Masculinity and Women's Taunts

A deep discussion in the P&B last night about chaps and chapesses. Someone asked why it is that women give men such a hard time. Someone else proposed that they do it to see if a man would 'break'.

This is not a new idea. A woman seeks a man who will be able to weather the storms of life and keep her and his children safe. Modern women take the 'tests' far too far though and have actually broken masculinity in pieces. She insists that a man be more in her image and likeness and does not like the result.

Whatever he does seems to be unsatisfactory.  The Gripes of Men's Wrath are her bitter, stunted harvest.

Now this conversation was set in train by my friendly 'Southern Belle' who spoke about Fathers the other evening. She is an educated lady of good taste and refined ideas about men and women in today's world. And she reads. She referred us to a 'book' in the Canon of Literature. Yes, the Grapes of Wrath. (Where did you think I got it from?)

Steinbeck saw what women look for in a man. Or used to. He saw what children look for in adults. Or used to. His depictions of masculinity and femininity are refreshingly free of the ideology that shapes gender characterizations in the literature of the last forty years. 

The men of the Joad clan are uneducated; the women are hard; and the children are perpetually barefooted.  But they’re all as tough as shoe leather and weathered by long suffering.

In chapter one, Steinbeck describes the waxing threat of a Dustbowl storm as it gradually sweeps into Oklahoma out of Texas and the Gulf.  The imagery turns again and again to the cornfields, a symbol of the vulnerability of the lives of thousands of poor families.

 

 

Men stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little green showing through the film of dust.  The men were silent and they did not move often.  And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men – to feel whether this time the men would break.  The women studied the men’s faces secretly, for the corn could go, as long as something else remained.  The children stood near by drawing figures in the dust with bare toes, and the children sent exploring senses out to see whether men and women would break…

 Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust.  After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant. 

Then the women knew that they were safe and that there was no break.   

Then they asked, What’ll we do?  And the men replied, I don’t know.  But it was all right.  The women knew it was all right, and the watching children knew it was all right.  Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.   

The women went into the houses to their work, and the children began to play, but cautiously at first.  As the day went forward the sun became less red.  It flared down on the dust-blanketed land.  The men sat in the doorways of their houses; their hands were busy with sticks and little rocks.  The men sat still–thinking—figuring.

The image of wellbeing and safety is extraordinary.  What do the adjectives hard, angry and resistant refer to here?  Outward resolve.  The opposite of self-centeredness.  The men turn outward, not inward.  They face their foe—the misfortune of catastrophic loss—with steely resistance. 

And in that resolve, the community takes comfort.

But today's 'Community' is a women's group.

It excludes men. Men are the 'enemy'.

The community has no comfort to take.

If this scene were adapted today for sitcom television, the men’s perplexity would increase while the women became hard, angry and resistant.  The men would struggle with their emotions by telling dirty jokes or playing with their X-box.  The women would roll their eyes and then roll up their sleeves and bring faux-comfort to the 'community'.  She, the 'Executive' woman married to a doofus husband would save the day, all in half an hour. Canned laughter would reinforce the comic message that men are stupid and weak, but that’s better than being sexists and abusers. Men can only be one or the other.

Unfortunately, Hollywood and women often get what they want. 

What we need is Hard, Angry, Resistant men. Not to put women in their place, but to rebuild the 'community' and Masculinity that the modern woman has been destroying like a dust storm for the past two generations.


By the Lord Harry, much ale was consumed last night.

By the way, the Southern Belle, who was toasted as a heroine, got it from:

http://culture-of-life.org/e-brief/importance-men-being-men

So what DO women do to taunt men? The 'Women's Rights' messages are everywhere and 'Feminism' is the flavour of our times. But it is a poisonous drink even in a low dive or back-alley speakeasy.

When men try to get a word in, all hell's filth breaks loose from the mouths of otherwise quite attractive women who were once  adored as someone's little girl.

 

 

Calumny is a stock in trade for feminists.  Against men in general, Institutions, moral behaviour, Family, even other women of a more traditional bent. It has spread from the UK and America to take its quite nasty, vicious message to all western countries. It is well organised and well funded.

 

 

Many, many of the 'silent majority' of women have gone along with the 'benefits' of feminist cajoling for a generation. Are things better for women?  Not from the continuation of demands and the escalation of the most dreadful slurs against the ordinary man, that is clear.

 

But perhaps some women are starting to fight back and show some strong femininity.

 

 

 

Now these last ladies are welcome to come into the Tavern and even lol about on the Patio. More effect to THEIR message.

 

But will the ordinary woman in the street care? Or will they continue to 'taunt and test' men?