The myth of a patriarchy is ridiculous for a few reasons. One is, of the two legitimate genders in existence, it is only the females who feel and act on a solidarity to their own sex. In fact, Team Womyn is the only sex ANYONE shows allegiance to.  Even today, men are compelled to compete against other men exclusively, and habitually act against their own self-interest, and that of men collectively. They are oblivious to the organized opposition to their very manhood,

I don’t like video selfies that much, but this clip is really worth a watch–especially starting around 5:40 or so. If you skip what’s before that, I’ll summarize something she shared:

Several men approached Girl Writes What privately to thank her for speaking out, but when she organized a conference specifically addressing the discrimination men suffer, nobody showed up.

And isn’t that just like us?

When Survivor was all the rage, I never watched it. I had cable with all the bells and whistles at the time but just didn’t watch a lot of TV–especially reality shows. But I caught the first episode of one season while a guest at a friend’s house. From what I could tell, the format of that season was guys vs. gals. The first competition was a timed obstacle course, and the men were winning decisively until some dork lost his balance on an obstacle, fell off repeatedly, and added enough time to the cumulative score that the women were able to pull ahead and win.

If your goal is to win a given competition, then it only makes sense to vote the weak links of your team off the island, right? The loser with no balance should have been first on the chopping block.

Instead, individuals on the men’s side conspired to vote one of their strongest members off the island, and they kept the clown (who I heard caused them to lose subsequent events). The females, however, voted in a way that was best for Team Womyn.

Whatever the rules are in Survivor that might justify the men’s actions, it is nonetheless illustrative of western culture in general.

There is organized effort to assign all the responsibilities in our society to men, and all the benefits/privileges to women. Men can be abused, cheated, conned, even killed, but it’s always women who are recognized as the victim (whether or not a man has the audacity to fight back).

Because vagina.

You’d have to be blind as well as ignorant not to be aware of this.

Yet, while nearly all females have an ingrained loyalty to other women collectively, men continue to throw each other under the bus (often for some psychological expectation of personal gain, perhaps?). At least 75% of the male population are white knights who think the situation should be made worse, not better. And this is just as bad on the right as on the left.

I’m very grateful to Girl Writes What for saying what few have the courage to say (her other videos have good info, too). I know nothing about her personally besides what she shares in the clips I’ve seen (and yes, she would probably look better with long hair…now snap your superficial self back to the subject and focus), but I really feel her pain about going through the trouble of setting up that conference only to have nobody show.

It kinda’ reminds me of one of the windmills I’ve tipped at.

I stopped visiting bookstores after the early ’90s when all the men’s fiction disappeared.

Chick-lit and romance dominate the literary world. Even when you find a book which appears dude-friendly on the cover and blurb, the author will sucker-punch you sooner or later with the obligatory feminist-pandering message and “strong female character.” When the book business went online, the pattern remained the same. And as if the gender bias wasn’t bad enough in mainstream, ostensibly neutral outlets, there are bazillions of groups, blogs, publishers and stores which cater exclusively to women. There was no masculine counterpart.

I got tired of drowning in the estrogen, and decided to make a difference.

My quixotic undertaking involved sparking a revival of pulp fiction and men’s adventure in several genres. Those were the last entertainment mediums that catered to masculine sensibilities, so I considered them the perfect kind of vehicle for taking back a small chunk of the literary world from entitled feministas and their white knight enablers. I imagined that whispered phrase from Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.”

This post is already getting long so, to make a long story shorter: after a couple years investing a whole lot of time and effort to bring back male space into the literary world, almost nobody showed up. And they kept not showing up. I stayed at it, and there were modest inroads made. Other authors and publishers thought a pulp revival was a good idea, so there were glimmers of hope.

What pimp-slapped me back to reality was, one of the guys I networked with brought some soccer mom into a mutual project, who immediately began beating her drum to feminize pulp, have homosexual pulp heroes,  social justice messages and so forth. In other words, to make pulp fiction exactly like everything else.

Shortly after that, it became evident that the guys I networked with to revive pulp didn’t share my Quixotic motives. They echoed the sentiments of the homophile soccer mom.

I had no allies.

It wasn’t the only time I bowed out of a creative undertaking because I  refused to conform. Other than working with cover artists, I’m not sure I’ll ever try to collaborate again.

I didn’t get it when I watched that episode  of Survivor, but now I do: for women, “the battle of the sexes” is a team sport; and they do and say whatever they think will benefit their team. For the male of the species, it’s every man for himself.