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Messages - stands2p
1
When I was just a little kid, I found out some people were coming to see us. I was a little scared because no one had ever come to visit us before and the concept was too alien; why didn't they just stay home? It didn't make any sense at that age that grown-ups could have brothers, just like I did.
I found out gradually that I had a whole 'nother family that we got to see twice a year. I remember a Christmas when my uncle played Santa and helped us set up the electric trains. I had cousins that were just like brothers and sisters you didn't have to fight with.
When I was a teenager, I went hunting with my uncle and learned that he had been a championship marksman when he had been a teenager. I remember him hitting birds that all of us had missed. And I remember his way of knowing where the birds would be. We never hunted with dogs, we didn't need to.
I remember playing chess with him as a young man fresh out of college. I was scratching my chin and he told me to play more aggressively, that I had already beaten him and just needed to finish it. He was proud of me in a way that didn't need to be said.
I remember hearing stories about my own dad and understanding him better; resenting him less. My dad had once been a cocky young pup who drove too fast and made actual mistakes. Who knew?
And it wasn't until I was much, much older that I found out not everybody has such a wonderful thing.
My cousin called a couple of hours ago to let me know he had passed. He was a Viet Nam vet and had been exposed to Agent Orange. He had worked in industrial environments for years before it occurred to anybody that certain kinds of dust could kill you. And he was a smoker. The last few months of his life were spent gasping for air. I will never understand why they didn't get him on oxygen sooner; there was no need for him to suffer that much. When they finally got him on oxygen, he developed pneumonia almost immediately, his lungs just wouldn't function anymore.
He was a man in world full of "guys" and "dudes." He worked hard all his life and would have cut off his own arm before he broke a promise or his word. He had more patience in the tip of his little finger than anyone else I've ever known. He went from bouncing me on his knee as a baby to accepting me as a grown man without a moment's awkwardness.
We have all lost a brother.
All of you be well, and take a moment to appreciate your uncles today.
3
I am a lifelong slob myself so here is another angle:
I was on a camping trip with a youth program when I was a surly teenager and one of the counselors observed that my stuff was scattered all over the campsite. I was ready for the usual lecture about how I should be so ashamed to be such a slob and how unfair it was to everybody else but the counselor was smart enough to put it in terms of what was in it for me. He said "an inch of snow would ruin you." and walked off, end of discussion.
I got my stuff rounded up since snow was a possibility and it did snow that night. Some of the other guys were scrambling around the next morning trying to find their shit before we hit the trail. The lesson stuck with me pretty well.
Ask your son what he would do if he had to pack up his things and move to another room on short notice. Ask him what he would do if there were some kind of emergency and he had to grab the one or two things that were most important to him and run for his life.
Packing up everything in his room and having him earn back the privillege of keeping a room in YOUR home would do a great job of reinforcing these concepts.
4
Road Trip
Get your pal next to a campfire, apply a few recreational beverages and get him talking. Find out what he thinks is so damned special about this chick.
Then tell him to shut up and listen.
I suggest you don't start in with negative comments about this woman but give him the full low down about the institution of marriage itself. He is likely to wind up losing everything he has with no benefits at all.
If the straight dope on marriage doesn't get him thinking, then it is time to unload on bridezilla. Nobody who loves somebody asks them to give up their dreams. If she finds out you have been trying to talk your pal out of sticking his head in the noose, she will ban you from the wedding. Make this your goal. If they still get married and you are standing there next to him in a matching powder-blue tux, you have failed.
Good luck saving your friend, you are a true pal.
6
Gonzo, haven't seen you in a while.
Sure.
I would call a courier and hire them to move it.
Why fuck around?
The casting dept. called, you can still be on the show if you wear your Viking duds and offer to pay the courier by not sacking his village.
7
Thought experiment:
Suppose there is a TV reality show where the contestants must get a heavy box from one location to another without touching it. This could be a one day thing across town or a weeks long thing around the world. Cameras follow each contestant and even the slightest contact with the box gets an immediate disqualification. The contestants have to persuade other people, cab drivers etc. to move the box for them.
Now, would a man EVER beat a woman at this game?
8
* The material is clear and concise to avoid spenidng hours or days reading long complicated books.
It really says "spenidng." It really makes a selling point out of being easy to read for stupid people and that selling point really includes a typo.
Priceless.
9
This is a great example of men turning existing paternity law upside down and giving it a good shake. Historically, any child born to a married woman was legally presumed to be fathered by her husband.
Welcome to modern times.
The other man is right to want the truth since the woman would demand support from him once her husband gets enough of her shit and shows her the door.
But also, and more importantly, if he is a father, he has a right to be a part of his child's life and he should demand and pursue that right aggressively and within the law. You can't be charged with harrassment for asking for what is yours as long as you stay within legal boundaries.
If this woman's husband took the same liberties during their "separation" and fathered a child, she would have to get her mind around the fact that her family is no longer the same neat little package as it was before. Her husband would be legally obligated to support another woman's child. Her children would deserve to share family events with their half-sibling.
She is assuming a privilege, an entitlement, to bring a child, possibly conceived outside of her marriage, into hers and her husband's home and raising it while excluding the father from their lives.
Justice is supposed to mean equality before the law without regard to gender. This other man has rights and her attempts to smear him as unstable etc. should be seen for what they are.
10
I will try to sum up:
In the final chapter she attends a Bly-esque men's weekend retreat. The point of these is to allow men to get out of the "earn a paycheck, watch sports, die miserable" cycle; give men a place to emote with other men. Women, obviously, can emote like nobody's business. When no women are around, men can do a fine job of attending to each other emotionally.
Vincent obviously wants to stay in character at the retreat but the effects of what is going on around her, and inside her is overwhelming. She sees men crying and hugging each other and commiserating in the fact that they have no emotional connection with their children and the people in their lives and I think she herself realized at that moment that everything she thought she knew about men was not just wrong but a lie.
I don't know how widespread this is but when I was in high school in the early 80's, some of the girls got into self-mutilation. They would lay a burning cigarette on their forearm and let it burn all the way down, leaving a nasty and obvious wound. These girls were fairly popular and reasonably successful in school. It was their way of dealing with the pain of adolescence. Vincent's reaction to the intensity of the men's retreat was to ask one of the men to hurt her. She suffers a nervous breakdown and ends her experiments.
In this chapter more than any other, Vincent set out to learn about male privilege but wound up learning more about female privilege.
I don't mean to gush over this book; it does have some serious flaws and I found some parts offensive but it is interesting.
11
The book she wrote: Self-Made Man is actually pretty interesting and worth a read. Norah Vincent is considered a traitor by the militant feminist lesbian bloc because she is not in favor of recreational abortion.
Anyone who ticks off the banshees at Pandagon is okay in my book, here is what they have to say:
I'm in the middle of Norah Vincent's book right now and it's outrageously misogynist on about a million levels. Vincent describes (and uses) strippers and sex workers as dead-souled, revolting, hostile zombies -- she actually calls them "not real women" -- while being a giant apologist for men. The dating chapter was just as bad as the titty bar chapters - check out this scream-worthy paragraph: "Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which, I supose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no." God forbid women should say "no" to any random dude who wants to have sex with them. What a load of shit! A lot of the book is interesting and I enjoyed (with some horror) the few insights about male bonding and friendship. Unfortunately there wasn't a whole book's worth of them and they were surrounded by stuff that ... really someone needs to take that book apart piece by piece and explain why it sucks so bad. Even more horrifying - the gushingly positive reviews of this book that praise its insight and say how they'll change how you see yourself as a woman. What, to make you hate yourself even more?! Just what we needed.
The book and her experiment do have some weak spots. From my review on Amazon:
...she limits her adventures in ways that show more about class distinctions than gender. Vincent's choices throughout the book show she is disdainful of the workaday world and the things ordinary people do to have fun and earn a living. Some of her experiments could have been done without the masquerade but they would have been called "slumming."
Assault, you mentioned her making it into a meeting of the "The Patriarchy." In a way, she did; she went to a Robert Bly style weekend retreat where guys beat drums etc. I think this is hands-down the best chapter.
12
Uh oh, I hope you validated her attention in some way such as offering to purchase goods and services for her use without implicit or explicit expectation of compensation of any kind. If you did not, you may have caused her to feel rejected and unworthy and you may be liable for civil and criminal damages.
I would recommend retaining legal counsel immediately.
13
This young putz is our target demographic.
He says men are getting what they deserve but what he really means is that other men are getting what they deserve. He himself has probably not felt inconvenienced at all by sexism against men (and I only say probably from a sense of rhetorical obligation.)
At some point, he will have a personal experience with misandry and he won't like it one bit and he will remember that pamphlet he scoffed at.
I teach a young men's class at my church and I am always looking for good ways to approach issues of dating and paternity and accusations of sex crimes to these naive young pups. These lads are at the mercy of their hormones and are totally bewitched by the young women. I'd like to see a pamphlet like this:
Hey kid, heard of VAWA?
Young men need to know that any time they have sex:
-You can be accused of a crime and treated as guilty without process.
-You can be notified via third party that you are liable for child support without ever knowing about the pregnancy.
-If a woman feels you have done something wrong, your rights can be infringed without recourse (restraining order, mandatory "classes" etc.)
Young men need to be warned not to stick their junk in a noose and they need to stop enabling the women-as-victims crowd in the interest of getting laid.
14
I saw an internet video ad for Cadillac and I was truly impressed. The ad begins with a fifty-ish guy walking through an office with a cardboard box. There is no audio save for the soundtrack throughout. The man stops to shake a few hands and leaves the building. He parks his car at the beach and stares out over the waves and then goes home. Clearly, he has retired and is contemplating the final chapter of his life. But wait. The next morning we see him kiss his wife goodbye at the breakfast table and leave the house wearing a tie. He shows up at a much less stodgy office building where we quickly see he has signed on to lead these modern young mavericks in a whole new enterprise. He conducts a business meeting from a couch with his shiny Cadillac parked outside.
My checking account admits to no immediate plans for a $70k ride but the ad was nice.
Then I saw another ad in the same series. A 29-ish woman walks through an office. Each time she encounters a man, he quickly tries to look busy. She steps onto an elevator with a man and the shot zooms in to the man's shirt pocket where his pen begins to leak, staining his shirt. The image clearly alludes to a man wetting his pants from fear. The ad closes with the woman behind the wheel of her shiny Cadillac, laughing gleefully.
Obviously, she is meant to be the boss and someone who enjoys her authority and prestige but there is no further development, no hint as to what she does or how she got there. The first ad is expertly crafted to tell a story about a man who has earned this shiny Cadillac through his courage and ingenuity (striking out on a new career track, later in life.) The second is just some person who has and enjoys great privilege and authority over others.
These ads illustrate perfectly the asymmetry in expectations for men and women. Obviously there are men who are members of the lucky sperm club and women who have been pioneers but this ad campaign wastes no time worrying about them. Their male customers want to believe they have earned a Cadillac, their female customers want to believe they deserve a Cadillac.
15
Kate says:
-The odd thing is, I got a little turned on reading this. No, seriously. Yes, the secret to feminists is we JUST WANT TO PEE ON MEN!
A sense of humor?! Alright lady, out of the car, let's see some ID.
But seriously Kate, we don't allow that kind of thing here. Or if we do no one has ever invited me, bastards.
