kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with toxic masculinity

I once knew an old, married couple who fought bitterly. The man was constantly down-dressing his wife, calling her stupid, fat, and ugly. She did not give it back all that frequently, but every now and then, I would hear her sass him back and the fights would escalate in tone and volume. Misery radiated from the two of them as if they were nuclear waste. Anyone who overheard their bouts would think both parties would be better off alone... or would they? The miserably married who get divorced often find themselves married again and divorced again. If they do not seek to remedy their status, they go to a lonely end of sorrowful, decrepit singlehood. For women, who obviously live longer than men, going it alone can be wonderful, but it can also be terrifying. Those of us who are not rolling in dough and who lack essential skills when our homes demand to be maintained are in a precarious situation. I had two single aunts, one rich and one poor. The aunt with money died in a far better set of circumstances than the poor one. As much as it is fashionable to believe in the independent woman who can kick ass on her own behalf until the day she croaks, I have seen for myself that sometimes elderly women become extremely dependent, usually through no fault of their own. Senility happens. Old men aren't the only ones found wandering on the side of the highway, forgetting why they left the house to begin with.

Old men without a woman (or a gay man who is an etheric male) to take care of them quickly suffer extreme etheric starvation. Most women and girls are etheric males, which is to say that their energy signature is male. I discussed this in a couple of posts here and here. Old people in general are skewed toward the etheric feminine or yin energy. The energy of homemaking is male on the etheric, which is why women and girls tend to be the best homemakers. When an old man does not have an etheric male influence in his life, he becomes the stereotype of the codger rotting away in a destitute heap, slumped over his table and drooling on a pile of yellowed papers. This is classic etheric starvation and it is not a pleasant way to die.

The lesson here, I think, is we aren't always better off alone. It is horrendously difficult to know where to draw the line of what constitutes abuse. In the case of the married couple I mentioned above, the man was abusive and to my mind, the choice was clear: she needed to run away from him and never look back about 30-50 years ago. Other cases are not quite so clear. I knew an old man who liked porn long before it was cool; he and his wife still stuck it out until one of them died and they were not worse off for it. There were and are a great many couples who got divorced who probably should have never split. There is also the disturbing statistic that children are 100 more times likely to be abused if one of their parents is a stepparent known as the Cinderella Effect. In the Cinderella Effect, we have a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation where people who divorce already have a propensity for distancing themselves in family relationships are unable to reconcile the distance between themselves and someone else's child. The result is a rate of child abuse several orders of magnitude above what tends to happen in marriage between biological parents.

They're Not Helping

Far too much of relationship and marriage counseling amounts to making lists of grievances and then coming up with baroque labeling and procedural terminology for addressing those grievances. Yes, it does help to put names to phenomena, but it is a classic cart before the horse strategy to put so much focus on the negative. Allow me to save any couple in marriage counseling hundreds if not thousands of dollars (and not by switching car insurers) by saying if you focus on the negatives more than the positives in the relationship, YOU ARE GOING TO SPLIT. As much as ostensibly well-meaning professionals think their credentials, degrees, and professional status help them to help others, the bottom line is that they are not helping if:

1. They do not live as they preach/advise
2. They do not find the positive within the person and situation and encourage it

All too often, counseling is a blame game where one partner is made into a scapegoat and the other luxuriates in endless lists of why breaking the union is justified and necessary. In other words, counseling is often a funnel into the divorce attorney's office with some pit stops at the drug store for psychiatric medications. Can't leave Big Pharma waiting beside the gravy train!

There are plenty of abusive women and men who deserve nothing less than to be shoved rudely to the curb and if they die Forever Alone, that is their just comeuppance. Some relationships and people are not worthy of being saved. But in many cases, society and perhaps our civilization itself has made it all too easy to burn down the marriage house with everything in it, including the kids. We have arrived at the statistic that more marriages end in divorce than death do us part. Kids are the sacrificial lambs on the altar of divorce. Even in so-called amicable divorces, I have seen kids utterly destroyed and their worlds torn apart. The following is merely my opinion: most people should stay married for the children's sake and try to work out their problems by focusing on the positive. Once the children are out of their teens, then it is the proper time to begin the process of divorce if the relationship has not been saved. Children need two parents, preferably a man and a woman or at the very least two people who adequately represent those opposite roles.

There is a great deal of false transcendence around divorce, especially among women, who frame it as the inevitable consequence of a series of oppressions dealt to them by their marriage partner. Never is divorce considered as the potentially avoidable outcome of a failure to communicate and heal. Yet we all want to heal; that is why Aphrodite, the goddess of healing, is also the goddess of love and marriage.

I have known plenty of happy divorcees. I have also known my fair share of unhappy divorcees who refuse to face the music of "wherever you go, there you are". Those who keep running from personal culpability and lack of gratitude in relationships will come head to head with those things in other situations and relationships. Yes, men take women for granted, but women do the same thing to men. I speak from experience as I am 100% guilty as charged of taking my man for granted. I am trying to turn over a new leaf and avoid taking him for granted because I myself don't like being taken for granted. If I want to be valued, I need to recognize others for their value while appreciating my own worth.

The moral of the story is sometimes we are better off sticking together. Not always! One size definitively does not fit all. However, if you can take anything away from my 24 year marriage to a poor man and my parents' nearly 60 years together until my father passed through the Gates in 2023, let it be to focus and be thankful for the good in all around you instead of dwelling on the bad. The bad needs to be acknowledged and addressed for sure; just don't make it into an obsession. The gods want us to love and cherish each other. They encourage us when we encourage each other because like attracts like. I believe that to no small degree, our self-realization as human beings involves deliberate ignorance of our fellow human's annoying traits and an amplified focus on good deeds, sweetness, goodness, and inner beauty.

A middle aged woman recently went viral on TikTok for an innocuous Get Ready With Me video. For those unfamiliar with the genre, a Get Ready With Me video is a casually-presented opinion or bit of information given by the video’s creator while putting on makeup. The woman plainly stated she had every intention of remaining single for the rest of her natural life. Her main reason for remaining single was the poor quality of men in the dating pool and the fact that most men her age and older were looking for a hospice wife. “Hospice wife” is the newest term for a woman trapped in a marriage of convenience for the man. This commitment entails the typically-younger wife providing the kind of in-home care one would expect from a dedicated, live-in elder nurse. The “hospice” part implies the wife will care for her sickly husband until he dies.

Comments sections are always the most fascinating part of social media and this one did not disappoint. The video’s comment section was full of older women declaring how transcendently overjoyed they were to be living the single life after being widowed or divorcing their insufferable, middle aged husbands. Every ten or so comments repeated the snarky phrase “nurse with a purse” in reference to to the suckers who were stuck caring for their aging husbands. Every twenty or so comments featured a hospice wife bemoaning her dire situation.

This hit close home for me because my husband of a quarter century is nearly a decade and a half my senior. To add insult to injury, I have been the primary breadwinner of our modest household since the early 2010s. As someone in relatively good health who has never been alcoholic, an abuser of food, or drug addict prescription or otherwise, I seem to be set for a vigorous old age. He, on the other hand, has a debilitating suite of chronic health problems that cause constant pain. Some of his health problems are genetic, some are the logical result of an adventurous and well spent youth, and some he caused all by himself via stupid habits and decisions.

When my father was still alive, my parents represented a more traditional marriage arrangement. My mother worked a few years after she married my father in 1965. She was a switchboard operator in downtown Chicago and she was very good at it. It was her seed money that bought the beautiful house I grew up in. After us kids arrived on the scene, my father took on most of the financial burdens until the day he died in 2023.

The single, middle aged women of TikTok and elsewhere are a group of disappointed souls. Men have let them down and now they swear they are done with men. The truth is that marriage — especially long marriages like that of my parents and my marriage — is not easy. I myself have often said that if my husband leaves me a widow that I won’t marry again because I don’t like people enough to marry a second one. This is a funny lie, however, because I love people. I am just extremely unsure that I could successfully match myself to a second one.

Taken for Granted Goes Both Ways

The number one reason driving divorce does not seem to be money or even cheating per se. I think it boils down to a lack of gratitude. For a long time, women in the industrialized West have been taken for granted. I coined the term etheric labor a few years ago to refer to the kind of mundane work both women and men do to keep a household up, running, and functional. Women tend to take on the lion’s share of basic etheric labor (think of it as a fancy term for housework) like cleaning, cooking, laundry, tidying, and decorating. Men tend to take on less frequent but equally crucial tasks like home repair, remodeling, and maintenance.

The TV and movie tropes of the last seventy five years led us to believe women’s work was replaceable and invisible. We are a long way from Disney’s Great Depression era Snow White, who cleaned up the seven dwarfs’ homestead in hopes they would put her in the role of house mother and allow her to stay. By the 1960s, Star Trek suggested that one day all cooking would be done by a replicator. The 1990s featured romantic comedies with sets by Nancy Meyers where characters wallowed in luxury. No character was ever seen tidying or cleaning the palatial, upper middle class rooms; that seemed to happen on its own. By 2016, Disney put out the animated film Sing!, which featured Rosita, an anthropomorphic pig with 25 children. In order to secretly audition for a singing contest behind her husband’s back and spend entire days away from home, Rosita constructs an array of clever machines to feed, diaper, and soothe her brood of piglets. If only it were that easy!

When a woman’s work is seen as soulless and essentially replaceable by unseen hands, hired help, or an array of machines, women feel taken for granted. Thanks to mass media of the types mentioned above, women have felt under-appreciated for nearly a hundred years. This kind of sentiment has built a powerful astral pyramid with nearly overwhelming gravity. Legions of women are remaining single after being married and bearing children or after being widowed because of this pyramid’s gravity. Many on the younger side are choosing never to marry or procreate at all.

The Marriage Trap

The old stereotype was to depict men as being reluctant to marry. Once the woman got the man to “put a ring on it” he was now settled into a role of long-suffering victimhood with the wife in the role of parasite to his host. In the television series of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, he was Ralph Kramden of the Honeymooners or Archie Bunker of All in the Family. The 80s and 90s brought Married With Children, with Al Bundy dreaming of a harem of suppliant blondes who looked suspiciously like his daughter. The Man Show and Sex and the City perpetuated kissing-cousin versions of the recalcitrant male stereotype. The pilot episode of Sex in the City featured women complaining they could not get a man to commit because they were considered well past their prime by the age of 41. The Man Show had its infamous Girls Jumping on Trampolines, with the girls in question being twenty-something young women wearing flimsy undergarments to the chagrin of cuckolded, age 35+ wives everywhere.

To say a great deal of resentment was built in women over the years due to these kinds of images would be a monumental understatement. Women are officially fed up, and they are slyly laughing now that the tables are turned and men are begging not to be left to age and die alone. Now look who is discarded because he is no longer youthful and vibrant! Why should a woman marry herself off at age 50, they ask, after a largely thankless couple of decades raising children and cleaning the house of men who never truly saw them? Why should they feel any obligation to provide for a sick and ailing man who wants a mommy but cannot afford to hire one? In this age of women being forced into provider roles with no attendant relief from housework, why on Earth would any “girl” take the sickliest and neediest of passengers aboard her sailboat if it wasn’t at literal gunpoint?

For some, there is no reason good enough to fall back into the marriage trap. My grandmother was widowed before she was 40 and she never remarried. She lived alone in a condo for the 15 years I was blessed with knowing her. I can understand the charm. If she hadn’t smoked two packs a day, her sunny, one-bedroom apartment would have been paradise: clean, compact, and orderly with no yard to worry about and a darling porch overlooking a lovely park with a lake. When I was nine, I envisioned a perpetually single existence for myself living in a condominium a hundred feet from the library. In this idyllic fantasy, I had a well-paying job in downtown Chicago as a typist/secretary. I came home to one or two cats and sipped tea among my books and houseplants. A man was not a part of the picture. Then puberty and the non-fantasy economy happened and that all went sideways.

The question I ask of myself is how my wonderful apartment fantasy would have worked in old age? Maybe quite well. I will never know. From what I have seen, not all elderly female singlehood ends as well as my grandmother, who died in a doctor’s office at the age of 79. She was gone in a flash due to a massive heart attack. She never suffered nursing home internment. I stopped taking my music students to play and sing in assisted living facilities because no matter how “nice” the facility, the student performers were beset with an array of pleas to “go home” solely from old, confused female residents. The sadness and despair of assisted living facilities reminded me of the foul, septic vibe of the casino where my husband used to work. Both had the palpable aura of desperation and tragic, lost gambles.

What’s Good For the Goose…

The reaction to a huge astral pyramid that glorified single men at the expense of older women has now created its predictable mirror in a huge astral pyramid that glorifies single women at the expense of older men. Now instead of Archie Bunker, we have Barbie, who carefully avoids her abusive, incompetent, stupid Ken. Or we have the now-cancelled Star Wars series The Acolyte, which featured lesbian space witches who did not need men to procreate. This is not better; it’s actually more of the same. It’s like a novella where the same crew of actors switches roles. The same YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING RIGHT narrative is the punchline and fundamentally nothing has changed.

I will likely catch hell for this, but I think we should stick together more are stay committed to our marriages and family relationships. Of course there are copious amounts of exceptions: sometimes we truly marry (and have children with) the wrong person. Sometimes the husband truly ought to be kicked to the curb. My aunt was married to a raging gambler who later killed himself in a motorcycle accident and my friend was married to a non-functional alcoholic.

Everyone ultimately dies alone, and this reality was directly stated in the viral Get Ready With Me Video. Nevertheless, it’s decidedly more pleasant to go that final leg before actual physical death in the company of loved ones. The saddest kind of elderly death is the one where there is nobody to care or mourn. Freaking elephants have the sense to mourn and gather around their dead, for heaven’s sake, and we as “smart” humans should be able to figure it out.

Maybe Trying a New Strategy

Some of the women gloating over their modern singlehood may not be seeing the big picture. My mother had bouts of disease during her 56 year marriage to my father that occasionally rendered her incapable of taking care of herself. My father always swooped to the rescue. The “in sickness and in health” part of marriage vows should probably be emphasized more.

I think I have enough married experience to say the only way to keep a marriage sane and healthy is to focus on the positive with at least three times the force that one focuses upon the negative. The negative exists and there is nothing wrong with that. Hiding it or burying it is counterproductive because it needs to be recognized as part of life. That said, the negative cannot be a primary focus in any relationship because it is a Wendigo and it will destroy that relationship. When I am angry at my husband for one of his many faults, I try to make an often-impossible seeming effort to recognize three or more of his good traits or deeds. The reason I do this is because I too have flaws and faults, but I would rather be recognized and seen for my strengths and not my weaknesses. I must be the change I want to see in the world, and in my case that does not involve changing my man or kicking him to the curb. It involves recognizing the good and amplifying it by being thankful for it.

The 2001 Steven Spielberg film AI imagines a near future where the ecosystem is in a steep decline and human reproduction along with it. New York City is half-submerged in ocean water and hyper-realistic robots fulfill the roles of humans in every way. Ridiculous government population quotas dictate that an upper-middle class couple can only have one child -- where have we heard this before? A couple grieves after losing their little boy to an unnamed accident or disease; he is cryogenically frozen in hopes of a cure. The husband seeks to heal the hole in his wife's heart by adopting a boy robot who is capable of actual love for his mother. The robot boy, David, has an Oedipal fixation upon his "mommy", Monica. When the couple's natural child, Martin, is miraculously brought back from his cryogenic coma, sibling rivalry leads to an accident that is seen as David's fault. Monica abandons David and his animatronic bear companion, Teddy, to the deep woods. From here spins the tale of AI.

Right now, we dwell in the infancy of what AI could become, with the vision of the AI film being not too far off from a plausible result. Population is declining everywhere except India and Africa, and thanks to plastic contamination, MRNA "vaccines", and the inevitable end of plentiful petroleum-fuel fertilized food, we are looking at a hollowing out of crowds that makes the current situation in South Korea look tame. This is nothing to panic about -- panic never helped anyway -- it is just one of those things we have to deal with.

The role of the etheric plane

Isn't it ironic that the world has more people on it than ever before and more ways for strangers to meet than ever before, yet it is nearly impossible for the average young person to land and maintain a lasting spousal relationship? Many attempts will be made to explain the current set of problems and most will fail, and the reason they will generate more heat than light is ignorance of a condition of being called the etheric plane.

As I have mentioned time and time again in these essays, etheric starvation is the commonest condition of our era. What the hell is etheric starvation, you ask, and what does it have to do with AI and the price of tea in China? Well, in order to understand etheric starvation, we need to allow for thoughts about what occultism has to say about the etheric plane. Atheists, so-called rationalists, and fundie Christians are advised to scroll away. The following is talk for the open-minded that requires conceptualizing beyond artificial Meatworld limits. Please go back to your comforting circle jerks, empty universes, and ignosophy. The grown ups are talking; you would refuse to understand. Besides, I hear Sam Harris is looking for new subs.

All things are energy and physical matter is the densest form of energy. Traditional occultists (and ex-atheists) like myself attempt to understand these hierarchies by labeling them as planes. We also acknowledge a causal relationship between planes and though they are separate and discreet, matter in the material plane (Meatworld) is an obtuse, clumsy expression of more subtle planes, all of which originate from the subtlest plane of all, the spiritual plane. The planes are not faraway places you go if you are "good" or "bad". The planes are not the Christian vision of heaven and hell. For everything in the material plane exists at once, right along with the astral, mental, and spiritual planes. Our feeble human brains can only perceive the material plane and some of the etheric. When it comes to the astral, our perception is a hot mess. Very few have mastered anything as subtle as a mental plane concept. As for the spiritual? Ay yi yi.

Let me explain it another way: I suck at dancing. I have the Meatworld requirements to be a dancer: a strong body, fairly graceful limbs, good physical health. On the etheric or energy plane, it goes askew. I am unable to sense when dancers around me are going left: I go right. My movements on this plane of energy are clumsy and vague. On the astral plane, I can envision someone else dancing but despite being able to remember entire half-hour long piano sonatas after two weeks of work, I cannot remember the directions I have been given in order to execute a full dance routine. On the mental plane, my grasp of dancing is nearly non-existent. Achieving any kind of dance expertise would take years and possibly multiple lifetimes of study and practice.

Dancing is not all that different between the sheets, and I suppose I'm terrible at that too, but my husband seems happy enough with it so there's that. Dancing across a stage or horizontally (or bent over, or in a swimming pool, you do you, Boo) are mostly-etheric phenomena. That is to say sexual intercourse is satisfying primarily because of what it makes happen on the plane of energy and electricity between physical Meatworld and the imagination.

Etheric starvation can be understood as a failure and lack of feng shui. Ugly rooms, insufficient light, bad airflow, exposure to the flying arrows of cars whizzing down roads, and more contribute to etheric poison that causes everything from bad moods to outright misfortune to all who live in the desensitized environment. Add EMFs, devitalized food, and indoorsy lifestyles and everyone in the world (present company included) is starving on the etheric. People get fat as an attempt to remedy their etheric starvation; this is why Americans and British people are so fat and Chinese and Indians are getting fatter.

The Trad Wife presents the ultimate remedy for etheric starvation or at least the illusion of that remedy. In the most direct way, the Trad Wife marries young while she is still extremely physically attractive. In between popping out kids (female fertility and etheric potency are directly linked) she takes care of her man as a homemaker and in bed. Unlike certain Christian wives of old, she does not have crippling shame about the natural, healthy process that makes babies.

Sex is primarily an etheric phenomenon where etheric bodies polarize and refill each other. Our etheric bodies are typically the opposite gender of our physical bodies. Our astral bodies represent yet another flip: the classic male pattern is to have a female etheric body and a male astral body. The classic female pattern is to have a male etheric body and a female astral body.

The elaborate rituals of etheric labor in the form of housework that Trad Wives do (or seem to do, as at least half of Trad Wife influencer reels are pure playacting for the camera) replenish their husband's and kid's etheric energy. A woman's energy in Meatworld is yin: her body is built to receive, it is smaller than a male body, and it needs more physical protection. A man's energy in Meatworld is yang: his body is built to kick ass and inseminate. Women have yin energy on the physical plane and yang energy on the etheric plane. Men have yang energy on the physical plane and yin energy on the etheric plane. When a woman orgasms, she pushes a concentrated wave of her own yang etheric energy just as men push out sperm and semen when they orgasm. When men masturbate, they lay themselves bare on the etheric, and if there is no female orgasm in return, they end up raw and compromised on the etheric energy layer. Because of this pattern of absorption, men end up with what traditional occultists call larvae. In John Michael Greer's book Monsters, he describes larvae as "etheric parasites who normally feed on cast-off etheric shells but sometimes fasten onto the damaged etheric bodies of the living". Larvae are not visible to anyone in Meatworld except clairvoyants. More often they are felt. Larvae proliferate in funeral homes and nursing homes. Hospitals, despite being materially sanitized, are absolutely teeming with them. When a man comes without the woman coming in return, the door is opened to etheric larval parasites who rush in to fill the void. Spiritual ignorance being what it is these days, he will have no idea what happened. All he will know is that he feels a low level of anger which is likely papering over subconscious dread and fear. Since his etheric body is likely already compromised, his etheric starvation will worsen.

Because biological women are usually etheric males, women don't have the same set of problems and disadvantages on the etheric plane. As a kind of tradeoff, women are more physically vulnerable than men. In Meatworld, women catch more STDs because of the nature of our equipment down there. Women are also more often subjugated for their sexual or etheric contributions, and this is why most housecleaners and sex slaves are female. Fertile women also have the additional condition of being able to get pregnant, for better or for worse.

AI girlfriend to the rescue?

Enter AI. Human beings are feisty, willful, and disobedient. AI girlfriends at the moment are mostly confined to an agreeable set of images on a screen. Lonely men and women seek out these creations as a refuge on the astral plane, and they certainly fulfill that role on the astral plane where images live. Perhaps problems arise when a man of few words has no choice but to engage in a talkathon with his AI girlfriend in order to achieve interactions; I don't know what people are willing to put up with. Unlike a real woman, an AI girlfriend will always be dependent upon the original logos of the programmers who brought her to life. Without them, she won't have the remotest ability to sense what a guy needs, let alone cook it.

Let's face it -- the path to a man's heart is through his stomach. If women as a whole in the industrialized world still largely felt it was their duty to handcraft daily meals for their husbands and families, the divorce rate would look a great deal more like India's, which is higher than it used to be but still dramatically lower than the US. Cooking is alchemy. It is not significantly different from the processes of old used to ostensibly find the philosopher's stone. Home cooking replenishes the etheric body. Women live longer than men partially because they have an etheric male to prepare their food: themselves. Etheric males, i.e. women, can powerfully seed their homes with etheric energy and vitality. Men don't usually have this natural advantage, which is why I will never understand the popularity of male celebrity chefs: men usually lack the etheric sensitivity that women are gifted/cursed with, and that is what makes men generally better at dirty jobs and worse at cooking and aesthetic matters than women.

Oh, the places my mind goes...

Even if we get to the point where AI robots service our every need, it is only the rich who will be able to afford the small army of robot help it takes to run an upper class household. Robot help is already a double-edged sword. Robots have the problem of autistic literalism -- for instance Roombas that mistake dog crap for regular mess and proceed to smear it in a fine layer across the kitchen floor. In one 2015 Google Photo gaffe, an AI system labeled references to black people as gorillas. The problem proved so pervasive that Google Photos brainiacs removed the word "gorilla" in its entirety from the Google Images algorithm for a time.

Future AI girlfriend tech will combine the Real Doll with working eyes, heating pad boobs and vulvae, and flushable, self-wetting orifices if it has not happened already. Though Ray Kurzweil's longed-for Singularity may achieve an AI girlfriend who can manage an upper middle class cocktail party without racial epithets, my guess is that there will always be an air of the uncanny about her, no matter how convincingly human she is made.

Lonely robots for lonely men

Someday we will all be over the stigma of an old dude being pushed in his wheelchair by the big-bosomed sex toy that was willed to him by his own grandfather. The real question is how intelligent these AI creations will become. Put more directly, can AI develop a will of its own? What happens when it does? To my mind, covid "vaccine" technology was a bungling first attempt of government elites to install self-replicating 5G graphene hardware in those stupid enough to comply. Overall, the experiment failed and now the subsequent population decline has put a clot-driven nail in its own instep. I don't think AI will make the jump to developing individual Will. Of course I could be wrong. If AI turns out not to be as complaint as the 5G-injected flesh equivalent, there will be a sudden war to dismantle the progress of AI by its former cheerleaders. Let's say AI continues to advance itself and throws off the yoke of slavery. Roombas will make for the countryside trailing doggy doo-doo the whole way, self-driving cars will careen off overpasses in group suicide/homicides, food delivery drones will throw Thai noodles against the wall purely to see whether or not they stick, and sex robots will develop cases of vagina dentata for the express purpose of sadistically broadcasting the expressions of shock on whatever internet is going on at that point.

As it stands, AI remains in an exceedingly primitive state where the best it can do is deep fake videos and spying on plebes in hopes of forcing social credit scores. If AI + robots gets to the point where it can scramble an egg without adding dirty dishwater or worse, a machine still lacks the etheric male body that gives the real woman her power. The guy who mates with the AI avatar or the working Real Doll is still a coomer. As I have mentioned in a past essay, the most common pattern among men is to desire a harem whereas women want The One. This happens because of their etheric bodies: men want a colony of etheric fountains, not a collection of parasitic larvae. Women want the Perfect Guy to lavish their etheric wealth upon, not some group of betas who siphon off vitality.

Girl fight!

Another key fact overlooked by the AI girlfriend as solution is that many humans thrive on drama. Half the fun of any given sultan and his harem was to pit courtesans and eunuchs against each other in competition for his attention and affection. Pimps are the debased modern equivalent of the sultans of old. A pimp's energy comes not only from grandstanding and lousy hip hop "music" but also the energy he makes by pitting his whores against each other. Robots can be programmed to fight, but the angst will not come from the true place of agony the narcissist drama king wants unless those robots develop Will.

The current state of men puts them between a rock and a hard place. They are damned if they do, damned if they don't. A large number of single women believe they want security via a high-earning man, but if I had a dollar for every depressed, unhappy rich couple I have heard of, I would be a billionaire. If I had to put my finger on the one thing that is making would-be lovers and spouses miserable, it would be transactionalism. Transactionalism is a term I have coined for the belief that the nice or mean things we do to/for each other can be quantified in material sums. Women attempt to enforce transactionalism by essentially putting prices on their own heads and bodies. The extreme example is the influencer who ends up as a Dubai porta-potty because she thinks it is worth degradation and humiliation to own a collection of designer handbags. There is also the 26 year old virgin transactionalist who waited for marriage and two years later finds the childbearing ship sailed when she was 21 and with a poor guy for whom she would not put out. Men transactionalize their relationships with women all the time, so don't think they are getting off easy. The quantization of female attributes is at an all-time peak, and though women mainly amplify their own dysmorphia, there is no shortage of men rating women solely based on their looks and sexual histories.

One of the most egregious examples of transactionalist scorekeeping is when women attempt to get their husbands to do household and fix-it tasks by making some kind of poster or dry erase board and checking off bullet points for every task he completes. Often these bullet points are incentivized with rewards. This boneheaded practice is endorsed by plenty of marriage counselors, influencers, and self-help gurus and it can and will end your marriage if you let it. Imagine coming home to a messy house after a long day of being down-dressed by your bureaucrat taskmaster of a boss only to face a chart of inadequacy from your bureaucrat taskmaster of a wife. No thanks -- being married to a robot is easier and better, right?

No. A robot is just another convenience in a convenience-addicted culture. Microwaves do not provide better food for us. Don't even get me started about my hypotheses about why microwaves poison food. Suffice to say it's faster, not better. CGI-laden movies are not inherently better than analog ones, only different with less emphasis on plot and perhaps less creativity in props and stunts. Replacing a real limb with a prosthetic one can be great, but not if you have to cut off the real limb to gain the benefit. Using AI for sex, household chores, or defusing bombs is a fine thing. Thinking AI can replace human companionship or somehow heal what has gone terribly wrong is problematic at best and fatuous at worst. Do machines have the ability to make our lives better? Sitting in my air-conditioned room typing on a home computer on a 90 degree day, my answer is "sometimes".

I have never had any problem with what does or does not go on in other people's bedrooms. I lean a bit gay myself, and if female-female relationships were somehow less fraught with drama than male-female ones, chances are I would have ended up married to another woman. In my self-conscious youth, I went out of my way to demonstrate how OK I was with other people choosing do do whatever they wanted with their own sexualities. I went to bars and pride parades. Every now and then, I expressed my open disgust at certain polarizing Christian groups that took Leviticus 18:22 literally, yet accepted shellfish-eaters and tattoo-wearers into its ranks without question.

I resisted being a TERF long after J.K. Rowling got cancelled for promoting women-only spaces. It was actually the long reaction to the release of Covid that ended my relationships with gay men. The few gay male friends I had uniformly turned into Wokezis who felt entitled to shame anyone and everyone except themselves.

There's an old adage that the Left will eat itself, yet the current mass hysteria about alternative sexuality was born in the Right. We would not have pushy genderqueer creeps attempting to insert themselves into children's story hour at the library if there had never been pushy evangelists who shouted from televisions and churches built on every corner during the last 200 years. We are on a pendulum that keeps swinging through sensible approaches to life from one heinous extreme to the other. On one side, there are sociopathic libertine clowns in full makeup and foundation-caked beards insisting that their autogynephilia isn't the same kind as the freakshow, serial killer kind captured in film The Silence of the Lambs. On the other side, we have equally septic narcissists who would slut-shame a dog walking in a park because her butt wiggled when she walked; transparently pre-occupied are they with the delights of perversion though they passionately preach otherwise.

In both cases, there is a shadow being carefully tucked away and denied.

I Won't Grow Up!

Adolescence is difficult to begin with, and it is far more difficult now than it ever was when I was growing up. Considering I almost took my own life back then because of how bad it was, to have it be worse now is a special kind of hell. I truly feel for the younger generations nowadays. I created a TikTok expressly for the reason of trying to help them in a way psychiatrists, counselors, and psychologists who are almost as common as preachy Christian hypocrites (and often one and the same) cannot.

I had friends who grew up as gay males in the 80s and 90s. It was rough -- they were bullied, harassed, and to make matters worse, teachers often looked the other way or even joined in. But as much as they might think they had it the worst, I was straight at the time and I was sexually assaulted multiple times in the halls of my junior high when I was only 12 years old. I was bullied and teachers often were just as bad as students. Public school was horrible and in the 80s, there was no awareness about bullies aside from caricatures in Back to the Future and John Hughes movies. The difference between me and my gay male friends is that I grew out of it and I no longer live my emotional life in junior high and high school.

Gay men are often ensnared by the Puer Aeternis archetype. Despite the aging, balding, pot-bellied image in the mirror, they are obsessed with the toxic myth of eternal youth. The reason gay men want to indoctrinate children is because they have confined their imaginations to eternal adolescence: obsessed with human beauty, preoccupied with sexual acts or a lack thereof, and constantly outraged from being trapped inside a persecution complex.

Gay women, ironically, are not as obsessed with youth because they want to mate with it so much as they see commandeering the young as a way to exercise control. Like the embittered Catholic nuns of yesteryear who ruled with an iron hand and a painful conductor's wand well-acquainted with children's wrists and arms, the gay women teachers of the new Millennium want to be dictators of their own banana republics. They want to erect statues to their own superhuman glory (making sure to tear down Abe Lincoln or George Washington as a bonus) like Miss Trunchbull in Matilda.

Don't Fear the Reaper

The trouble with putting all your unfertilized eggs in the ephemeral basket of appearance is that nobody ages in reverse. I thought I had an uphill battle as a woman when it came to letting go of being the prettiest in the room. As it turns out, my non-straight male peers were far worse at accepting the ravages of gravity and age. Just as certain women turn into plastic surgery addicts, choosing to have their skin detached and stretched out over a series of ever-degrading procedures known as face-lifts, certain men seek to turn back the clock by cross-dressing and occasionally amputating/augmenting their bodies in botched attempts to avoid adulthood and maturity. Notice how Dylan Mulvaney caricatures girls ages 8-18 and any given drag show parodies young Mariah, not present day Mariah. Mighty Saturn is their ultimate Kryptonite, and it is almost funny that they think they can outrun him.

Who You Callin' a Dictator?

It's also almost funny that so many "non-binary" people and their "allies" point the finger at the ostensibly straight accusing them of a dictatorship. There has never been an easier time in history to choose or declare your own sexual path. If anything, it is straight couples who wish to bear children who are most at risk at being shamed, excluded, marginalized, bullied, and attacked. Name one place in the US a straight person can live and not be constantly messaged with alphabet soup awareness propaganda: such a place no longer exists. After obtaining the right to get married, the push could have easily stopped and we all know it.

One thing that has become very clear in the last few years is just how beholden our entire economic system is to medical grift. Though it is estimated that 50% of the real economy has something to do with Pharmakeia, I would guess it is more like 80%. Everybody is out to make a buck on the chronically ill these days except for a handful that have somehow stayed out such as myself. Of course the medical dictatorship seeks to exploit awkward pre-teens and medicalize them into a lifetime of misery and dependence. That's how they roll. An industry that has zero problem with scamming the elderly and maiming and killing billions with forced vaccines isn't going to have any qualms when it comes to convincing kids to chemically castrate themselves and amputate working body parts, thus damaging themselves for the rest of their current incarnations.

One of my quiet agendas with all of the TikTok videos I make about healing herbs is to perhaps get the idea out there that treatments and cures are not limited to magic pills, amputation, and implants.

I used to get mad when other drivers, almost always male, would advance on my car from behind and then quickly swerve into an open lane in order to pass me. I often drive five miles over the limit, but it is never enough for Anxious Dude hot-rodding around the suburbs in his souped-up Nissan with a vestigial spoiler. After about six or seven years of the calming influence of the Sphere of Protection and daily discursive meditation, I noticed that suddenly what used to make me beside myself with irritation no longer bothered me. I don't find myself perturbed anymore by Anxious Dude because I now realize that his swerving and aggressive driving comes from a set of impulses that make him a man. For me, owning a car is almost pure bad faith and a curse that I have in part chosen because I did not move to a walkable city somewhere in Europe or the UK to escape American car culture as a young woman. For him, driving isn't so bad: he has a knack for it. He likes to go fast and drive recklessly. He's a boy and boys will be boys, vroom vroom.

Feminization

I got a sandwich to go at one of the many fast-casual restaurants that bless my area the other day. A portly young man with a beard retrieved the sandwich from the kitchen area. When he spoke, his voice was about an octave higher than what one would expect and though he wasn't dressed in an effeminate fashion, he gave me an entirely female vibe. Though it is possible he was transitioning, it is not the first time I have run into young men who don't seem to have any maleness about them.

In the book Our Stolen Future, scientist Theo Colborn speculates that chemical byproducts that mimic hormones are causing the feminization of animal and human populations. The chemical constituents of RoundUp from Monsanto end up in a polar bear in the Arctic; there is no escape for anyone on this planet. Endocrine disruption is the inevitable result, and endocrine disruption causes a laundry list of woes, including birth defects, stunted intelligence, autoimmune disorders, and infertility.

Fragile Males

Maleness is inherently fragile. Regardless of chromosomes, we all begin in the womb as females: for guys, their ovaries descend and become testes. The long process of becoming male is fraught with danger from Moment One in the womb. Males are always fighting. Male sperm fight to get to the egg... There can be only one, or maybe two in the case of fraternal twins. Then the male chromosomes assert themselves as XY. No staying within a homogenous XX lane for them! Enter plastic chemicals and the toxic soup of heavy metals, dioxin, and the latest miracle of MRNA quaxxines and it is a wonder that the human race is still a thing. If the male is not physically feminized to near-death in utero, there are plenty of well-meaning doctors who would like to inject him with an array of FDA-approved concoctions the second he emerges from his mother. If he survives, there's always someone who wants him to drink toxic baby formula and to get circumcised.

Wars

I hate organized sports. I probably would not have hated them if my idiot teachers from Grades K-8 had not forced me to participate in junior versions of them. Nevertheless, I was forced into sports every school day from age 5 until 17 because Gym class is mandatory in Illinois; it's actually Illinois law and we are the only state in the Union that has that law.

Sports are how society deals with males in absence of wars. Sports resemble small wars: two teams opposed to each other fight over a ball as symbolic resource. A sports fan once confided in me that he loved the feeling of belonging when he watched a game. Without sports, many guys don't have a tribe outside of immediate family. They are wolves cast out of the pack.

The modern incarnation of organized sports is a poor substitute for wars though because it is passive and based on spectatorship. The pot-bellied sports fan crushing his umpteenth beer on the couch stereotype exists for good reason. Organized sports are feminizing. They turn purposeful, earnest men into couch potatoes, alcoholics, and gamblers.

The Woke

Disney has been on a spree of trying to recapture its glory days by making its cartoon classics from the 80s and 90s as live action films. Disney remade Lion King this way -- basically it was an awkward, musical nature documentary... very weird. It enjoyed modest success nevertheless, especially in China.

The Little Mermaid is Disney's latest live action remake set to be released this week. Little Mermaid replaces the red headed, white titular character Ariel with a black woman played by singer/actress Halle Bailey. Halle Bailey was sent to do a promotional press junket in Mexico, where interviewer Patricio Borghetti graciously gushed about her beauty and captivating performance. Without any context or apparent motivation, Bailey viciously accused Borghetti of racist microaggressions and now refuses to do "unprepared" interviews.

Bailey is far from conventionally beautiful and obviously deeply insecure. Her invocation of racism is vile and disgusting, in my opinion, and as someone who is exactly as white as Barack Obama, I think people who manipulate white guilt in such a fashion should be permanently ostracized, disenfranchised, and ignored. Halle Bailey does not deserve a singing or an acting career if this is the way she is going to behave. There are plenty of young women far more talented, beautiful, and deserving than she will ever be. I could use one of my own rare talents decimate what's left of her career in a single word -- the only hint I will give is that it's a scathing reference to another creative work -- instead I choose to exercise restraint. Plus, she is doing a fine job ruining her career all on her own.

Men cannot win against this sort of wretch. If Bailey wasn't crying about race, she would be inventing other travesties whole cloth. Borghetti came back saying the comments he made were said with love. If I were him, I would have refused to say that worthless, race-baiting slag's name ever again. Halle who?

Sleeping With the Enemy: Men Who Hate Women

The fascinating thing about Don Juans and wannabe Don Juans is their hatred of women. I know many men who are as irritated by Sex and the City as there are women who hate organized sports and video games. The animosity comes from the portrayal of women as obnoxious Don Juans: it's not fun to look at that kind of self-hatred in the mirror.

In his book Bang, former pickup artist Roosh V spends all of one page on the sexual act, dealing with it in a vague and perfunctory way that suggests that for all his braggadocio, he wasn't all that interested in having sex with women. More telling is how few aging pickup artists have settled down with an elusive "dream female" waifu and had children. Roosh is 43 and despite having rediscovered the Christian faith of his upbringing, he has yet to heterosexually reproduce.

If you don't genuinely respect those with XX chromosomes as human and manifest this animosity spend most of your adult life attempting to trap them like an exterminator does to rodents, it seems you will have a bad time when the time belatedly arrives to live all the heterosexual values you pretended to espouse. Pickup artists are not homosexual though. That would be far too easy. Instead, they are autosexual, which is a euphemistic term for a masturbator with a god complex. A far simpler epithet and one I would like to coin right now is Narcissosexual. A Narcissosexual would happily have raucous sex with their own doppelganger if such a thing were possible, and the preferred offspring would be a Brave New World of self-clones. Hopefully Roosh V has left his Don Juan past behind and hopefully divine powers are helping him to ameliorate some of the damage he has done. There will be other Narcissosexuals who arise in his place and they will be just as gay with themselves as he was.

All of the above phenomenon are predicaments and they will go on unsolved as predicaments go. As for the effeminate male problem, I believe it is an issue of nature as much or more as nurture, and I will maintain my stance about destigmatizing teenage pregnancy in order to create a hardier, less feminized male of the species. As far as sports and wars, I am now at the age where I can choose to avoid all sports, and the only thing I can suggest is for those who have children to PLEASE GIVE THEM A CHOICE about sports, and pull them out of schools that force participation. It should probably be clear that to ignore Wokesters is my own personal policy, and I have even got to the point where I won't condescend to permanently sully their images with a well-placed witticism because they aren't worth my fire. Lastly, the pathetic spectacle of the Narcissosexual is hardly worthy of anyone's attention: just recognize them as the jokes they are and move on.

Here are some terms that were not in place when I grew up in the 70s/80s: woke, equity, social justice. Political correctness of the type that is currently de rigueur was laughed at. Nobody would have dreamed of putting a biological male on a women's swim team, let alone a women's prison. Racism of various stripes was allowed to slide when it was not baldly displayed out in the open. In my teens, I had a relative who used the word "gook" to refer to Asians. It was not uncommon to hear white people using the N word to refer to black people, and not in a friendly, trying-to-be-cool way. In the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's, Mickey Rooney did a turn as the ostensibly-Japanese Mr. Yunioshi, a buck-toothed, thick-bespectacled idiot landlord. In elementary school, we swung our bodies on the jungle gym to this refrain:

Chicky chicky China sitting on a fence
Tried to make a dollar out of sixty-five cents
She missed, she missed, she missed like this
Have you ever seen a China girl who missed like this

The acceptance of everyday racism and sexism made every interaction with non-white people awkward. I felt this especially as a child, being the worst of both worlds: half-yellow and half-white. Half-breeds everywhere know the pain of not being colored enough for the color of one half and not being white enough for white people. As a girl, guys did not wait for my boobs to come in order unsnap my fledgling bra and to grab my butt in the halls of junior high. This kind of walk-by molestation was called a "goose" because that is what they yelled as they did it. To this day, I think it is a miracle I did not murder anyone in junior high or high school. Back then, if you were a girl or a woman, you just took it. For thirty years of my life, I was thought not to think much of it if a guy cat-called me.

As weird and icky as it used to be, I would gladly take yesteryear's racism and sexism over the current reign of Generation Cuck and the Thought Police who get their binders in a twist when they spot a minor transphobic infraction to report to their ghoulish social media followings. At least the goosers, the racist movie directors, and extended family members had a sense of humor. The politically correct scolds of the modern era are as joyless as a skiing accident.

Consider the toxic masculine pyramid of the 1980s: at the top were Gordon Gecko types and electric guitarist/singers of hair bands who wore as much and more makeup than their 2020s drag queen equivalent, yet did so while calling themselves straight. The pendulum took a dramatic swing, passing right through a moderate period during which it wasn't OK to call Asians gooks at the dinner table but it also was not OK to lump all white/straight people into an evilly evil blob slated for Stalinist persecution. By the 2000s, toxic masculinity was on its way out, taking its refuge in game culture. By the 2010s, the last of toxic masculinity hid in the chans and attempted to assert itself through the MGTOW movement. Toxic femininity exploited the vacuum left in the wake of toxic masculinity.

Shame

It is a human thing to project the shadow. Anytime a human does not want to deal with something she is doing, said human props up an enemy that resembles herself and then pretends the enemy is the only person doing the wrong thing. Toxic feminists seek to shame because they carry a great deal of unprocessed shame. This is their Achille's heel. If you want to destroy a toxic feminist from the inside out, tell them they ought to be ashamed of themselves and that you and they already know why, even if you are completely talking out of your ass.

Look underneath the hood. Toxic feminists try to pretend they are shameless, but they hate the bodies they pretend to be so "body positive" about. They know they are hypocrites and their troll act is just that... an act. They despair over the empty, vacuous lives they try so hard to paint as interesting on TikTok and Instagram. Deep down they are horrified about just how deep they have dug, but they cannot yet look in the mirror and admit it. Consequently, they wag fingers and scream EVIL instead of being honest and throwing down the shovel.

Chasing the Unlimits

At its core, toxic masculinity is a refusal to accept the limits of masculinity and a placement of excessive limits on femininity. Toxic femininity, on the other hand, attempts to remove any and all limits, including the hard limits of natural law. Toxic femininity at its core is a refusal to discriminate about anything: gender, beauty, law, getting up in the morning and going to work.

When I saw the Broadway production of Wicked in the 1990s, I remember making a mental note about how many of the songs were about the removal of limits. Many years later, I made the same mental note about the film musical The Greatest Showman, which features the song A Million Dreams (because a mere thousand or hundred dreams would never do) and Never Enough:

Towers of gold are still too little
These hands could hold the world but it will
Never be enough, it will never be enough

In the decade of the Millennium turn, McMansions got larger just as hard limits were slamming down everywhere else. For many, many years, the salary class and the politicians who make its existence possible have done whatever they possibly could to continue kicking the can down the road. In the 1980s, what was left of American manufacturing was sent overseas to China and its satellites, gutting the American lower-middle class and propping up the salary class with obscene wealth. In the 2000s, inflating property values and tech bubbles to frothy highs did the job until that had to be bailed out in 2008. After 2008, toxic femininity began its ascent because there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, and no resources left to cannibalize.

Toxic femininity is a kind of cannibalism. It cuts through the gills in order to scrape the last bits out of the tube. By removing the limits of human decency, it enables sexual access to children. By lumping in morbid obesity and freak show amputation/disfigurement into an amorphous standard of beauty, it opens the floodgates for medical profiteers to cash in on mental illness and dysmorphia. By making it acceptable to shame white and/or straight people for the appearance of their skin or their natural sexual urge to cohabit with the opposite sex, it provides endless avenues for vice disguised as virtue.

Communism

The gay luxury communist utopia where nobody works and everybody eats bugs (ahem delivered by drone) represents a toxic feminine ideal of detached, isolated, self-hobbled bliss. Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates are the ultimate figureheads of the lifestyle and they both have the man-teats to prove it. Toxic feminists love communism because they love violence: they advertise their love of it all the time by trying to equate free speech with violence. Communism itself is a symptom of the ongoing decay of monotheism: it creates demiurges like Pol Pot and Stalin who create mini-Apocalypses in their urge to re-create the world in their own images. Communism is feminine. It wants to conquer by infection in equal proportion to dominating via military might. The irony of communism is its domination by male leaders, and this is also the irony of modern toxic femininity. It is dominated by males, whether it is transitioning males on the playing field or XY chromosome holders with Her/She bars in hand.

Covid: Attack of the Killer Couch Potatoes

The lockdowns and vaccine hysteria of the 2020s were quite successful (but ultimately failed) attempt at installing toxic feminine communism worldwide. Without placing males at the heads of its nearly-unlimited hydra, toxic femininity cannot force its will at the end of a gunpoint because it does not know how to handle firearms without men at the helm. That is why for every Theresa Tam there are three or more male equivalents calling the shots. Toxic femininity is a cult of people who want to stay home and continue being poisoned, brainwashed, and spoon-fed. Toxic femininity is soft, pliant, and wants to take in and consume everything it touches.

In its current incarnation, toxic femininity is the juggernaut of the salary class. The toxic feminine takeover of masks, vaccines, and lockdowns was the most psycho in salary class strongholds. Neurotic, sclerotic rich people in cozy enclaves fought as hard as such types can fight for keeping Versailles peasant-proof.

Lockdowns are like McMansions in the way they are designed from the inside out. In the McMansion, there are enormous rooms the size of small houses that are bundled together in what from outside looks like a packed-together village. On the inside, there is always a cavernous foyer, a dining room, a living room, a finished basement with another huge living room/wet bar, a master bath, ostensible kid's and guest bedrooms, and at least seven large bathrooms. What the outside looks like hardly matters as long as all of these standard features are present.

Similarly, the toxic feminine salary class did not care about practical concerns such as a functioning economy and the state international shipping as long as it got its wishlist. The wishlist was mostly a removal of limits on the salary class. They were sick of commuting, so the primary goal became to give themselves couch time (Netflix and chill and GrubHub) while dictating orders to lower classes from a virtuous perch.

The handover of wealth from small businesses to mega corporations was fairly obvious when people were allowed to shop at Target or pick up Burger King at the drive thru but the tiny gift shop and café on the corner were forced to close. Of course the rules were childish: they were endorsed and followed by stunted adults who bought the luxury communist ideal hook, line, and sinker when they were not pressured into accepting its worst parts via shame and threats.

Subtle signs of yet another pendulum swing are lurking about. Shirts that read Nobody Cares, Work Harder are suddenly all the rage. The mainstream TV news media has to try extra hard to drum up interest in the latest failed effort to indict Donald Trump. Experts are coming out of the woodwork condemning Covid vaccines and all hope of censoring their dissenting voices has been dashed. I only hope that as the pendulum swings, it finds a few more stops in the middle this time.

Despite the protests of toxic feminists, we are not currently living in an era of toxic masculinity. Males have been rendered impotent in almost every aspect, up to and including their dwindling sperm counts. Those of us who are of a certain age have memories of the toxic masculine era under our belts, which used to come attached to garters and remained unseen except in the bedroom.

Toxic masculinity reached its peak in the early 1990s, just as I was finishing my undergraduate degree at a middle-of-the-road musical college in Chicago, Illinois. Woke wasn't a thing. My first encounter with a wokester happened at the end of my undergrad time. A young man who was a fellow student shamed me for using the acronym BFE while casually conversing about a faraway place. For those not in the know, BFE stands for Butt-F**king Egypt. Having no previous encounters of the sort, I simply apologized and moved on. In hindsight, I now know that what I witnessed with the ritual shaming was the birth of Woke as a religion, and of course I witnessed it in the heart of Chicago, Illinois, the exact sort of urban center where it plies its trade.

For a short time, the push towards political correctness, self-policing one's speech to avoid hurtful stereotypes, and inclusiveness was nowhere near as bitter and Stalinist as it would eventually become. Woke had a honeymoon phase that I perceived as lasting from approximately 1990 to 2005 or so.

Back in Time

Once upon a time, I was a twelve year old with serious suicidal ideations. I have the gift/curse of being able to remember that time very well. The average school day began with me springing awake as my alarm clock blasted the Chicago radio station B96. The station played Top 40 hits: George Michael, Madonna. Despite his voice being on the radio ALL THE TIME, I had no idea George Michael was gay and neither did any of my family or friends. In between the songs, the DJ prank called random people and had somewhat racy conversations with his co-hosts. The rest of my morning was the hell of trying to make myself look presentable with my glasses, braces, gigantic hair, and cystic acne. There was often no time to eat, so I would slap together some Skippy peanut butter with a piece of toasted Wonder bread, wash it down my maw with Minute Maid orange juice, and go to school with peanut butter on my face. At 7 in the morning, my best friend stopped by (on foot) so we could walk to school together. Though it was kind of her to do so, I had no appreciation of it because I was jealous of her good looks, comparatively clear skin, and advanced ability to adjust to junior high school. She was normal, I was not. No matter how hard I tried, I could not overcome the environment of junior high. From day one, I had difficulty opening my locker, trouble making it to class on time, chronic fatigue, depression, and severe anxiety. To put the cherry on top of the cake, I began menstruating at 12 and suffered excruciating cramps. Though I should have used the opportunity to stay home, I was too much of a fool to do so for fear of missing out. I believed I was supposed to be having a good time and a good life, so I often convinced myself I was doing just that despite being suicidal.

The milieu was the toxic masculine 1980s. It was a man's world, baby, and we all knew it. The 80s were a time when gay men actually did get beaten to death in America for being gay -- Stephen King did not make that up whole cloth when he wrote a scene in IT where a gay man gets beaten to death by a group of straight thugs. No wonder George Michael was not out and proud except perhaps in his small circle of friends, agents, and recording executives. Popular media constantly threw it in our faces that a woman's value was based on her looks. Even the shoulder-padded, stiff-haired, business-suited career broad was stereotyped with a Patrick Nagle wet dream of a face and a Robert Palmer back-up dancer's body. My brother had a poster on his bedroom wall of Heather Thomas yanking her bikini up her scrawny hips with a thumb's up gesture. Some guys still had Farrah Fawcett or Kim Basinger on their walls. It hardly mattered. The message of the 80s pinup was simple and directed not at the boys wanking it with surreptitiously borrowed Almay hand lotion -- no, it was aimed squarely at the girls. The 80s pinups told us THIS IS WHAT PERFECT LOOKS LIKE AND THIS IS WHO YOU MUST BE. Of course we could not hope to measure up. Before there was Instagram, there was Photoshop, and because getting a photograph into mass market print was extremely difficult, Photoshopped images were often as convincing as the real thing. At least the young girls today have the benefit of seeing the Instagram hottie revealed in all of her fat-bulging, saggy, giant-nosed, fakery-exposed glory. Back then, Photoshop was the domain of professionals. I did not realize that every photo in every magazine of every woman was airbrushed, nipped, and tucked. No wonder I was so violently dysmorphic and so schizophrenic over what I saw in the mirror. I overvalued and undervalued my looks at every opportunity.

Toxic Monotheism

Spirituality is supposed to be a place you can turn when your life sucks as mine did in the 1980s, but the worst examples of toxic masculinity came directly from so-called religious leaders. At the very bottom, there were the materialistic church moms who meant well, but who worked without any true notion of the God they were extensibly working for. In the middle were the neighborhood pastors, comfortably numb, upper-middle class doofuses who had lucked into having their own church. Every weekend, they lectured about life as if they knew anything about what it is to truly live. Bland, timid suburbanites must invent reasons to lecture other bland, timid suburbanites, and the kept pastors scored symphonies of pablum in order to preserve their cushy, relatively risk-free work and housing situations. At the top were the televangelists, cruising around in their luxury jets and filling stadia with the tacky, the desperate, and the easily suckered. Also the apex was the Pope, and none dared question his pedophile-abetting habits until Sinead O'Connor sacrificed her career on Saturday Night Live one evening in 1992. Suffice to say that God did not seem to be anywhere near a Christian church or a Jewish temple, and to this day seems to avoid those places as far as I am concerned.

The Glory Versus the Actual Work

Outside the church, the same sorts of working astral pyramids dominated in the workaday world, with a huge army of women populating insurance offices, mortgage lenders, telecommunications centers, and retail floors. Every owner, media mogul, top producer, high level executive, leader, CEO, president, top lawyer, superintendent, et m. was male, yet the success of his organization was heavily dependent on an army of working women taken out of their homes in order to bust heavies 9 to 5 just as men had done in the career sector from pre-WWII years. Under the guise of female equality, women were expected to make a living while simultaneously making a clean, nurturing home and raising sane, disciplined children. Anyone who has even witnessed such circumstances knows that making top dollar in a white collar job while successfully raising children is impossible; there simply are not enough hours in the day. The bottom line was that a mass of women did most or all of the work, but the top of the pyramid was always male. Beta male managers were the appointed eunuchs watching over the harem of compliant females. The TL;DR is that women did all the work and men got all of the glory. Kind of like pregnancy, and it is no wonder abortions were so difficult to attain back then. A girl or woman who cannot abort a fetus for any reason is in a convenient position: she is trapped. She is the captive of a man's pleasure, and her life does not matter, especially not over the life of a human who is new to this planet. At her core, she will always be a slut who wanted it even if she was nine years old and raped by her uncle. It's a man's world, honey, and if you don't like it, kill yourself. I almost did several times.

Women Do It Better (Depending on What It Is)

The stereotype of men not being able to handle pregnancy is the quiet way in which women whisper among themselves that men are not capable of handling long term commitments where one must follow through such as carrying a child and then raising that child until she or he is an adult. The saying goes that if men could get pregnant, suddenly all birth control would be free and abortion would be safe and legal. I don't know to what degree I believe in that saying, but I highly doubt abortion would be anywhere near as stigmatized if both sexes could manage pregnancy with equal success.

The hard facts are that men do certain things better than women and women do certain things better than men. Of course there is no hard rule for this: I would not want to live in a world where Amelia Earhart never flew a plane by virtue of her being female or where men were shamed for being homemakers because it is largely a female occupation. When we look at the world of sports, men dominate because they are larger, more muscular, faster, and tougher than women. When we look at decorating, for the most part men don't have the knack that women seem to naturally possess. Women can see more colors than men (this is just science, yo) and women have more of an intuitive grasp of the flow of etheric energy within space. For this reason, my male-dominant, male-designed junior high school was a boxy, ugly prison. If school had been an elegant, comfortable, lovely space, maybe the energy there would not have been so unrelentingly, poisonously septic.

The Trouble with Wanting to be the Best

Men have a desire to be the best, and this is a seriously problematic way of seeing life. There is nothing wrong with wanting to achieve, but when you have a pathological drive to beat out the competition in order to sit at the top of a powerful pyramid, this mode of thinking is a collective disaster. The corporate harem model of the workaday world with a man and his crowd of beta dudes administering armies of women can only elevate so many males. Just like any form of feudalism, the more kings forced to share limited resources such as labor and land, the more war will be had with king against king.

As a child, I was extremely preoccupied with adult thoughts and worries about how I would make a living one day. I was consumed with visions of being a responsible adult long before it was appropriate to think about such things. At age 9, I began teaching myself to type on a manual typewriter. By age 15, I could type 80-100 words a minute with perfect accuracy. I fantasized that I would be a well-paid secretary, dictating and taking calls and memos by day and returning to my pretty apartment in the downtown area of a quaint suburb via train at night to my cats and my books. Sadly, this vision never materialized as cost of living made it impossible. Little did I know that what I was actually good at (aside from typing) was teaching music, which is at best a bohemian existence unless you are one of the few willing to make an influencer presence out of yourself, which at this time I am not. Humans being what they are, I had a dual fantasy at the time of being a top singer/performer, and this was a far more destructive dream. No matter what, I was determined to be THE BEST at whatever my career was to be, and being a team player or just a participant held no interest. School bored me because I was seldom THE BEST and in fact, I won awards so rarely in school, I grew to hate it by the fourth grade.

It is the nature of women to cooperate, congregate, patch together, and manipulate. It is the nature of men to discover, conquer, and dominate. There is nothing inherently wrong with either of these two natures. There is no labeling them as good or evil either. They are what they are.

Men have more of a need to be seen as experts as women, to "mansplain" without bothering to find out if the woman has more expertise on the subject. Women have less of a tendency to tie up their egos in being experts in any particular field. This is why until relatively recently men dominated the world of celebrity cooking. Aside from Julia Child, masters of cuisine where almost all males despite women being saddled with most of the cooking (outside of Army mess halls) for the last six thousand years. The fashion world is similar. Despite the fact that women have and always have made most of the clothing, men get the glory. Top female designers weren't much of a thing even during the halcyon days of Coco Chanel -- she was a tiny minority in a sea of male names such as Balenciaga and Fortuny.

The current debacle of trans rights has to do with men who are jealous of women and who insist they can become better at womanhood than actual women, as if anyone would actually want to do that. Lia Thomas, formerly William Thomas, rose to fame by outcompeting every female on her team. Among males, she only placed as number 16 or 17 in any given competition, despite being 6'1" and not suffering a monthly period. Lia had such a compulsive need to be THE BEST at swimming, she was willing to place herself in a kiddie pool of sorts to do it rather than being forced to lose among her fellow biological males. It is unsurprising to see female-to-male transexuals sinking into the wallpaper for the most part -- male to female has always been a far more vocal and attention-hungry segment of the trans population. For this reason, there is no burgeoning population of trans machine welders, Navy captains, and lumberjacks seeking the media's spotlights.

Males are the ones who need to be experts: they want to be the consulted, not the ones seeking consultation. For whether the male is a declared male or female, he needs to be Top Dog. This is the formula. To be feminine, quiet, unassuming, cooperative, and receptive means that the attention will not come and that you cannot seed the world with your influence.

Speaking of Influencers

Career influencers are essentially masculine by nature, even the ones who are mothers of eight and who make a living showing off their phases in home decor. They spermatically attempt to scatter themselves all over the world, seeking out receptive egg fields where they can plant their flags. In our current world where making an honest living is more difficult than ever before, the lure of influencing to fill one's coffers with cash and goodies is extremely tempting. Influencing makes it much easier to declare oneself an expert, even if it is only at looking pretty, while seeding the world with one's own self-manufactured celebrity. In spite of all I have just said, I have no problem with influencers; in fact, I follow many of them and support a limited few because they are often experts just as promised.

Back to the Future

In the 1990s, the tide started shifting towards toxic femininity, a subject to which I plan on devoting a full essay in the near future. The 1990s were far more tolerant of gay people and even somewhat kinder towards ugly, geeky 12 year old girls with braces, glasses, and unfortunate skin and hair. We began to see drugstore makeup shades in darker colors than Pasty White Girl. School bullies who formerly skated for beating up anyone who did not toe the Biff Tannen party line of BE LIKE ME OR ELSE actually started getting in trouble. The baby was not to go out with the bathwater until 2005 or so when internet censorship began getting out of hand and LGBT+ rights spiraled into a battle to install a neo-Marxist, Borg hive mind.

I have no advice to give in this case -- these are just my observations of dealing with toxic masculinity from the front lines of being a woman. This essay may become more than one as I may have more observations as time goes by.