Hot stuff

So, we're coming up to the start of the last season of Fringe.

I'll let it go, but only on the condition that they give Peter Bishop his own baddass, interdimensional cop show.



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Arty "salon" for men

From the always-wonderful Underpaintings 'blog,


Titled, "l'Atelier" by Horace Vernet, 1822

All the contemporary paintings I've seen of the old classical ateliers make them look like a kind of gentlemen's clubhouse or a men's version of the ladies' salon. A lot more than just drawing and painting seemed to go on in them. Doubtless there was lots of interesting talk about art, politics, religion etc. Several of these people are smoking!

I wonder how much the infiltration of women into this masculine domain, that started in the 20th century, contributed to the collapse of the classical atelier tradition in art instruction.

For my part, it looks irresistably fun, interesting and attractive. If I had lived at that time, I'm sure I would have found the company at such a place above much more engaging than a dull, stuffy salon any day. (How many salons included spontaneous fencing?!) So I can understand why chicks wanted in. Women are boring. Men are fun.



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New 'blogs: the male perspective

Dr. Helen: mostly about how sucky the feminist world is. She's written a book about how the hyper-feminized culture has excluded and systematically discriminated against men, particularly in matters pertaining to marriage, childrearing and divorce. I'd like to review it.

I'm starting a list of blogs by and about men and their view on the world, sexuality and other big issues. Some years ago, I started understanding how much damage feminism has done to men, how it has excluded them from domestic life and from the authority they should have in the home.

Apparently, there are not a few men who have noticed it as well, and the "Manosphere" is the result. There are many manifestations of this, with a wide variety of political opinion, but they seem mainly to be of either conservative or libertarian point of view in the American political sense, and among the latter, that is, libertarian end, to hold not only feminism but women in utter contempt. I think this trend, along with the execrable section of it of "Game" players - men who have dedicated their lives to a materialistic form of hedonism and the luring and using of women for short-term sexual gratification - appears to have been an offshoot of the sexual/feminist revolution in which men have said, "Fine, you want us to throw off our protective role? You've got it, honey."

There is a lot of anger in their writing at the wholesale emasculation of men and the hardening of women, which I can certainly understand, but their hatred of family and marriage seems like a dying patient hating and fearing the cure. A great many of them come across as being as childish and self-centred as the brainwashed women they criticise. Nevertheless, I think their observations about what feminism is doing both to men and to women, and to our societies as a whole, are worth reading. Food for thought, at any rate.

There are a lot of others, like our new friends Joffre the Giant and the Ignorant Redneck, who have taken a less self-harming mode. These more balanced characters seem to have one thing in common that the more angry and embittered men's writers do not; Christianity of a serious, intellectual and strongly devotional stripe.

I am still reading and collecting data about them, but as a whole, the men's bloggers are a very interesting internet phenomenon. They are very much akin, I think, to the early Catholic Traditionalist movement, who found each other and developed a network in cyberspace that helped us understand what was going on in the Church and the world. I should have been reading them for a long time, and don't know how I could have missed them until now. I'll pass on the more interesting bits to you lot and we shall see what we can make of it all.

The Private Man

The Rational Male

Alpha Game

The Spearhead



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Boccherini and Russel Crowe

One of my favourite composers in one of my favourite films played by one of my favourite hunky alpha-male actors.

Time for a short bracing shot of unabashed masculinity, I thought.



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My new favourite blog

Joffre the Giant on buxom wifely obedience.

Highlights...

Mansome: "Real men don't 'Tweet'" This reminded me powerfully of my stepfather, Graham, who though very troubled in life, was certainly a real man, and being a marine engineer, also smelled of diesel fuel.

It also brings to mind a recent conversation with a male friend about Jane Austen (which he had, of course, read). We were discussing the relative merits of Willoughby and Col. Brandon.

"As a guy, of course, I hated Willoughby instantly."

Good manly instincts there, I think.

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Lately I've been getting very annoyed by the response of the churches and prelates to the "gay marriage" thing. They go on and on about how wonderful marriage is and never, ever talk about what needs to be talked about. They're afraid. Not a very manly thing.

"Homosexuality among Christians: not a gift, but a deep wound."


"International Women's Day Meditation: feminism is bad for people"

And I think there's a big something missing in the whole discussion. Women are not going to believe this until men tell them. It's part of our nature. We need to be guided and protected by men, and as long as men don't tell women that feminism is bad, and doing bad things to them, they will keep hurting themselves, and men and children and the whole world with it.

Women are not constitutionally disposed to believe other women. Men need to say it.

Use your authority, given by God, and tell us the truth.



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Every man for himself

People are talking about the Concordia disaster. I noted it at first because it happened about 20 minutes train ride from where I sit.

The other thing I noted almost immediately is the news about the behaviour of the captain, Francesco Schettino, and the other men on board.

Rich Lowry comments in the National Review:

"“Every man for himself” is a phrase associated with the deadly Costa Concordia disaster, but not as a last-minute expedient. It appears to have been the natural order of things. In the words of one newspaper account, “An Australian mother and her young daughter have described being pushed aside by hysterical men as they tried to board lifeboats.” If the men of the Titanic had lived to read such a thing, they would have recoiled in shame. The Titanic’s crew surely would have thought the hysterics deserved to be shot on sight — and would have volunteered to perform the service.

...

Another woman passenger agreed, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats.” Yet another, a grandmother, complained, “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”

I note that Michael is doing a series this week on the emasculation of men and the effects of feminism on the Church. Today he mentioned the type of men who are feminist-approved in today's media. Men are routinely depicted as weak, stupid and ineffectual and lorded over by strong, hip intelligent women. After watching today's offering, I sent him a note asking that he not forget to talk about feminism's vilification and demonisation of strong men. The flip side of feminism's hatred of men is to denounce them as violent, evil and terrifying. Monsters.

I think it is also worth commenting on the effects on men in the real world of feminism, and her strumpet child, the Sexual Revolution. Feminism has killed the cultural priority of men protecting and being responsible for women. A male who has overcome adversity and grown from a child protected by women into a man, an adult who protects women and children. Our feminist-inspired anti-culture, coupled with a soul-deadening consumerist materialism, has tossed these concepts out and by telling women they don't need men, by demonising the strength of masculinity, it has at the same time told men that they never need to grow up.

If feminism has taught women they can sleep around "like men," it is to be remembered that this means it has also given men permission to do the same. Instead of insisting that men behave responsibly, marry a woman and protect and care for her and his children, it has offered men women as toys and offered women the Pill and abortion as the back-up plan.

I read an interesting, though deeply frightening, website that claimed to be in support of men against the feminist world. One of the points that the clearly angry men made was that they were often held to a grossly unjust double standard. The legal system, now held firmly in the feminist claw, holds them financially responsible for the children they father. The article on the site pointed out however, logically enough, that since effective contraception was available for free, and women are now allowed to use men sexually as easily as men use them, no man should ever be held responsible for fatherhood. The argument was even more chilling as it addressed abortion. Why should any man ever be financially ruined by family courts when abortion is legal, a lot cheaper and easy to get?

Why indeed? Feminism, because it is essentially dishonest, childish and self-serving, will never own up to the logical conclusions of its premises.

The culture-wreckers made divorce easy to get in the 1970s but it took a few decades for feminism, having now gained monstrous political strength, to catch up. It was not until about ten or twenty years ago that they realised that easy divorce and "free sex" left women and children without protection. When my parents divorced in 1971 or so, there were no laws protecting women from total abandonment. It is true that at that time, many, if not most post-divorce women were left in desperate poverty, often relying on welfare handouts, when the man ignored court orders for child support.

But in the last 20 years, feminism has caught up and now a man who divorces or leaves his family is often completely wiped out. Feminist family lawyers are known actively to discourage reconciliations in favour of totally ruining the man. In Canada, with the stereotype of the despicable "deadbeat dad" conveniently kept alive by the media, family court judges think nothing of ordering a man to turn over nearly his entire income. One man I know of, who had lost his job and was facing eviction from his apartment, was told by a judge, "I don't care if you don't have the money. If you don't pay, you go to jail." Canadian family law has revived the Victorian institution of debtor's prison.

Recently, the popes have written against the kind of feminism that promotes abortion and contraception, for hammering a wedge of hostility between men and women. Universal promiscuity, contraception, legal abortion, easy divorce, together with a youth-worshipping, madly consumerist culture, they have said, has created the perfect storm. A cultural disaster that tells women they don't need men, and men they can remain happy, care-free adolescents their whole lives.

This message seems to have come through especially loud and clear in Italy where it is only too easy to find men who are the embodiment of the self-indulgent man-child stereotype. Feminised men are a plague in Italy: vain, self-important, shallow and self-seeking mamma's boys who think nothing is wrong with living in their parents' house in their thirties and forties. One of the things I have written about recently is the drop in marriage rates in Italy. I think one of the best reasons for it is the terrible dearth of grown-up men. (Not forgetting that their skinny, shrieking, tarted-up, painted-claw, artificially endowed females are not anyone's warm ideal of wife and motherhood either.)

I'm happy to say that I am not the only one to have noticed this. It is a common cultural self-criticism of Italians.

Rosaria Sgueglia writes in the Huffington Post (somewhat ironically) that the master of the Concordia is one of those Italian men who match the stereotype point for point.

The average Italian man is said to be narcissist, egomaniac, coward, selfish, unable to follow basic procedures and unable to follow the rules. True or not, it's a stereotype, a stereotype which is strongly proved by the latest, tragic events in Italy.

But I'm also happy to say that I've liked and admired most of the Italian men I've met. The cultural stereotype is easy to observe in Rome, but it is not universal. I've certainly been the recipient of a great deal of careful assistance from a lot of good Italian men lately. (I've also observed that the grown-up Italian men I've met are also almost always Catholics who take their faith seriously.)

These would be men like the Coast Guard Captain Gregorio De Falco who repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, ordered Schetino back on board after the creep had fled the ship and abandoned his charges.



Sgueglia voices the frustration of Italians at the common shortcomings of their own post-Catholic culture, "Today Captain De Falco is the voice of Italian People; an angry voice, angry as every single Italian is."

Yes, today we are furious and we are because a human accident, a stupid accident, caused the death of people who didn't deserve to end their life in such a horrible way. We are because a five-year-old girl was left on board and is still missing; as are more than 20 people. We are because it took Mr. Schettino an hour to call the Mayday. We are because pregnant women, elderly and people who needed assistance were left without any coordination from their captain.

And we are because someone who was clearly incapable of doing his job was made responsible of more than 4,000 people. And, yes, we also are because people like Mr. Schettino do nothing but compromise the already damaged image the rest of the world has of Italian people.

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Must...Cheer...Up...

...Save ship...

Nothing like a Shatner vid.

All hail the alpha male.



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Men: like 'em.

A tribute to the Alpha Male with some of our favourite Orwell's Picnic manly videos:

The one, the only, the greatest of them all...


Not to be outdone, Fightin' Jack Aubry and his manly crew





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Just read a bit today of this article on boredom and I have to say that I agree with the general principle. We pale-skinned, frog-eyed denizens of Netland often forget that what we write about, life, happens outside our apartments, outside the computer-generated world. If SOMEone weren't out there doing real things in The Real, we'd have nothing to blog about.

I've been invited to be interviewed on Vatican Radio some time in the next few days about the Vatican's blogger conference, and this is, essentially, what I'm going to say. The internet isn't the Real. Blogs aren't very important.

A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday I felled a small wild cherry tree, sawed it up and split it. Not one minute of the work was dull. I didn’t wonder what the world was up to. When you open up cherry, all you want to do is smell it and look at it and open up more of it. I can’t say the same about what I did Monday to Friday, much of which involved managing—nay, fending off—electronic distractions.

James Tiberius Kirk didn't get to be the youngest-ever captain of a Constellation class starship by spending his youth playing internet computer games, and Jack Aubrey was learning the ropes (literally) on the high seas when he was 14. Lord Baden Powell began serving in the army at 19 and defended the town in the Siege of Mafeking in the Second Boer War. Churchill too fought bravely in the Boer War before going on to become Prime Minister and trounce the Hun.

And none of them, in their entire lives, was ever "bored".

Last night, I was terribly tired, but a thought was trying to germinate in my mind and it was something like this: I'm almost glad about cancer because it has forced me to think entirely in the Real, to concern myself exclusively with real things and to forget about the Fantasies and dreams my brain usually entertains and distracts itself with.

This is something to remember the next time we're sitting in a room that has grown dark because we've not bothered to get up and turn on a light, feet growing cold from lack of circulation, arguing in a commbox somewhere over the minutiae of some damn thing or other...

I've said it before. Go outside. Weed the tomatoes. Talk to a pretty girl. Swim in the sea when it's freezing cold. Draw a picture. Go to a gallery. Make soup.

Today, I'm going down to town, to pick up Katrina Ebersole at Trastevere train station. She's coming here for the Blogger conference and the Scholar's Lounge Blognic. She will be fulfilling a dream and meeting a real live Swiss Guard.

The Real is waiting for you.



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Little more man-music for ya

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Here's someone who gets the philandry thing

Things women will never understand about men

I understand it. Maybe I'm weird.



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One of the things I like about country music

it's for men.

Sounds good to me

Where do I get one?



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What can go wrong?

Sometimes the whole "alpha male" thing goes terribly wrong.

I once wrote an essay about Michael Corleone and The Godfather, (that I still contend was the greatest film ever made) in which I proposed that it was Michael's inversion of the hierarchy of love that corrupted him. He became a monster out of love for his father, which he placed above the love of God.

Don't love the creature more than you love the Creator.

It goes badly.



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'Cause it's never a bad moment for a Shatner moment

All hail the alpha male


Philandry: it's the new black.



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