Trump and Vance dog-whistled them to win the election. Now their leaders are loose. They'll target women and people of color first. And won't stop there.
I believe that most of this aggression and acting out is essentially compensatory. That is, men are essentially weak and pathetic, know it deep down, and can't deal with it. Male privilege was a way of socializing this compensation to keep men from destroying everything, if you can believe it could have been worse than it has been.
I'm going to write something about this very soon, but this is all far, far, far more complicated than it looks. The patriarch has not always existed. It arose a mere 5,000 years ago, after 300,000 years of egalitarian relations between men and women. Note, the absence of patriarchy does NOT imply matriarchy. There was never a matriarchy. Women don't seem interested in solitary authority or "overlordship" in any way. Most ancient societies, clear back to hunter-gatherer groups, shared the work and the power. If there was a division at all, men ran civil affairs and women ran religion (see ancient Crete, ancient Greece, and early on, ancient Rome). Now by the time we get to any of these civilizations patriarchy has already begun to take strong hold, so gender relations in these countries were already leaning into patriarchy and got a STRONG, HUGE PUSH FROM CHRISTIANITY. But in Crete before the Mycenaean Civilization invaded it, there was almost absolute gender equality, with women sea captains, farmers, business people, etc. In Greece, because Aristotle was such a pig (I mean that), gender was going to hell even before Pericles wrecked Athens' economy. But it took a declaration from the Lysis Mater--the head priestess of the Temple of Athena--for men in Athens to have PERMISSION to go to war. And when wars bankrupted Athens, it was the courtesan Phryne, the richest person in Athens, to finance a war, which she banked 100% out of her own money. (Later, she was accused of witchcraft, and her lawyer lover stripped her clothes off in open court, with the result that the court immediately declared her innocent on the custom that beautiful people were beloved of the Gods, and she was, well, a real looker.) Meanwhile, things REALLY go to hell in a handbasket with the writing of the Garden of Eden story (Genesis II), which was a rip-off of all the symbols and functions of the goddess Asherah, firmly placed in the hands of one Yahweh, and then brutally enforced on everybody else in the Palestinian Corridor. This is where we now, for the very first time, get the notion that a WOMAN got the world into big trouble -- although the theory of THE FALL did not come into being until St. Augustine INVENTED it 300 years after Christ died. ... There is a book called "The Mythology of Eden" that everyone should read. And everybody should real "The Creation of Patriarch" by Gerda Lerner, published in 1987, that traces the INVENTION of patriarchy. ... Now to your point, one of the things that really screws up men is patriarchy. That sounds strange, but it's true. Men getting the power to enslave women REALLY SCREWS THE UP. They know they don't deserve it. But they take it -- and now are fighting like hell to get it back -- despite the fact it's soul-twisting for them. But the problems happening now are far, far more complicated than even that, and I'll talk about that in the coming weeks. And it's going to have a LOT to do with screens. Men aren't spending time with women, or even with other men. They're spending time with screens, playing games and listening to ^)(^&(*WADS like Andrew Tate et al. who know nothing and are nothing. And Andrew Tate has now made $67 million spewing toxic hatred of women and selling "pick up" courses to Incels who pay him $610 a pop to learn how to MANIPULATE a woman into bed (and get maid service, too). This is a huge problem. We'll talk about it. Meanwhile, suicide rates for men whose wives divorce them and take the kids is SKYROCKETING. And the happiest, healthiest, longest-lived human group ON THIS PLANET are women who have never been married and never had kids. Privilege isn't a way of socialization of male violence. It's a crime against humanity, an appropriation of a woman's whole life, and an act of violent masochism against the male himself.
I've mentioned it in an unrelated thread, but I had to try to read the whole of the City of God in Latin in graduate school and pretty much concluded that Augustine was mentally ill, and was left wondering how many of the saints were schizophrenic (hearing voices?) and how many of the purportedly great minds of antiquity (and since) had other mental health difficulties. It sure wouldn't be surprising if people with paranoid ideation were rising into positions of influence and causing trouble.
My supposition has been that men were essentially bribed with deference to try to get them to behave and it worked about as well as it does with the mafia, and now it's impossible to know how it might have played out differently but we're in danger of destroying the world with this shit.
It doesn't look like it. THOUGH (on your side) the development of patriarchy was accomplished by potentates gifting the right to control women to men who supported them, and then women -- the first slaves -- were traded for money (to breed children for military clout) and to pay off the debts of fathers and brothers. See Lerner on this.
We're on the same page, aren't we? That the patriarchy is compensatory, perverse and self-destructive? I studied it years ago but at that time it was unclear that the Mycenaeans even conquered Crete. It might have been that the Minoans were severely weakened if not wrecked by the eruption of the volcano at (Santorini) Thera.
Nope. Men went 300,000 years without having to have a "compensation" for their aggression. They certainly didn't aggress women. In Old Europe, there were no hilltop fortification before the Hordes sent in three waves of Kurgan invasions. So, nope. The explosion of Thera is hard to date, and volcanologists date it anywhere from 1645 BC to 1500 BC. The Mycenaeans DID invade Crete, around 1450 BC, and they brought the patriarchy with them.
I'm citing the need for compensation as the source of the aggression, internal to men and related to fear and insecurity, which results in the yielding of authority on the other end, including and possibly primarily by men who aren't nuts, in the same way that abusers come to dominate families because the families don't know what else to do to try to control the destructive impulses which have become a fact of their existence. I think we see it right now, in our own society, as though we don't have the power to keep stuff from happening but fail to do it because the leverage that comes with being utterly irresponsible and uncaring about consequences is deployed against us and we are ineffective against it.
In any case, I will certainly own being rusty on the historical stuff, not having studied it in detail or thought it through thoroughly for decades. My interests have been elsewhere though I once worked on it with some dedication. I still think we're not far apart, if not in agreement, but haven't the time or interest to try to fully recover my understanding, to the extent it ever existed, of the material, which was strongest subsequent to prehistory. I'm scared to death about what's going on around us, and in disbelief though I'm the one who's been trying to get people to understand how screwed up things are for decades. I look forward to reading the writing you say you have in the works on the topic.
I believe that most of this aggression and acting out is essentially compensatory. That is, men are essentially weak and pathetic, know it deep down, and can't deal with it. Male privilege was a way of socializing this compensation to keep men from destroying everything, if you can believe it could have been worse than it has been.
I'm going to write something about this very soon, but this is all far, far, far more complicated than it looks. The patriarch has not always existed. It arose a mere 5,000 years ago, after 300,000 years of egalitarian relations between men and women. Note, the absence of patriarchy does NOT imply matriarchy. There was never a matriarchy. Women don't seem interested in solitary authority or "overlordship" in any way. Most ancient societies, clear back to hunter-gatherer groups, shared the work and the power. If there was a division at all, men ran civil affairs and women ran religion (see ancient Crete, ancient Greece, and early on, ancient Rome). Now by the time we get to any of these civilizations patriarchy has already begun to take strong hold, so gender relations in these countries were already leaning into patriarchy and got a STRONG, HUGE PUSH FROM CHRISTIANITY. But in Crete before the Mycenaean Civilization invaded it, there was almost absolute gender equality, with women sea captains, farmers, business people, etc. In Greece, because Aristotle was such a pig (I mean that), gender was going to hell even before Pericles wrecked Athens' economy. But it took a declaration from the Lysis Mater--the head priestess of the Temple of Athena--for men in Athens to have PERMISSION to go to war. And when wars bankrupted Athens, it was the courtesan Phryne, the richest person in Athens, to finance a war, which she banked 100% out of her own money. (Later, she was accused of witchcraft, and her lawyer lover stripped her clothes off in open court, with the result that the court immediately declared her innocent on the custom that beautiful people were beloved of the Gods, and she was, well, a real looker.) Meanwhile, things REALLY go to hell in a handbasket with the writing of the Garden of Eden story (Genesis II), which was a rip-off of all the symbols and functions of the goddess Asherah, firmly placed in the hands of one Yahweh, and then brutally enforced on everybody else in the Palestinian Corridor. This is where we now, for the very first time, get the notion that a WOMAN got the world into big trouble -- although the theory of THE FALL did not come into being until St. Augustine INVENTED it 300 years after Christ died. ... There is a book called "The Mythology of Eden" that everyone should read. And everybody should real "The Creation of Patriarch" by Gerda Lerner, published in 1987, that traces the INVENTION of patriarchy. ... Now to your point, one of the things that really screws up men is patriarchy. That sounds strange, but it's true. Men getting the power to enslave women REALLY SCREWS THE UP. They know they don't deserve it. But they take it -- and now are fighting like hell to get it back -- despite the fact it's soul-twisting for them. But the problems happening now are far, far more complicated than even that, and I'll talk about that in the coming weeks. And it's going to have a LOT to do with screens. Men aren't spending time with women, or even with other men. They're spending time with screens, playing games and listening to ^)(^&(*WADS like Andrew Tate et al. who know nothing and are nothing. And Andrew Tate has now made $67 million spewing toxic hatred of women and selling "pick up" courses to Incels who pay him $610 a pop to learn how to MANIPULATE a woman into bed (and get maid service, too). This is a huge problem. We'll talk about it. Meanwhile, suicide rates for men whose wives divorce them and take the kids is SKYROCKETING. And the happiest, healthiest, longest-lived human group ON THIS PLANET are women who have never been married and never had kids. Privilege isn't a way of socialization of male violence. It's a crime against humanity, an appropriation of a woman's whole life, and an act of violent masochism against the male himself.
I've mentioned it in an unrelated thread, but I had to try to read the whole of the City of God in Latin in graduate school and pretty much concluded that Augustine was mentally ill, and was left wondering how many of the saints were schizophrenic (hearing voices?) and how many of the purportedly great minds of antiquity (and since) had other mental health difficulties. It sure wouldn't be surprising if people with paranoid ideation were rising into positions of influence and causing trouble.
My supposition has been that men were essentially bribed with deference to try to get them to behave and it worked about as well as it does with the mafia, and now it's impossible to know how it might have played out differently but we're in danger of destroying the world with this shit.
It doesn't look like it. THOUGH (on your side) the development of patriarchy was accomplished by potentates gifting the right to control women to men who supported them, and then women -- the first slaves -- were traded for money (to breed children for military clout) and to pay off the debts of fathers and brothers. See Lerner on this.
We're on the same page, aren't we? That the patriarchy is compensatory, perverse and self-destructive? I studied it years ago but at that time it was unclear that the Mycenaeans even conquered Crete. It might have been that the Minoans were severely weakened if not wrecked by the eruption of the volcano at (Santorini) Thera.
Nope. Men went 300,000 years without having to have a "compensation" for their aggression. They certainly didn't aggress women. In Old Europe, there were no hilltop fortification before the Hordes sent in three waves of Kurgan invasions. So, nope. The explosion of Thera is hard to date, and volcanologists date it anywhere from 1645 BC to 1500 BC. The Mycenaeans DID invade Crete, around 1450 BC, and they brought the patriarchy with them.
I'm citing the need for compensation as the source of the aggression, internal to men and related to fear and insecurity, which results in the yielding of authority on the other end, including and possibly primarily by men who aren't nuts, in the same way that abusers come to dominate families because the families don't know what else to do to try to control the destructive impulses which have become a fact of their existence. I think we see it right now, in our own society, as though we don't have the power to keep stuff from happening but fail to do it because the leverage that comes with being utterly irresponsible and uncaring about consequences is deployed against us and we are ineffective against it.
In any case, I will certainly own being rusty on the historical stuff, not having studied it in detail or thought it through thoroughly for decades. My interests have been elsewhere though I once worked on it with some dedication. I still think we're not far apart, if not in agreement, but haven't the time or interest to try to fully recover my understanding, to the extent it ever existed, of the material, which was strongest subsequent to prehistory. I'm scared to death about what's going on around us, and in disbelief though I'm the one who's been trying to get people to understand how screwed up things are for decades. I look forward to reading the writing you say you have in the works on the topic.
Sickening. But thank you for exposing the truth.
I am speechless!😱