First off I’d like to appreciate Pajamas Media, Bill Whittle and the Trifecta for exposing me to what I am about to share with you. Going online is like going to Shinsengae Centumcity Department Store (the worlds largest, sorry GUM) and being asked as you checked out if you found every thing you wanted: there’s just no way to know if you did. On the internet there is such a tsunami of information there is simply no way to find all the stuff you want. Pajamas Media is a great bird dog for pointing out interesting game and I recommend them to you.
I’ve taken issue in past blogs with the simplistic theory of the Alpha Male, and now in all fairness I can take on the equally sophomoric philosophy of what the Alpha’s would call Beta Males, but I’d put them a little further down the continuum… maybe theta’s or zetas.
The proponents of Alpha Maleness cling to an atavistic understanding of the relationships between man and women which comes down to this: real men are not pussy whipped. They meet their obligation to provide the occasional ibex on the cave floor and otherwise do exactly what they want and to hell with anything the little woman has to say. In the Alpha male world a guy is either an alpha male or a pussy whipped loser.
Enter now “A Manifesto for Conscious Men.” It is the product of Gay Hendricks and Arjuna Ardagh, and like all good manifestos it has a web page, a facebook page (where you can read the screed) and if you can stomach it, a Youtube video.
The manifest starts off by embracing one of the cardinal sins to those who would be better men: apologizing for something you didn’t do, for Hendricks and Ardagh encourage all men to assume responsibility and atone for all the oppression and abuse of women at the hands of men since time began. They apologize for religion, for science, and even for unconscious actions. They don’t get around to apologizing for the Holocaust despite the fact that it killed millions of women, but I’m sure, had they thought of all those horrid alpha male Nazis with their Heidelberg scars they would have realized that all of the Third Reich was essentially misogonistic performance art and made their mea culpas.
Here’s the thing: I’m not going to apologize for slavery. Not to the blacks of America, nor the defeated soldiers marched into Rome under the banner of Julius Caeser, nor for Aparteid, jim crow, or even the holocaust. I’m not going to take responsibility for the burka, or female circumcision or the abandonment of Chinese female babies.
I won’t apologize because I didn’t do it. I’ve got plenty of my own shit to take responsibility for in my struggle to be a better man, and I don’t do myself, or the woman I love, any favors by nailing myself to the cross and taking responsibility for the fact that some Neanderthal male beat up a homo erectus female in a cave in Provance six thousand years ago.
Within the first sentence of the manifesto, bolded for emphasis is the commitment to becoming more "conscious" in every way, which is a great and noble endeavor for anyone, male or female. The problem is, however, that the manifesto then propounds a series of trite and false assumptions about women in general which it proposes other men adopt unchallenged.
According to Mssrs. Hendricks and Ardagh, all women have a deep connection to the earth, have an intuitive understanding of how to heal the planet, a profound capacity for feeling, a wisdom of the feminine hearts, a capacity for peaceful resolution of conflicts And can listen to their bodies and have an innate sense of compassionate justice.
Men, however start wars and pollute the earth. Really, these guys make the Alpha Male crowd look good by comparison. If Hendricks/Ardagh propose anything, it is for other men to divest themselves of all rational thought and to be conscious of nothing but the pablum of this manifesto.
There is only one part of the "manifesto" that speaks to me and that is the third paragraph which says "I commit to owning and stewarding a masculinity that honors and celebrates us as equals." That makes sense, but seven paragraphs later this modest proposal that men not only honor and worship this ersatz female god that walks among us paternalistically recognizes that while a woman’s body belongs to herself, the soulless commercialization of her beauty is wrong. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds a lot like this. If we are equals I don't get to decide what is right or wrong for her. She can pose for Playboy or Vogue. It is her right.
Here’s the truth: if you want to honor and respect the woman in your life, understand and honor the woman in your life and not some pseudo gaia projection of collective male guilt. The better man desires to have a mature and meaningful relationship with his beloved and that, my friends, requires first and foremost bringing his best game to the table and second, not polluting his mind with false expectations of what his wife is. We are all imperfect, male and female alike and in good relationships we both strive to be better.
two typos fixed 4/17
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