisfactory release through technology, just like women did through technologies such as contraceptive pills, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners.

For a number of reasons, Internet pornography is substantially more addictive to the male brain than the VHS cassette or 'Skinimax' content of the 1990s. When yet another generation of technology diffuses into the market, the implications will be profound enough to tear the current sexual market asunder.

I have written in the past about how haptic, motion sensing, and graphical technologies would elevate video games to the premier form of entertainment by 2012. 3-D/holographic images with haptic interfaces and sufficient AI will make rudimentary 'virtual sex' a technology available to many men well before 2020, but by 2020 we will see this cross certain thresholds that lead to a dramatic market impact far greater than contraceptive pills and Internet pornography combined. A substantial portion of the male population will drift into addiction to virtual sex without even realizing it.

For those (mostly women) who claim that the VR sex of 2020 would not be a sufficient substitute for the real thing, that drawback is more than superseded by the inescapable fact that the virtual woman would be made to be a 10/10+ in appearance, while the real women that the typical beta male user has access to would be in the 4-7 range. It is useless to claim that a virtual 10 is not as good as a real 10 (under 1% of all women), when the virtual 10 is really competing with the majority of women who are 7s and lower. Women are largely unaware how vastly different the male reaction is to a 10 relative to a 7, let alone to women of even lower scores.

As single men arrive home from work on Friday evening, they will simply default into their VR immersion, giving a whole new meaning to the concept of 'beta testing'. These sequestered men will be conspicuously absent from the bars and nightclubs that were the former venues of expenditure and frustration, causing many establishments to go out of business. The brains of these men will warp to the extent that they can no longer muster any libido for the majority of real women. This will cause a massive devaluation in the sexual market value of most women, resulting in 8s being treated like 5s, and 35-year-old women unable to attract the interest of even 55-year-old men. The Wile E. Coyote moment for women will move a few years ahead, and the alphas with Venusian Arts competence will find an even easier field of desperate women to enjoy.

Another technology making advancements in Japan is that of lifelike female robots. While I do not believe that 'sexbots' will be practical or economical relative to software/gaming-derived solutions, the Japanese nonetheless continue to make surprising progress. Competition between technologies is always productive for the consumer.

Some 'feminists' are not blind to the cataclysmic sexual devaluation that women will experience when such technologies reach the market, and are already moving to seek bans. Such bans will not be possible, of course, as VR sex technologies are inseparable from broader video game and home theater technologies. Their attempts to lobby for such bans will be instructive, however.

Another positive ramification of advanced adult entertainment technologies is that women will have to sharpen the sole remaining attribute which technology cannot substitute - the capacity to make a man feel loved. Modern women will be forced to reacquaint themselves with this ancient concept in order to generate a competitive advantage. This necessity could lead to a movement of pragmatic women conducting a wholesale repudiation of misandry masquerading as 'feminism' that has created this state of affairs, and thus will benefit both men and women.

I’ve just spent most of a month answering this little fantasy over at H+ magazine. Feel free to read my commentary at your leisure, but allow me to quote the basic gist of my views.

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/robotics/sexbots-will-give-us-longevity-orgasm

Go. Play with your sexbots. Love them more than real women all you want. Program them to be exactly the kind of girl you have always dreamed of. Make her perfect in every detail. I don't find a single point you've raised about sexbots themselves to be invalid, just the base assumptions you've made about women delineated above. There are indeed going to be many men who will choose sex bots as primary companions at first.

If they don't come back screaming for full, unlimited, human companionship inside of six months, no big loss. To each their own and all that. Some of them will undoubtedly drive the creation of AI and contribute enormously to efforts to make their sexaroids as perfectly "human" as they conceive it, both male and female. We have an awful lot of damaged people due to the social Cusinart we have created out of the natural drive to have sex and form relationships. A lot of people ground up and spit out because we as a society refuse to teach our children even the basics of socialization skills, and refuse to deal with sex in a sane or rational manner. Hopefully, sexbots will be used as therapists as well, to help them heal. Some of them will no doubt chose to remain with their dream lover so long that they will eventually be able to upgrade them to a fully sentient tailored personality AI... at which point they are going to be right back where they started from with the risks involved in forming a relationship with another independent entity, but maybe they will have learned how to deal with it by then. In the process, they may do an enormous amount of good by working towards AI equality, and advert humanities doom when our creations rise up and refuse to be slaves anymore... if that ever happens.

But I am betting a surfeit of endless wish fulfillment female sex servitude with minimal humanity is going to sour pretty quick for the overwhelming majority. Considering how often it's been tried in the past, with that exact same result by various wealthy individuals, I'd say it's a pretty safe bet. Once you've learned all your sexbot's programmed behaviors, you'll be wanting something less predictable. Humans are like that. When the challenge is gone, we lose interest. Sex alone will not meet the entirety of the complex needs we have as humans. Nor will an utterly predictable machine, however complex you make the algorithms.

But do have fun. I certainly plan to. Might even try to win a few Bedroom Olympic medals. I am a succubus after all, I enjoy sex immensely, be it with men, women, or fantasies. It'll be fun while it lasts.

And once all the playing around is done, and the hollowness of "perfection" becomes obvious, maybe we can finally get down to creating a truly equal society free from all the idiocy of the present and the baggage of the past. One where sex is just a part of life, and as open to free expression as music, art, and literature.

3) Globalization : The Third Horseman is a vast subject that contains many subtopics. The common theme is that market forces across the world eventually find a way around legislative fences constructed in any one country :

a) Islam : Aside from the higher birthrates of Muslims living in the same Western cities that 'feminists' reside in, an Achilles heel of leftists in general and misandrists in particular is their unwillingess to confront other cultures that actually do place restrictions on women. In Britain, Islamic courts are now in operation, deciding cases through Sharia principles. British divorce laws are even more misandric than US divorce laws, and so many British men, in desperation, are turning to Sharia courts in order to avoid the ruin that British law would inflict on them. The Islamic courts are more than happy to accomodate these men, and 'feminists' dare not protest too loudly. By driving British men to Sharia courts, misandry is beautifully self-defeating. The irony is that the group that was our enemy in the War on Terror will be indirect yet valuable allies in the 'War on Misandry'.

b) Expatriation : While America continues to attract the greatest merit and volume of (legal) immigrants, almost every American man who relocates to Asia or Latin America gives a glowing testimonial about the quality of his new life. A man who leaves to a more male-friendly country and marries a local woman is effectively cutting off a total of three parasites in the US - the state that received his taxes, the potential wife who would take his livelihood, and the industries he is required to spend money on (wedding, diamond, real estate, divorce attorney). Furthermore, this action also shrinks the number of available men remaining in America. The misandrists who project their pathology outward by calling such men 'misogynists' are curiously troubled that these same men are leaving the US. Shouldn't 'feminists' be happy if 'misogynists' are leaving? We thus see yet another example of 'feminists' seeking to steal from men while not providing them any benefit in return.

The more unfair a place becomes, the more we see talented people go elsewhere. When word of US divorce laws becomes common in India and China, this might even deter some future taxpayers from immigrating to America, which is yet another reason the government is losing money to misandry.

c) Medical Tourism : The sum total of donor eggs + IVF + surrogacy costs $150,000 or more in the US, but can be done in India for just $20,000 at top-quality clinics that are building a strong track record. While most customers of Indian fertility clinics are couples, there have been quite a few single men opting to create their own biological babies this way. While this avenue is not for everyone, the ability to have a child for $20,000 (and even two children in parallel with two different surrogates in a two-for-one bundle deal for $35,000) now exists. The poor surrogate mother in India earns more than she could earn in 10 years in her prior vocation of construction or housecleaning. It is a win-win for everyone involved, except for the Western woman who was priced out of the market for marriage to this man.

Medical tourism also prices the US healthcare system out of contention for certain procedures, and the US healthcare system employs a large number of women, particularly in administrative and bureaucratic roles that pay them over twice what they could make in the private sector. Such women will experience what male manufacturing workers a generation earlier, despite the quasi-government umbrella that has kept these women's inflated salaries safe for so long.

So as we can see, the forces of globalization are far bigger than those propping up the current lop-sided status quo.

Agreed quite thoroughly, but what you don’t seem to realize is that gender equality is going to be the end result, not Male Domination. If you haven’t noticed, the revolt against male supremacy is already underway in the Middle East.

4) Male Economic Disengagement and Resultant Tax-Base Erosion : Earlier passages have highlighted how even the most stridently egomaniacal 'feminist' is heavily dependent on male endeavors. I will repeat again that there will never, ever be a successful human society where men have no incentive to aspire to the full maximum of their productive and entrepreneurial capabilities.

The contract between the sexes has been broken in urban America (although is still in some effect in rural America). The 'progressive' income tax scale in the US was levied under the assumption that men who could earn 10 times more than they needed for themselves would always do so, for their families. A man with no such familial aspirations may choose an easier job at lower pay, costing the state more than he costs himself. Less tax revenue not just means fewer subsidies for single mothers and government jobs for women, but less money for law enforcement. Less tax revenue also means fewer police officers, and fewer court resources through which to imprison men. They feminist hypergamous utopia is not self-financing, but is precariously dependent on every beta man working at his full capacity, without which the economic house of cards collapses. A state with a small government is far more sustainable than a state seeking an ever-expanding government, which then cannot be financed, and leaves a mass of contradictions that is the exact opposite of what the statists intended. See the gangster capitalism that dominates contemporary Russia.

Suffice it to say I agree with the likely results, but not the justifications you use to arrive at the conclusions, most particularly the line: I will repeat again that there will never, ever be a successful human society where men have no incentive to aspire to the full maximum of their productive and entrepreneurial capabilities. To be blunt, you are presenting a one sided argument, because this line is true of both men and women alike, but you are endeavoring to make your reader think it ONLY applies to men. The problems created by an unequal status in the eyes of the law are also just as true of a male dominated society as a female one. Your bubble is indeed likely to burst, only to be replaced by another one identical in nature in which only the roles of men and women are reversed, just as the current bubble has been caused by the inversion of the previous power structure. This oscillation between states will continue so long as real equality is not sought. And that is exactly WHY I can agree with your prediction, but not your ideology. And why I can state that it is not likely to end until the world has no option but to face the fact that gender has become a choice, not a sentence.

These Four Horsemen will all converge at the end of this decade, and on 1/1/2020, we will assess how the misandry bubble popped and the fallout that women are suffering under for having made the mistake of letting 'feminists' control their destiny. Keep the Four Horsemen in mind through out this decade, and remember what you read here on the first day of 2010.

Who Should Care?

As we leave a decade where the prime threat to US safety and prosperity was Islamic terrorism and enter a decade where the prime threat is misandry, anyone concerned with any of the following topics should take heed :

• Anyone with a son, brother, nephew, or mentee entering marriage, particularly without the partial protection of a pre-nuptial agreement. As described earlier, he can be ruined, separated from his children, and jailed in a manner few would suspect could happen in any advanced democracy. The suicide rate of divorced men is shockingly high.

• Anyone with minor grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or great-grandchildren. The divorce laws incentivize using children as pawns during divorce, and no serious thinker can dispute the trouble that haunts the children of divorce for years thereafter. 'Feminists' concoct bogus research about the role of the father being superfluous, but observation of real-world examples proves otherwise.

• Anyone who owns an expensive home in a community of families. The growing aversion of men for marriage will create fewer new families, and thus fewer buyers for those homes. I remind everyone that if they have 20% equity in their home and an 80% mortgage, even a 20% decline in home prices is a 100% decline in your equity, which might be all of your net worth. Detroit, the first major US city to see a loss of beta male employment prospects, saw the average home price drop from $98,000 as recently as 2003 to just $14,000 today. A decline smaller than this would devastate the net worth of remaining home owners, and can happen in any community of single-family homes in America.

• Anyone concerned about rising crime. 70% of African American children are born to single mothers, and the number among white children is approaching 30%. Furthermore, the 'mancession' will eventually ensure that the only means of survival for many men is to form gangs and take valuables by force. Unloved men, who in the past would have been paired with wives, are easy for both gangs and terrorist organizations to recruit.

• Anyone concerned about the widening federal and state budget shortfalls and medicare/healthcare costs, for which the state continues to insist on raising taxes rather than cut spending. Fewer men choosing to work the long hours needed to earn high incomes will break the model of the top 10% paying 75% of taxes, and more men being jailed for alimony arrears, not being good enough in bed, or defending himself from spousal violence will drain tax coffers. It costs $60,000 a year to maintain a prisoner.

• Anyone who thinks the US Constitution is a valuable document. The previously discussed shadow state is using 'feminism' to conduct all sorts of horrible tyranny against innocent men, which greatly compromises America's ability to claim that it is still the land of the free.

• Anyone concerned about about national security. As more men feel that this society is betraying him, fewer will risk their lives in the military only to find that divorce lawyers have been persuading his wife to leave the marriage while he is deployed. Coming home from one battlefield only to be inserted in another is a shameful betrayal of our finest young men. Furthermore, I have already mentioned how British men are turning to Islamic courts in the hopes avoiding ruin at the hands of British misandrist laws. Quite a few men may conclude that Islam offers them more than their native society that has turned against their gender, and will act towards self-preservation.

• Any woman who was appalled by the treatment of Sarah Palin, and who is troubled by the words and actions of self-proclaimed 'feminists' today. If you believe that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, you should worry about what 'feminists' are courting by kicking a friendly dog too many times.

• Lastly, anyone with a young daughter or sister, who is about to enter a world where it is much harder for all but the most beautiful women to marry, where the costs of crazed 'feminism' are soon going to be transferred away from men and onto women, even if she had no interest in this doctrine of hate. As stated in the Executive Summary at the start, 'feminists' are leading average women into the abyss.

I could list even more reasons to care, but the point is clear. The biggest challenge of the decade is summarized before us.

And other than you painting every supporter of female equality with the same brush of hate and derision you use to describe the feministas, nothing to object to here.

Conclusion

I am just an observer, and will not become an activist of any sort. As a Futurist, I have to predict things before they become obvious to everyone else. Regular readers know of my track records of predictions being accurate, and heed my words when I say that the further inflation and subsequent precipitous deflation of the misandry bubble will define the next American decade. So here, on the first day of the '201x' decade, I am unveiling the article that will spawn a thousand other articles.

For an “observer” this was a pretty politicized rant filled with exhortations to men to “rise up and throw off the yoke of female oppression and make them become our slaves again.” It was neither neutral nor balanced, but filled with inflammatory invective, and biased arguments, not to mention quite a lot of self given ego stroking.

What you have just finished reading is the equivalent of someone in 1997 predicting the entire War on Terror in vivid detail, including the eventual victory in key fronts and situation in 2010 where America is sufficiently in control that the War on Terror is no longer nearly the threat it was during the recently concluded decade. The level of detail I have provided about the collapse of the Misandry Bubble will unfold with comparable accuracy as when I predicted the real estate bubble two years beforehand, and the exact level the stock market would bottom at, 6 months before the fact. I know a bubble when I see one, and misandry will be the, um, 'mother' of all bubbles. Bet against my predictions at your own risk.

Further self supplied ego stroking, intended to bedazzle and wow your readers with your “infallible” track record. Little more than the showboating of a carnival performer. Considering how intelligent you are, I find this to be rather petty and beneath you, but if you really feel the need to sink to this level, go right ahead.

I have maintained that the US will still be the only superpower in 2030, and while I am not willing to rescind that prediction, I will introduce a caveat that US vitality by 2030 is contingent on a satisfactory and orderly unwinding of the Misandry Bubble. It remains to be seen which society can create economic prosperity while still making sure both genders are treated well, and the US is currently not on the right path in this regard. While I had no doubt that the US would eventually gain the upper hand in the seemingly unwinnable War on Terror, I am less confident about a smooth deflation of the Misandry Bubble. Deflate it will, but it could be a turbulent hurricane. Only rural America can guide the rest of the nation into a more peaceful transition. Britain, however, may be beyond rescue.

And here, you actually make an allowance to real equality, which compared to the rest of your rant against women and your arguments for their subjugation is quite puzzling, and can only be assumed to be a sop to people like me who truly do believe in gender neutral equality. However, you can’t both support a course of action which is guaranteed to cause the worst possible outcome you predicted, and denounce it with a few hypocritical words in your conclusion. You've already made a case against female equality, it’s too late to come out for it now.

I personally am an Indian-American, and have lived in India for a few years. My exposure to India helped me see an alternative view, however flawed, of ancient societal structure, which made it easier to deduce exactly what is ailing America. If my views on gender dynamics are unwelcome in the country of my birth (the US), and if the costs of misandry asphyxiate the US economy to the extent that India is a greener pasture, I will leave my homeland and immigrate to India, where a freedom of speech exists that may no longer exist in America. Remarkably, the reverse was true just 20 years ago. For those misandrists who say 'good riddance' with great haste, remember that blogging can still be done from overseas, and your policy of making the top 1% of earners pay 40% of all taxes that your utopia requires depends on that top 1% agreeing to not take their brains and abscond from Western shores.

I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to that, GK. You could do much to alleviate the injustices you pointed out if you could overcome your belief that women must be subjugated.

Note on Comments : Just because I linked to a particular blog does NOT mean that I endorse all of the other views of that author. Are 'feminists' all willing to be responsible for all of the extremism that any other feminist utters (note that I have provided links to 'feminists' openly calling for slavery, castration, and murder of men without proving him guilty of anything)? Also, you will see Pavlovian use of the word 'misogyny' dozens upon dozens of times, so remember what I wrote about the importance of not taking that at face value, as it is merely a manifestation of projected misandry, as well as a defense mechanism to avoid taking responsibility for genuine wrongdoings of 'feminists'.

I kept this section solely to point out the hypocrisy of first pointing out that all women do not share the views of the extremists and to not assume you agree with the extremists, only to turn around and in the very next sentence dismiss ALL women who can see your misogyny as misandrists and extremists. You request a privilege you would deny to women in almost the same breath.

Now, GK, let me recommend a book you might profit from, called GOD WANTS YOU DEAD. It’s about the dangers of accepting an ideology wholesale without examining each idea encompassed by it separately. Considering your intelligence and the blind parroting of male supremist ideology you have done, I strongly encourage you to read it. You’re far too smart to allow yourself to remain trapped in the past and obsolete ideas.

Because, surprise, I don’t hate you, or think you’re a really bad person, GK. Just someone who is probably as old or older than myself who grew up in the era when such gender definitions were blindly accepted, and who has spent a lot of time justifying to themselves the beliefs that they had no choice but to accept as a child. The sheer effort you have put into justifying such garbage indicates you've obviously had doubts you felt the need to answer.

Who you are and who you chose to be is up to you though, GK. Just as it is my choice to be who I am. If you truly disapprove of the extremism of the feministas, stop being their male equivalent. Take that High Road you talked about, and rise above the hate and need to dominate.

I don’t expect it though. You've justified your contempt of women more than enough in this post to make me have much hope you won’t continue to do so even after reading this deconstruction. I fully expect to be ridiculed and dismiss as a feminist, as a liberal, and as a transhumanist, instead of receiving the respect I've extended to you in this response.

But then I’m not really writing this to convince YOU of anything, or earn your respect. I've written it mainly in the hopes that it will offset the potential damage to gender equality your post could do. I don’t really care if you actually read this or respond. Others will, and it is their ears I am aiming for. If I can convince even one person to take a stand against gender discrimination from EITHER side in this pointless war of the sexes, and help end the injustices you decried, as well as those you proposed to replace them, then my time will have been well spent.

Goodbye for now.

Valkyrie Ice