RANTINGS OF A SINGLE MALE
Excerpts

by
Thomas Ellis © 2005

From: “Go Figure”
The Confessions of April

Then there was April, an American grad student who taught beginning German classes. She was a cute redhead with a pixielike face. We went out and always had a great time. We could switch over to German and talk about people for fun. I wanted her bad. I wanted her so bad I even wanted a relationship. This could be it I thought. But something was wrong. Whenever I dropped her off at the end of an evening, she would just about bail out of the car before it stopped. She would actually have the door open while the car was still moving. “Gotta go! Thanks, bye!”

It was obvious she was avoiding the kiss. You know, I’m not that bad. I’m not repulsive. I shower and brush my teeth. What was it? I suppose I should have taken it as a warning when she complained there was a guy in one of her women’s studies classes. At the time, Women’s studies didn’t register with me as a red flag. It’s not unusual for campus girls to dabble in feminism. Besides, April was a total babe.

She went off to Germany for a few months and I gave her a call when she got back. She was really happy to hear from me and we went out again. This time she was pounding down the Long Island Iced Teas. Keep ‘em comin’, I thought. Again, we had a great time. I was driving her home and asked, “Want to stop by my place?” “Sure,” she said. How refreshing. She’d never been to my place. It was going unexpectedly well. She comes in and we start kissing immediately. Nice. Alcohol is a wonderful thing. After five minutes of my tongue in her mouth and my hand up her skirt she suddenly stops.

“Before we go on there’s something I need to tell you,” she says.

It can’t be good. I already know it’s over, it’s just a matter of why.

“What’s that?”

“No. No, I can’t tell you.”

Jesus, now I’ve got to drag it out of her.

“No, come on, what do you need to tell me?” I ask.

“I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

I think that’s my favorite line of all time.

“I’m really upset right now because my fiancée just broke off our engagement.”

“You’ve been engaged all this time? That explains a lot.”

“I’m sorry, I should have told you, but I thought you wouldn’t see me again if you knew, and besides, my fiancée lives in another state.”

“Well, thanks for telling me. I wish you would have said something.”

 That wasn’t too bad. In fact, I was ready to pick up where we left off. So what if she broke up with someone? I was in no position to care. With my hand still up her skirt I made an effort to continue when she interrupted.

“There’s something else I need to tell you.”

Somehow I knew there would be something else.

“My fiancée was another woman,” she says and starts sobbing.

Now I’m supposed to comfort her for the agony she’s inflicting on me. She must feel awful.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

“I was afraid you would reject me.”

“Besides, I don’t really consider myself a lesbian.”

There she was, ready to marry another woman and didn’t think she was a lesbian. She must have learned that in one of her women’s studies classes. I was willing to debate the point with her, but she was already in tears – the international female distress signal. At this point I’m supposed to figure out the right thing to say and say it. Not this time. April strung me along for over a year pretending to be available and straight, yet I was supposed to buy into how hard it was for her. She expected me to accept her for whoever she was, continue to date her and buy her dinners, and let her go off and fuck other girls and marry them behind my back. I removed my hand from under her dress and took her home. See ya.

From: “The Culture of Female Pathology" 

Lorraine’s Favorite Story

I heard Lorraine tell the story twice at work. It was obviously one of her favorites. Lorraine was in her late 50s and worked for years on ranches in Texas before getting an administrative job at Compaq. She used to like it when new ranch hands got hired. These would be young guys 17 or 18 years old. Lorraine would show them the different types of farm chores to be done. She had one chore that she saved for special occasions. According to her, she would demonstrate to the guys how to castrate a caged bull, and then take the bloody testicles and throw them to some dogs that would fight viciously for the privilege of devouring them. She loved watching the reactions of these new ranch hands when they saw that. “One guy even passed out,” she laughed. It’s one thing to be required to castrate a bull, it’s another to really enjoy it. There are some demented women around. I never noticed any examples like her in our Compaq sensitivity training films.

Well, Lorraine is just one woman, right? How can I project that onto all American women? It has to do with that whole John Wayne Bobbitt incident. A woman slices off a man’s penis and women everywhere are delighted. I guess it’s their idea of instant equality. The women at work all had big demented grins whenever they brought up the topic. It seemed really odd to me. I remember them sitting around and laughing. They all loved it. I was standing there wondering, “What’s wrong with them?”

Men don’t go around high-fiving each other whenever a woman is tortured. We don’t celebrate stories of rape we hear on the news. But all the women I talked to thought Lorena Bobbitt was some kind of heroine for castrating her husband. She took his severed penis and threw it in the street somewhere – even better. The office girls just assumed her actions must have been justified. Obviously he was a real jerk or she wouldn’t have been driven to do that. What courage she had. It was a moment of pure joy to them. They also delighted in our male discomfort with the topic. By expressing their delight they collectively castrate us all. It’s emasculation by proxy.

There’s more. I was visiting a girl named Elizabeth a few days after the whole Bobbitt incident. Elizabeth was one of the nicest, most affectionate, positive girls I’d been out with in a long time. She was intelligent, into history, not weird on any religions, not feminist. Just nice. Elizabeth and I were curled up together on the couch with the TV on, and there was a news update about the Bobbitt incident. Suddenly this wonderful positive girl sits up as says “Oh God, I’m sooo glad she did that. He really deserved it.” As a matter of fact, he did not deserve it. It did not even occur to my nice affectionate Elizabeth that her comment might offend me or that I might disagree that castration was such a wonderful tool for dealing with marital problems. Any woman who thinks Lorena Bobbitt was justified in her actions is basically stating that she herself reserves the right to castrate a man if she so chooses. It must be an even better rush than castrating a bull.

Using the part of my brain that is missing from females, I switched gender roles to imagine what would happen if they showed some guy on TV who had cut off his wife’s nose or breast and flung it in the street. What if I had expressed delight over it with Elizabeth in my arms? What if I had said, “Ha! I bet the bitch had it coming!” She would be horrified. I would be thrown out, and rightfully so. But I stayed calm and let the moment pass. The alternative would have been to have a huge fight and never talk to her again. And she was the nicest girl I’d met in years.

There was no reason to lash out at Elizabeth specifically. She didn’t say anything I hadn’t already heard from the office girls. But at that moment I understood how bad things had gotten for men. It was depressing, realizing that all women hate us. It’s just that some women hate us more than others. And it’s not that Elizabeth hates me, but she has contracted the same collective hate of men that has infected almost all American women. The castration of John Bobbitt was just an outlet for her to vent her anger. As a man, I share in the collective hate that is directed toward us all. I’m man enough to be hated, just not man enough to be loved. A few women I’ve known keep me from giving up altogether.

From: “The Culture of Female Pathology” 

Media Feminism As Assault Weapon

Man-hate is now actively promoted in our culture. Regardless of what Naomi Wolf says, “power feminism” is not an improvement over “victim feminism.” I noticed the transition from victim feminism to power feminism sometime in the mid 1990s. During the reign of victim feminism, we were inundated with images of men committing acts of brutal violence against innocent, adorable females. All men were potential rapists and killers, ala Susan Brownmiller. With the rise of power feminism, the violence has shifted to female-on-male violence, ala Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Men are beaten up, defeated, outsmarted, kicked in the balls, and killed by attractive empowered females. It’s generic “media feminism” which celebrates female-on-male violence and the ridicule of masculinity. Media feminism is dumbed-down misandry for the masses. The basic anti-male theme is repeated again and again as entertainment. It’s indoctrination for all, via slow hypnosis.

So, unless you’re majoring in Women’s Studies, forget about victim feminism or power feminism or difference feminism or dissident feminism or militant feminism or gender feminism or equity feminism or whatever feminism. However you qualify it, feminism will always be identified with the mistrust, emasculation, and minimization of men.

Television commercials are one of the biggest proponents. I saw Mary Chapin Carpenter in concert on Austin City Limits a couple years ago. I like her music, and yes, I think she should have a rock and roll band. Even if it is all male. But there’s one song she plays about how she’s upset by a coffee commercial from the 1960s, and how the husband is so impressed with the cup of coffee his wife made that he thinks he’ll “keep her.” How dare he judge his wife by a cup of coffee? I wonder if Mary Chapin Carpenter has seen any commercials in the last 20 years? If so she should be happy, because men portrayed in commercials now are all incapable idiots, and thank God for the women who keep them from screwing up. One ad in 2003 has the wife taking digital photos of food as a shopping list because her husband is apparently too dumb to read a written list. He’s a white guy, of course.

We’ve been so conditioned to be über-sensitive to anything that might offend women that it’s become unimportant how white males are portrayed. For years we have been barraged with offensive anti-male content on TV. We’re dorks and cavemen. Homer Simpsons. We’re routinely ridiculed as morons and very few people think it matters.

The inadequacy of men and fathers has become part of our culture. In the movie Armageddon, an asteroid is on a collision course with earth. NASA decides to send a bunch of loser men from an oil drilling team into space with a nuclear bomb to destroy it. One of the men has been shunned by his family as an unreliable husband and father. How can he gain their acceptance? He has to go save the whole fucking planet.

In a Verizon commercial from September 2004, a dorky-looking dad comes in and tells his two cute teenage daughters that he just enrolled them in an unlimited cell phone plan, so now they can talk to him all they want. The daughters look mortified. They don’t want to talk to dad. Mom step in and tells them they can talk to their friends all they want, too. The girls are relieved. “Group hug,” says the dad. His teen daughters and wife hug each other, deliberately excluding him. “Call me,” he laments as they walk away with the phones he has just paid for.

I just saw Terminator II again. I noticed the scene in which the Linda Hamilton character is watching the interaction of her young son with the protective terminator robot. She thinks about how this father will never get drunk and hit him, will never leave, and won’t say he didn’t have time for him. “Of all the would-be fathers, this machine was the only one that measured up. In an insane world, it was the only sane choice.” That’s right, robots are the only good fathers. Thanks for reminding us.

Women are always kicking men’s butts on TV and in movies, and girls love it, especially young girls. It’s empowerment. That’s strange, didn’t I just read that violence is an expression of masculinity by us male oppressors? Some friends of mine have a 9-year-old girl, and she was ecstatic when telling me about how Xena beat up a bunch of men. Why is that so healthy? Would it be good for young boys’ confidence to see girls getting beat up by men half the time? There goes my role reversal kicking in again.

It gets much worse. Sexual violence against men in advertising is now commonplace. Apparently we deserve it. In 2002 I saw a commercial for Progressive Insurance in which a woman was using a voodoo website to torture some guy who was out on a date with another girl. The ad is supposed to show the power of their insurance sales website. The woman in the commercial superimposes a digital photo of the cheating bastard onto the computer-generated voodoo doll, then uses her mouse to drag and drop torture implements onto him. The guy on the date screams. Finally after using the typical voodoo tools like needles and fire, she does a drag and drop of some snippers to castrate the voodoo image of the guy. The guy on the date grimaces with pain. This is presented as hilarious, and the woman doing the castrating is portrayed as delighted and ingenious. It shows that nothing has changed since Bobbitt. A man getting his dick cut off by a woman is still amusing and empowering. They changed the commercial in 2003 so that the girl gleefully tortures the guy in non-sexual ways. That’s nice.

How does that coffee commercial compare with the voodoo castration of a man on a date? I doubt Mary Chapin Carpenter will be writing a song about that. I’m sure she’s still out there complaining about the old coffee commercial. In early 2003 there was an uproar over a beer commercial showing two women fighting and ripping each other’s clothes to the delight of two male onlookers. Entire TV shows were dedicated to the controversy. Yes, women are still shown in sexual roles in commercials, but at least they aren’t tortured and sexually mutilated to sell products.

In 2003 I saw a Trident gum commercial in which a squirrel runs up a man’s pants and bites his genitals. This makes him the idiot that doesn’t recommend Trident gum. There was a Washington Mutual ad that showed a man getting his gonads crushed by an errant bowling ball, but he doesn’t care because he got a great loan. I was at a Superbowl party in 2004 when a Bud Light commercial came on showing a dog jumping up and biting a man in the crotch. The girls in the room erupted in laughter and cheers. I saw later that it got voted best Superbowl commercial of 2004. I saw a Dairy Queen commercial in May 2004 that showed a 2-year-old kicking his dad in the groin when he doesn’t get ice cream. I did some searching on the web and discovered that the director of client services for the ad agency, as well as the Dairy Queen exec who approved the ad are both female.

TV and movies always portray men getting struck in the groin as hilarious. Gratuitous crotch violence has become mandatory in all action and comedy films. Ever since the spectacular crotch kick in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hollywood can’t give us enough. It’s everywhere. I recently saw an online listing of more than 1500 films and TV shows that depict attacks on the male genitalia.

Even “family” shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos shows men and boys getting hit by various objects in their groins – and they’re always served up with a laugh track. They’ve desensitized an entire segment of the public to men in pain. Unlike images in the movies, these groin hits are real. A recent episode showed a man falling backwards into a campfire and the host asked, “Who doesn’t like roasted marshmallows?” The winner of the best video of the year was for a five-year-old kid who got his nuts smashed riding a mini-motorbike. For the 300^th episode, America’s Funniest Home Videos had a feature called “Greatest Groin Hits,” and offered a cash prize for the greatest groin hit of all time.

Why is it acceptable to show men in pain from various assaults on their sex organs? It’s because this type of pain does not offend women. These same women are supposedly against violence. Violence against women, that is. Why do women enjoy images of men getting their testicles bitten and beaten? Because men deserve it. All men, damn them. Because every man has hurt a woman emotionally, and since men are devoid of feelings the only way to make them really feel pain is physically. And what more appropriate place than right in the groin? Quick, everyone think happy thoughts. Oh yeah, to women those are happy thoughts.

While expressions of violence by women against men are presented in the media as something positive, violence against women is portrayed as the ultimate evil. Cute girls who are murdered or disappear get huge media coverage. Some I recall are; Chandra Levy, Elizabeth Smart, JonBenet Ramsey, Polly Klaas, Dru Sjodin, and Lori Hacking. Fox News has dedicated more than 100 entire shows to Laci Peterson. No such concern is displayed for men and boys who meet violent deaths.

I just saw an infomercial fundraiser for animal shelters. The female moderator explained that one reason to donate was because apparently, when women run away from abusive men, the men beat up on the women’s poor little pets instead. That in turn encourages the women to come back and take the beating themselves. Oh sure, we’ve all done that. So now we need battered pet shelters too. Just not battered men shelters. Oh, but women aren’t violent like men. Just ask the husband of Clara Harris from Houston or the boyfriend of Dana Pierce from Austin. Oh, that’s right, they’re dead. Brutally murdered, in fact. Maybe that’s why we don’t need shelters for men.

I don’t think commercials and movies actively encourage women to go out and slice off our penises or murder us. At least not generally. More likely is that women get the message again and again that men are opponents. That men deserve punishment. That pain inflicted by women upon men is good fun. That violence toward men is justified. That violence is a form of female empowerment. The result is not so much an increase in female violence as a decline in respect for men. Our value as human beings is diminished. We must be demeaned. It’s done more with images than with actual violence. It’s media feminism as an assault weapon. It’s a daily bucket of gasoline on the fire.

Besides the assaults on male sex organs for fun, the casual killing of men, and the portrayal of all men as idiots, there are more subtle denigrations going on. It’s common for TV to show capable and skilled men reporting to young and sexy women who are their superiors. These divas are the decision makers barking orders at docile men, who scramble to carry out every command. It’s retaliatory sexism in screenwriting. It’s the result of writers exercising “power feminism,” looking for every possible way to belittle and ridicule men. It’s pathology “light.”

Women absorb these attitudes, then try to enter into relationships with us. The old feminists have slowly gotten their way. They are successfully harming men. Feminists have never caught on that damaging men will eventually damage women. Eventually has come to pass.

Copyright 2005 Thomas Ellis, all rights reserved