This year I discovered something called “the Manosphere.” Is it possible to discover something you’re already a part of? Because as near as I can tell, I’ve been part of the Manosphere since starting the Two-Fisted Blog a few years ago. Granted, the 2FB was never about game or gender relations, but it was written by a man, for men, and usually about men. Specifically red-blooded heterosexual men. I’ve never pandered to the feminists on my blog or in my books, nor will I ever. I was a manosphere poet and didn’t know it.
But now I know it.
My epiphany began after hearing the phrase “alpha male” for the umpteen-zillionth time, and deciding to find a definition for it. I got a lot more education than I bargained for. To summarize briefly, there are names for the phenomena and personalities I’ve observed; for the theories I’ve formulated and even some attitudes I’ve adopted. And yet there’s still a lot I had not discovered strictly on my own via the School of Hard Knocks, so other blogs in the Manosphere have been like a crack addiction to me lately. My vocabulary increased overnight to include terms like “white knight,” “mangina” and “NAWALT.”
NAWALT – Not All Women Are Like That. Frequently heard on Manosphere websites, usually used by intruding women or trolls who want to derail an assertion. If only one out of a million women “aren’t like that,” it’s still technically true (but Diogenes wouldn’t waste the lamp oil to go looking for her!).
White Knight – (1) a man who “comes to the rescue” of a woman, or of women, reflexively, emotionally-driven, without thought or even looking at the situation; (2) a man in authority who enables Team Womyn in his legislative actions, judgments, or rulings, reflexively, emotionally-driven, without thought or even looking at what’s right.
Mangina – an unfortunate (in all ways) combination of “man” and “vagina”. Generally used to describe a male person who has left his balls in some woman’s purse.
I’m not going to start blogging sex or dating advice here. But some very astute observations have been made in the manosphere and some of them have helped me put something into perspective. For lack of a better subject heading, I’ll call that something “GENDER BIAS IN POP CULTURE (IN GENERAL) AND ACTION-ADVENTURE MOVIES (IN PARTICULAR).”
Action-adventure has been a predominantly male genre, and marketing gurus will tell you it still is.
In literature it was once labelled “men’s fiction.” This genre disappeared from traditional publishing circa 1990. A handful of authors (including myself) have done our best to resurrect men’s fiction (in various sub-genres) for the last few years. In fact, that was one goal of the Two-Fisted Blog and, now, Virtual Pulp Press.
The obstacles have been large and numerous. One is the astronomical volume of available books in the online age, now that anyone/everyone can get a book published. And does. So just getting a reader to discover a particular book is a significant hurdle. And with so much garbage being published by the aforementioned anyone/everyone, indie authors suffer guilt by association, rendering odds of discovery even worse. There’s an assumption that if the New York Publishing Cartel (NYPC) didn’t publish it, it’s not worth browsing/sampling. And finally, the target audience for the genre (red-blooded heterosexual men), by-and-large, just doesn’t read much anymore… besides Twitter posts and videogame subtitles, anyway.
Men still pay to see action movies, though.
And despite the wives or girlfriends who accompany them to the theater on occasion, nobody disputes the audience for this genre being male at its core.
The genre appeals to traditionally masculine impulses. It was designed to be escapism for males, giving them heroic, masculine role models that, at least subconsciously, men and boys aspire to be. Why then is it absolutely obligatory (so far as film makers are concerned) to have at least one woman in every action movie who is at least as masculine, if not more so, than the hero? (This certainly isn’t limited to the big screen, BTW–you find the same fetish in comic books, videogames and other media, but movies have the largest audience, and this fetish is apparently a requirement in film.)
The motives and reasons behind this are too numerous to document here. What it boils down to is that this convention is one symptom of a feminized culture, in which worldview, opinions and thought patterns are conditioned by pop culture and mass media.
In my aforementioned crack spree intensive research, I discovered two counterculture (or perhaps anti-establishment is a better description) websites: The Rational Male and Return of Kings. If the latter was an automobile, there’s no doubt in my mind it would be festooned with “No Fat Chicks in Bikinis” bumper stickers. But despite the frequent superficiality, and what seems to be a conscious effort on the part of the writers at times to resemble the “sexist pig” stereotype, there are some interesting conclusions reached there. Here’s an excerpt from one of their articles about the myth of “male privelege:”
Women…see media as a source of therapy. …They expect to be able to turn on any media outlet and have their egos massaged. …Of course, ferocity, independence and intelligence are always assumed on the part of the woman. Think about that – female egos are not even worried about actually being smart or tough, as they assume that they are that just by existing.
This assumption is regurgitated in action movies.
The hero in an action movie is nearly always an exceptional man. Often he has undergone extensive training to achieve his level of physical prowess; or sometimes he towers above other men due to superpowers. Traditionally, only the villain mastermind approaches equality with him in unarmed combat…
With the exception of female characters.
A woman can be a waitress, or receptionist, or welfare queen–it doesn’t matter. There’s no necessity of rigorous training or superpowers–the very fact that she has a vagina automatically makes her equal (or superior) to the action hero. Look at the TV portrayals of Lois Lane for the last 20 years, just for one example. She’s such a badass you just know she’d thrash Superman back on Krypton. Bet you didn’t know reporters were one-woman armies, dijja?
In this case it’s not even necessarily women who are dogmatically inserting this female dominance fantasy into action movies. More often it is feminized males (white knights and manginas) behind this overused canard.
More on that in another post, perhaps.
Indeed, pop culture is not just a propaganda tool of the political left; it is a cohesive theraputic strategy for the female of the species. She turns on the idiot box television, and watching any sitcom, the denigration of everything masculine is reinforced…at least when embodied in a male character (because it’s not enough to flatter empower women by virtue of their being born female; men must also be ridiculed for the cardinal sin of being born male).
Special little snowflake Jane Public goes to watch a romantic comedy and reviews how women are emotional victims of alpha males, and the only sympathetic male characters are white knights, metrosexuals, or homosexuals. She watches a dramatic movie or TV show and it is reinforced that 1. women are simultaneously victims and strong, take-charge leaders while 2. men are cheaters; bullies/cowards; rapists; abusive; ineffectual; incompetent; weaklings; or some combination of the above. And when she sits through an action movie with her boyfriend (poor fool), she is conditioned to believe there is no physical difference between men and women besides breasts and genitalia.
Next thing you know, special little snowflake Jane Public (and her white knight cheerleaders) regurgitate originate ideas like: “Why shouldn’t women be in combat? Obviously women are just as tough as men–usually tougher, in fact.”
Hmm…I can see I’m going to need more than one blog post for this subject. To be continued…
Like a lot of us, Bracken is bothered by a government that views as it’s primary enemy the very citizens whose rights it was established to protect. Up until Castigo Cay the backdrop of his stories was almost entirely comprised of the efforts of renegade public servants hell-bent on violating a specific article of the Bill of Rights they swore to uphold. I’ve read and 
Don Pendleton’s “
In remembrance of the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, I’ve been celebrating the work of my favorite war fictioneer, Len Levinson. I just came across something he wrote that I really should have included in my intro to 
is a jerk and Topkick is a LIFER scum (been there, done that). The soldiers under Mahoney are typical grabasstic draftees. And “friendly fire” incidents become almost habitual, perpetuated by typical military bureaucracy and the incompetence it breeds.
One thing Len liked to do in this series is steer Mahoney into notable highlights of the war in Europe. Sometimes he went beyond that and had Mahoney himself become instrumental in the course of events. As mentioned previously, I thought the way he had Mahoney destroy the German fuel reserves during the Battle of the Bulge (#8 
Once was in the book preceding this one (#2 
similar contrived moment in this book. Here’s a little historical note to orient you: the hedgerows in northern France were so tall and thick that they’d been an obstacle to armies going back to Roman times. How high and how thick? Well, even the Sherman Tanks deployed by the Allies had a very difficult time busting through them. This delayed the Allied Forces from breaking out of the landing zone…in other words, it was holding up the advance in a way that the Germans by themselves couldn’t, and ultimately prolonging the war. Then an American tanker, using a little Yankee ingenuity, welded together a crude brush-cutting blade and afixed it to the front of a tank. Not long after that, Patton’s 3rd Army broke out and had the Krauts on the run.
I’ve followed Mahoney through the blood splattered pages of nine novels, so I know him pretty well. He’s a fantastic field soldier, an accomplished pick-up artist, and probably the world’s greatest bayonet fighter. One thing he is not is a handyman. Mahoney is not mechanically inclined, so having him be the one to design the brush-cutter for our tanks was an eye-roller for me.