http://returnofqueens.com/what-the-manosphere-has-given-me/
For
years now in my spare time I have loved reading, and sometimes
commenting on politically conservative blogs. In late 2011 one of my favorite sites led me to Captain Capitalism, who transported me here a few days ago. The links on his blog brought me stumbling into the Manosphere. In the first throes of discovery, alternately fascinated, horrified and delighted, I often visited the sites of Dalrock, The University of Man (now sadly defunct), Return of Kings, Heartiste, Rational Male, The Spearhead,
etc. One thing was clear: amid all the dissoluteness and depravity on
display, these wrathful, cynical, amoral (most of them) young men were
taking down feminism, and I loved it.
Yes, too frequently the Manosphere men are crass, crude, vulgar, and shockingly selfish about relationships and sex. But this happily-married, Christian stay-at-home mom doesn’t worry about their behavior all that much. I have my husband, who makes my world a better place when he walks in the room. I have our dear children, and I’m turning forty this year; I am not affected personally by what young men in their twenties and early thirties think about marriage and sexuality. I still go back to their sites occasionally now because, (in no particular order of significance): I love their eviscerating rants against feminism; the insights they provide will help me, and have already helped me guide my growing boys and girls to adulthood; their posts frequently reinforce my love of and appreciation for my husband; and their observations about women constantly validate the choices I have made in my life.
First: I abhor radical feminism and the pronouncements of prominent feminists often curdle my insides. I can’t abide how these women, combined with toxic leftist ideology, do their best to twist beautiful and worthy things – marriage, sex, devotion to family, pregnancy, raising children, and faith – into ugly, divisive, ‘oppressive,’ and sneer-worthy negatives. I am appalled at what their destructive ideology has done to our nation, our Western civilization. The wreckage is strewn about us; we all see it and are both horrified and saddened. Those kids, oh those kids: fatherless, overweight, tattooed, incoherent, wispy, dumbed-down, drugged-up, purposeless, feminized boys and termagant girls; they are prey for unpleasant people to make use of politically, sexually, and economically. A generation is lost partly because feminists tear down fatherhood and marriage, deliberately deny what is natural to men and women, and try to subvert everything good to cover up their own inadequacies and failures. So, when an intelligent and expressive writer in the Manosphere delivers a mighty, cruelly elegant screed of contempt against the women who helped wreck the West, I love every word and cry, “At last someone’s saying it!” (But you do have to go mining for the good stuff; there is a lot of junk in the Manosphere, too.)
Second: my children will benefit from what the Manosphere has taught me. My oldest boy has just become a teenager. He’s a quietly confident and intelligent lad. I’ve been dropping a little “red pill” wisdom on him about girls already; just a few statements here and there when he has questions. He is not going to be beaten down by the man-hating and boy-squelching powers out there if I have anything to do with it. The example of his parents’ marriage will help shape his understanding of relationships but might also leave him bewildered when he meets today’s girls raised in leftist-and-feminist-dominated homes.
So I’m carefully preparing him for the reality of hypergamy. I’m encouraging him to be realistic about ‘romantic love’ and not place any girl, even one he adores, onto a ‘do-no-wrong’ pedestal. I’m educating him about women’s use of emotions to manipulate people (his sisters certainly help open his eyes in that area!). When (if) he goes off to college, he will be well-informed about the dangers of false rape accusations and about how hyper-paranoid the girls around him will be in what is arguably one of the safest environments ever for the privileged western female.
I’m also encouraging him not to fall for feminist “grrrl power” nonsense. You should have seen his smile, as if the light dawned, when I once quoted to him from one of my favorite conservative lady bloggers: “If women ran the world, we would all still be living in caves, but with really, really fancy curtains.” I think he’s safe, now, from being cowed by feminist harridans into hating his own masculinity. Both my boys and my girls will be reminded often about all the great things that the strength, power and minds of men have done and are doing for our civilization: art and music, inventions, construction, civil engineering of cities’ infrastructures, first-responders during disasters, law-and-order providers, heroism in war and hard times. Thanks to his father, who generally ignores the Manosphere but seems amused with the nuggets I share (he usually just grins and says, “I could have told you that!”), and thanks to a filtered-by-mom (so far) Manosphere, our boys will come out intact after the teen years and into their twenties. I hope. They will recognize the type of girls and women to respect and fall in love with, and the type of girls and women to ignore and avoid. I hope.
As for my daughters, I now have a much clearer picture about the character of boys and men they will face when they leave the house, and what kind of women they should be if they hope to be happy. Feminine, slender, kind, giving, careful with their money and yes, hard-working: these are the traits I plan to encourage in my girls while also emphasizing God’s wisdom about abstaining from sexual relations outside of marriage. My daughters will receive our support and cheer-leading for any honorable career they desire to pursue, but I will explain to them that they have no one to blame but themselves if their choices have unhappy consequences when they’re older, especially if they insist on wasting years studying for a useless degree that does not provide them with a good job while leaving them with a life-limiting financial burden. They will be reminded not to ignore the biological reality of their prime years for bearing and raising children if they dream of having a family. And, if they try to go for a career and motherhood at the same time, I’ll ask them to carefully consider whether the added stress and frantic pace is worth it, and I will try to help them understand that expecting their husbands to do the housework will not end happily for all concerned. I will do my best to raise my girls to fit in the NAWALT group that many of the Manosphere men believe does not exist. As for those very same no-doubt-charming yet ruthlessly exploitive rogues, my beautiful daughters will be warned about them and will be wise enough to look for and find the good Christian men out there. I hope.
Third, the Manosphere helps me appreciate my husband. I always did appreciate him, don’t get me wrong, but it had somehow escaped me before that men really put up with a lot, and give up a lot, to become husbands and fathers. Do you realize, girls, that a man can live on little and still have a great time in life? He can, indeed. We ladies, on the other hand, and the kids – we are a financial Black Hole.
Consider my husband. Here is a good-looking, confident, intelligent man who easily draws people in with his friendly personality. He has a well-paying engineering position. He is also turning forty in a few months. Where is his BMW (he loves those cars), where is his great sound-system with world-class speakers (he loves music), where and when has he been able to travel and party since the kids came, how often is he able to hang out with the guys at a jazz club, and where is his great apartment in the city with access to all the cultural ambiance and activities he enjoys? He’s stuck in a bland suburb, in a boring suburban home, with the children and with me, who is sporting these new wrinkles on my face that will only expand as the years go by. We use up all his money. We take up almost all of his spare time. He has to listen to songs about “Baby Beluga” and “ABC” as he drives a mini-van around during his weekends. He gets to guide a little child down the Beginner’s Hill over and over when we make it out to the ski-hill, with almost no time to take the Black Diamond runs as he once did. Many evenings we both fall asleep ten minutes into a movie we found on Netflix when we were finally able to sit down together at 10:00 PM. Exciting life!
If I ended our marriage and left in a huff tomorrow, the man who married me fifteen years ago could yet have a fun, successful, adventurous life. If he walked out tomorrow, however, the children and I would miss him in every single area of our lives for a very long time (I have no illusions about the relationship market for a 40-year-old single mom with children). I appreciate more and more the value of a noble, faithful, loving man who makes a conscious choice to be true to his marriage vows, and is good to his family. The Manosphere is explicitly clear about what he’s missing, but those bloggers also write about what men appreciate in the good women in their lives. And I try to be good to my man. He gets an orderly and clean house, home-made meals are ready when he walks in at the end of the day, the washing and ironing are done, and the household chores are complete so we can relax together for those few hours when he’s at home. I also make a deliberate, self-aware attempt to curb those typical womanly traits of nagging and petulant emotional blackmail. I try to be loving, and to look as good as a busy mom can look. Our younger children clamber all over him the minute he walks in the door, but if it weren’t for that, and for his endearingly daddy-ish tendency to play with them all until dinnertime, I would urge my husband to relax by the fire with a Scotch after work, like Mr. Banks. He earns that every day.
He likes coming home at the end of the day. I will never take that for granted. We shouldn’t, ladies. We’ve all seen otherwise in other families. Marriage is a huge risk for men: when they put those rings on our fingers they are giving us enormous power over their emotional and financial well-being because the courts love us and would let us walk away with the kids and the goods if we schemed to do it. We should remember what our men have given up in life when they married us (independence, time, finances), and do our best to help them believe and feel that they’ve actually gained something instead. We need to bring something to the marriage, not just sit back and expect to be adored, served and spoiled because we are so marvelous simply for existing. That’s a Disneyland fairy-tale, that’s what that is, and I’m no special Disney princess. I’m just a woman who was blessed to fall in love with and marry the good man I have, and he deserves the best from me without constantly having to deal with my worst (so there, Marilyn Monroe memes). He gives me his best in return. In spades.
Finally, the Manosphere validates the choices I made in life. Ladies, we’ve had decades of the media, Hollywood, academia, the music industry, celebrities, the arts, etc., all browbeating us constantly about the horrors and the sheer loserdom of being stay-at-home moms, of being wives who are devoted to their husbands and want to please them. It does wear you down sometimes, doesn’t it? I admit it: it wore me down on occasion. Those ladies in their power suits on the political stage, those have-it-all career women in Hollywood’s fantasy-land movies and sitcoms, these flawlessly groomed, immaculately made-up models on the screen, capable of being rocket scientists, martial arts experts and perfect mothers with serene children and spotless homes all rolled into one, constantly spouting “in-your-face-men!” snark while still having the male characters fall head over heels in love with them – those Hollywood fantasies sometimes got to me. At times they made me feel like I was an example of failed potential, a tool, a mere stepped-on servant of “The Patriarchy.” They portrayed my home, my children, my life as all wrong. All the time. (Ever watch Love Actually? The relationship that turned out to be the most prominent fraud in that movie was, of course, the one between the husband and wife in the traditional nuclear family.) The cultural air we breathe told me for years that someone like me was a loser. I didn’t really believe it, of course, but the constant drumbeat was wearying. The usually heartening church community can only do so much, because even among believers we’re often divided on the issue of women and men’s roles in relationships.
Then I found the bloggers of the Manosphere. I read their scorn of the very lifestyle that feminists kept saying I should have chosen. I discovered that many men see right through it all, every single grrrrl-power utterance. I found out that women’s snark and “sassiness” is actually really grating and annoying to men and they’ve had it up to here with the constant snarls against their masculinity. When they see a petite, half-starved, twig-like actress destroy three burly guys in a fight on screen, they laugh at the absurdity of it. They have observed and experienced the behavior of women in the workforce and, though I honestly believe NAWALT (must offer that caveat, of course), the Manosphere men describe these ladies’ cattiness to other female colleagues, how much emotions control their reasoning, how often they ride on the coattails of what the men do and how tense women often make the work environment with their uber-sensitive radar on for any fancied sign of misogyny. When the Manosphere men are told that men are no longer needed in this world, they just think, “So don’t call us when the plumbing malfunctions, or the roads need fixing, the car breaks down, the garbage has to be removed, a new construction needs building, your electricity stops working, something heavy has to be lifted … or you need soldiers to defend your land with their lives as they endure the pain, cold, filth, heavy loads, and terror.” I realized that, underneath most of their blunt crassness, these cynical and angry young writers were crying out for the mothering many had not experienced, for the women-of-wifely-material they had never met or could not find, and for the dads who had been denied the chance to be their fathers; though some of the bloggers, of course, just want to have a good time in life without responsibility, and are contemptuously grateful to feminism for paving their carefree way. I saw them punch back at years of being told they were evil, violent, potential abusers and rapists, just because they were boys and men. I discovered there are real injustices that many men, and their children, experience at the hands of the courts when it comes to custody battles and alimony payments. Children need their dads but biased courts and angry mothers can take these vital men out of their children’s lives, just like that, and rob those fathers of almost all financial assets as well.
The Manosphere also brought home to me a truth I will be sure to emphasize to my girls: a woman has about fifteen, maybe twenty years to be her freshest, her most beautiful she’ll ever be, with the world at her feet just for her smile; then that’s gone. If, by the end of that short passage of time, she has not found a man willing to commit to her and raise children with her, it’s most likely going to be a long, long walk alone to the cemetery that awaits us all at the end. Better to be a wrinkly fifty-year-old surrounded by a loving husband, appreciative children and grandchildren and memories of a life spent in service for loved ones while looking forward to a few last years of resting and travelling with your life partner, than a wrinkly fifty-year-old surrounded by pictures on the wall of people who shook hands with you once in an office and memories of a life spent as a wage-slave. Because, women, we all get wrinkly and old. The fresh look just … goes. The constant ego-boosting many of us ladies experience from ages sixteen to thirty-something, the light, pleasant flirting men engage in and the cloak-over-the-mud-puddle treatment from male strangers everywhere we go, can be taken for granted as our due, as a never-ending peon to our “special-ness,” if we don’t have a realistic head on our shoulders. All at once, men will stop noticing you and you will find yourself invisible; just another older woman going through the chores and requirements of her day. We will all get there one day, girls, every single one of us precious princesses. If your life is not fortified by something more permanent than what your looks can get you and do for you, this sudden change can be devastating – hence the huge industry in plastic surgery so some of us can try to put off rounding that corner all women must face. In my case, rounding that corner was not devastating, it just delivered some wry self-amusement when I realized the male staff in the sports store where my son hunted for shoes did not even see me, and even more thankfulness for the man in my life. He won’t behave like the patriarchs of old, like the Kings David and Solomon, adding hot young babes to their collection of wives. He just has his one aging wife for as long as we’re on earth together, and he still seems to see me with the eyes of love, finding beauty in looks that are fading in the eyes of the rest of the world. I’m not invisible to him, nor am I to my children. I’m vital to them all. It’s good.
And, thanks to the Manosphere, I realized afresh something I have always known but sometimes wavered in my conviction about it: every important choice God guided me to make in life – relationships, marriage, husband and children – was a good choice. The world needs wives and mothers like me. In fact, if we go, civilization goes, because the men who create and sustain civilization will see no need to do so, in fact, they will walk away, if they don’t think their women are worth the effort. It really is that simple.
They are rude online, these Manosphere men. They are ungodly, many of them. They indulge in over-the-top obscene language. They scheme to find ways to cajole women to into having sex, but lose respect for them when they do. They hurt women’s feelings all the time. They sometimes say awful things and they have displayed some of the most selfish opinions I have ever stumbled upon. Yes, they are not nice people. But … we cannot spare these Manosphere men. They fight. Men like them may help to give our civilization another century, if they cause enough women to wake up and smarten up. And I sincerely hope these cynical young men do find true happiness, and peace, at the end of their road, though I will pray that they all stay far, far away from my daughters while they travel on it.
What the Manosphere Has Given Me
For
years now in my spare time I have loved reading, and sometimes
commenting on politically conservative blogs. In late 2011 one of my favorite sites led me to Captain Capitalism, who transported me here a few days ago. The links on his blog brought me stumbling into the Manosphere. In the first throes of discovery, alternately fascinated, horrified and delighted, I often visited the sites of Dalrock, The University of Man (now sadly defunct), Return of Kings, Heartiste, Rational Male, The Spearhead,
etc. One thing was clear: amid all the dissoluteness and depravity on
display, these wrathful, cynical, amoral (most of them) young men were
taking down feminism, and I loved it.Yes, too frequently the Manosphere men are crass, crude, vulgar, and shockingly selfish about relationships and sex. But this happily-married, Christian stay-at-home mom doesn’t worry about their behavior all that much. I have my husband, who makes my world a better place when he walks in the room. I have our dear children, and I’m turning forty this year; I am not affected personally by what young men in their twenties and early thirties think about marriage and sexuality. I still go back to their sites occasionally now because, (in no particular order of significance): I love their eviscerating rants against feminism; the insights they provide will help me, and have already helped me guide my growing boys and girls to adulthood; their posts frequently reinforce my love of and appreciation for my husband; and their observations about women constantly validate the choices I have made in my life.
First: I abhor radical feminism and the pronouncements of prominent feminists often curdle my insides. I can’t abide how these women, combined with toxic leftist ideology, do their best to twist beautiful and worthy things – marriage, sex, devotion to family, pregnancy, raising children, and faith – into ugly, divisive, ‘oppressive,’ and sneer-worthy negatives. I am appalled at what their destructive ideology has done to our nation, our Western civilization. The wreckage is strewn about us; we all see it and are both horrified and saddened. Those kids, oh those kids: fatherless, overweight, tattooed, incoherent, wispy, dumbed-down, drugged-up, purposeless, feminized boys and termagant girls; they are prey for unpleasant people to make use of politically, sexually, and economically. A generation is lost partly because feminists tear down fatherhood and marriage, deliberately deny what is natural to men and women, and try to subvert everything good to cover up their own inadequacies and failures. So, when an intelligent and expressive writer in the Manosphere delivers a mighty, cruelly elegant screed of contempt against the women who helped wreck the West, I love every word and cry, “At last someone’s saying it!” (But you do have to go mining for the good stuff; there is a lot of junk in the Manosphere, too.)
Second: my children will benefit from what the Manosphere has taught me. My oldest boy has just become a teenager. He’s a quietly confident and intelligent lad. I’ve been dropping a little “red pill” wisdom on him about girls already; just a few statements here and there when he has questions. He is not going to be beaten down by the man-hating and boy-squelching powers out there if I have anything to do with it. The example of his parents’ marriage will help shape his understanding of relationships but might also leave him bewildered when he meets today’s girls raised in leftist-and-feminist-dominated homes.
So I’m carefully preparing him for the reality of hypergamy. I’m encouraging him to be realistic about ‘romantic love’ and not place any girl, even one he adores, onto a ‘do-no-wrong’ pedestal. I’m educating him about women’s use of emotions to manipulate people (his sisters certainly help open his eyes in that area!). When (if) he goes off to college, he will be well-informed about the dangers of false rape accusations and about how hyper-paranoid the girls around him will be in what is arguably one of the safest environments ever for the privileged western female.
I’m also encouraging him not to fall for feminist “grrrl power” nonsense. You should have seen his smile, as if the light dawned, when I once quoted to him from one of my favorite conservative lady bloggers: “If women ran the world, we would all still be living in caves, but with really, really fancy curtains.” I think he’s safe, now, from being cowed by feminist harridans into hating his own masculinity. Both my boys and my girls will be reminded often about all the great things that the strength, power and minds of men have done and are doing for our civilization: art and music, inventions, construction, civil engineering of cities’ infrastructures, first-responders during disasters, law-and-order providers, heroism in war and hard times. Thanks to his father, who generally ignores the Manosphere but seems amused with the nuggets I share (he usually just grins and says, “I could have told you that!”), and thanks to a filtered-by-mom (so far) Manosphere, our boys will come out intact after the teen years and into their twenties. I hope. They will recognize the type of girls and women to respect and fall in love with, and the type of girls and women to ignore and avoid. I hope.
As for my daughters, I now have a much clearer picture about the character of boys and men they will face when they leave the house, and what kind of women they should be if they hope to be happy. Feminine, slender, kind, giving, careful with their money and yes, hard-working: these are the traits I plan to encourage in my girls while also emphasizing God’s wisdom about abstaining from sexual relations outside of marriage. My daughters will receive our support and cheer-leading for any honorable career they desire to pursue, but I will explain to them that they have no one to blame but themselves if their choices have unhappy consequences when they’re older, especially if they insist on wasting years studying for a useless degree that does not provide them with a good job while leaving them with a life-limiting financial burden. They will be reminded not to ignore the biological reality of their prime years for bearing and raising children if they dream of having a family. And, if they try to go for a career and motherhood at the same time, I’ll ask them to carefully consider whether the added stress and frantic pace is worth it, and I will try to help them understand that expecting their husbands to do the housework will not end happily for all concerned. I will do my best to raise my girls to fit in the NAWALT group that many of the Manosphere men believe does not exist. As for those very same no-doubt-charming yet ruthlessly exploitive rogues, my beautiful daughters will be warned about them and will be wise enough to look for and find the good Christian men out there. I hope.
Third, the Manosphere helps me appreciate my husband. I always did appreciate him, don’t get me wrong, but it had somehow escaped me before that men really put up with a lot, and give up a lot, to become husbands and fathers. Do you realize, girls, that a man can live on little and still have a great time in life? He can, indeed. We ladies, on the other hand, and the kids – we are a financial Black Hole.
Consider my husband. Here is a good-looking, confident, intelligent man who easily draws people in with his friendly personality. He has a well-paying engineering position. He is also turning forty in a few months. Where is his BMW (he loves those cars), where is his great sound-system with world-class speakers (he loves music), where and when has he been able to travel and party since the kids came, how often is he able to hang out with the guys at a jazz club, and where is his great apartment in the city with access to all the cultural ambiance and activities he enjoys? He’s stuck in a bland suburb, in a boring suburban home, with the children and with me, who is sporting these new wrinkles on my face that will only expand as the years go by. We use up all his money. We take up almost all of his spare time. He has to listen to songs about “Baby Beluga” and “ABC” as he drives a mini-van around during his weekends. He gets to guide a little child down the Beginner’s Hill over and over when we make it out to the ski-hill, with almost no time to take the Black Diamond runs as he once did. Many evenings we both fall asleep ten minutes into a movie we found on Netflix when we were finally able to sit down together at 10:00 PM. Exciting life!
If I ended our marriage and left in a huff tomorrow, the man who married me fifteen years ago could yet have a fun, successful, adventurous life. If he walked out tomorrow, however, the children and I would miss him in every single area of our lives for a very long time (I have no illusions about the relationship market for a 40-year-old single mom with children). I appreciate more and more the value of a noble, faithful, loving man who makes a conscious choice to be true to his marriage vows, and is good to his family. The Manosphere is explicitly clear about what he’s missing, but those bloggers also write about what men appreciate in the good women in their lives. And I try to be good to my man. He gets an orderly and clean house, home-made meals are ready when he walks in at the end of the day, the washing and ironing are done, and the household chores are complete so we can relax together for those few hours when he’s at home. I also make a deliberate, self-aware attempt to curb those typical womanly traits of nagging and petulant emotional blackmail. I try to be loving, and to look as good as a busy mom can look. Our younger children clamber all over him the minute he walks in the door, but if it weren’t for that, and for his endearingly daddy-ish tendency to play with them all until dinnertime, I would urge my husband to relax by the fire with a Scotch after work, like Mr. Banks. He earns that every day.
He likes coming home at the end of the day. I will never take that for granted. We shouldn’t, ladies. We’ve all seen otherwise in other families. Marriage is a huge risk for men: when they put those rings on our fingers they are giving us enormous power over their emotional and financial well-being because the courts love us and would let us walk away with the kids and the goods if we schemed to do it. We should remember what our men have given up in life when they married us (independence, time, finances), and do our best to help them believe and feel that they’ve actually gained something instead. We need to bring something to the marriage, not just sit back and expect to be adored, served and spoiled because we are so marvelous simply for existing. That’s a Disneyland fairy-tale, that’s what that is, and I’m no special Disney princess. I’m just a woman who was blessed to fall in love with and marry the good man I have, and he deserves the best from me without constantly having to deal with my worst (so there, Marilyn Monroe memes). He gives me his best in return. In spades.
Finally, the Manosphere validates the choices I made in life. Ladies, we’ve had decades of the media, Hollywood, academia, the music industry, celebrities, the arts, etc., all browbeating us constantly about the horrors and the sheer loserdom of being stay-at-home moms, of being wives who are devoted to their husbands and want to please them. It does wear you down sometimes, doesn’t it? I admit it: it wore me down on occasion. Those ladies in their power suits on the political stage, those have-it-all career women in Hollywood’s fantasy-land movies and sitcoms, these flawlessly groomed, immaculately made-up models on the screen, capable of being rocket scientists, martial arts experts and perfect mothers with serene children and spotless homes all rolled into one, constantly spouting “in-your-face-men!” snark while still having the male characters fall head over heels in love with them – those Hollywood fantasies sometimes got to me. At times they made me feel like I was an example of failed potential, a tool, a mere stepped-on servant of “The Patriarchy.” They portrayed my home, my children, my life as all wrong. All the time. (Ever watch Love Actually? The relationship that turned out to be the most prominent fraud in that movie was, of course, the one between the husband and wife in the traditional nuclear family.) The cultural air we breathe told me for years that someone like me was a loser. I didn’t really believe it, of course, but the constant drumbeat was wearying. The usually heartening church community can only do so much, because even among believers we’re often divided on the issue of women and men’s roles in relationships.
Then I found the bloggers of the Manosphere. I read their scorn of the very lifestyle that feminists kept saying I should have chosen. I discovered that many men see right through it all, every single grrrrl-power utterance. I found out that women’s snark and “sassiness” is actually really grating and annoying to men and they’ve had it up to here with the constant snarls against their masculinity. When they see a petite, half-starved, twig-like actress destroy three burly guys in a fight on screen, they laugh at the absurdity of it. They have observed and experienced the behavior of women in the workforce and, though I honestly believe NAWALT (must offer that caveat, of course), the Manosphere men describe these ladies’ cattiness to other female colleagues, how much emotions control their reasoning, how often they ride on the coattails of what the men do and how tense women often make the work environment with their uber-sensitive radar on for any fancied sign of misogyny. When the Manosphere men are told that men are no longer needed in this world, they just think, “So don’t call us when the plumbing malfunctions, or the roads need fixing, the car breaks down, the garbage has to be removed, a new construction needs building, your electricity stops working, something heavy has to be lifted … or you need soldiers to defend your land with their lives as they endure the pain, cold, filth, heavy loads, and terror.” I realized that, underneath most of their blunt crassness, these cynical and angry young writers were crying out for the mothering many had not experienced, for the women-of-wifely-material they had never met or could not find, and for the dads who had been denied the chance to be their fathers; though some of the bloggers, of course, just want to have a good time in life without responsibility, and are contemptuously grateful to feminism for paving their carefree way. I saw them punch back at years of being told they were evil, violent, potential abusers and rapists, just because they were boys and men. I discovered there are real injustices that many men, and their children, experience at the hands of the courts when it comes to custody battles and alimony payments. Children need their dads but biased courts and angry mothers can take these vital men out of their children’s lives, just like that, and rob those fathers of almost all financial assets as well.
The Manosphere also brought home to me a truth I will be sure to emphasize to my girls: a woman has about fifteen, maybe twenty years to be her freshest, her most beautiful she’ll ever be, with the world at her feet just for her smile; then that’s gone. If, by the end of that short passage of time, she has not found a man willing to commit to her and raise children with her, it’s most likely going to be a long, long walk alone to the cemetery that awaits us all at the end. Better to be a wrinkly fifty-year-old surrounded by a loving husband, appreciative children and grandchildren and memories of a life spent in service for loved ones while looking forward to a few last years of resting and travelling with your life partner, than a wrinkly fifty-year-old surrounded by pictures on the wall of people who shook hands with you once in an office and memories of a life spent as a wage-slave. Because, women, we all get wrinkly and old. The fresh look just … goes. The constant ego-boosting many of us ladies experience from ages sixteen to thirty-something, the light, pleasant flirting men engage in and the cloak-over-the-mud-puddle treatment from male strangers everywhere we go, can be taken for granted as our due, as a never-ending peon to our “special-ness,” if we don’t have a realistic head on our shoulders. All at once, men will stop noticing you and you will find yourself invisible; just another older woman going through the chores and requirements of her day. We will all get there one day, girls, every single one of us precious princesses. If your life is not fortified by something more permanent than what your looks can get you and do for you, this sudden change can be devastating – hence the huge industry in plastic surgery so some of us can try to put off rounding that corner all women must face. In my case, rounding that corner was not devastating, it just delivered some wry self-amusement when I realized the male staff in the sports store where my son hunted for shoes did not even see me, and even more thankfulness for the man in my life. He won’t behave like the patriarchs of old, like the Kings David and Solomon, adding hot young babes to their collection of wives. He just has his one aging wife for as long as we’re on earth together, and he still seems to see me with the eyes of love, finding beauty in looks that are fading in the eyes of the rest of the world. I’m not invisible to him, nor am I to my children. I’m vital to them all. It’s good.
And, thanks to the Manosphere, I realized afresh something I have always known but sometimes wavered in my conviction about it: every important choice God guided me to make in life – relationships, marriage, husband and children – was a good choice. The world needs wives and mothers like me. In fact, if we go, civilization goes, because the men who create and sustain civilization will see no need to do so, in fact, they will walk away, if they don’t think their women are worth the effort. It really is that simple.
They are rude online, these Manosphere men. They are ungodly, many of them. They indulge in over-the-top obscene language. They scheme to find ways to cajole women to into having sex, but lose respect for them when they do. They hurt women’s feelings all the time. They sometimes say awful things and they have displayed some of the most selfish opinions I have ever stumbled upon. Yes, they are not nice people. But … we cannot spare these Manosphere men. They fight. Men like them may help to give our civilization another century, if they cause enough women to wake up and smarten up. And I sincerely hope these cynical young men do find true happiness, and peace, at the end of their road, though I will pray that they all stay far, far away from my daughters while they travel on it.
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