Analysis of LaudanumByron’s Song “The Hatred of Women”

Lately I’ve been considering a departure from the Men’s Rights Movement after a falling out with female members of my family over my posting to Facebook the lyrics of a song titled “The Hatred of Women,” by YouTube user LaudanumByron (I cannot determine his real name). To the title I added the parenthetical phrase “(For Men Like Me).” When said female family members asked me if I was implying that women hated me specifically (or I might be projecting hatred onto them) I gave them the silent treatment. And yes, I do mean my blood family, my family of origin, the one I’m stuck with no matter what my opinions on various issues may be at any given moment.

The theme of the song is “Women hate me.” One of the MRM’s key websites, A Voice for Men dot com, as I have understood it to be, is not about hating women, but rather about teaching men how best to survive in the political, economic, legal & social climate of today’s Western world. Its radio arm, A Voice for Men Radio, hosted at BlogTalkRadio.com, currently is hosted by one man & 2 women: John the Other, Typhon Blue & Girl Writes What. John has stated before that there is a difference between women & feminism: women are a biological demographic, while feminism is an ideology that fosters misandry (hatred toward men). Yet one of the songs that is played during music breaks is the song in question, “The Hatred of Women.” Women! The biological demographic! So where does that leave women who, like TB & GWW, are fed up with feminism & want to see Western societies treat their men as more than mere disposable utilities? Those 2 gals don’t hate the singer, do they?

Now let’s analyse the lyrics. Let’s start with the 1st verse:
I never heard my Grandpa speak
A simple man, mild & meek
He went to work, he went to sleep
My Grandma told us that he was weak

So why or how exactly was Grandpa weak? And if he was so weak, then how did he & Grandma manage to get together to create the singer’s mother or father? However they did, their relationship must not have been a healthy one, much less a happy one.

Now let’s fast forward to another verse or 2:
Men have no doubt just what they’re for
We die at work, we die in war
Die at sea as the lifeboats float ashore
Women & children, all aboard

We take the strain, bear the load
Build the bridges, sweep the roads
Build the houses that make the homes
Pay for others, but live alone

The singer could not have died at work, in war or at sea, else he would not have lived to write this song. Nor does he say whether he specifically has ever made his living at a dangerous job such as construction, or been divorced or alienated from any children he might have had.

Now let’s skip to the next verse:
I never held my father’s hand
Took his side, made a stand
All my life I just ran & ran
He said “Son, you don’t understand.”

So is the singer implying that his parents divorced when he was a child? And how did that affect his relationship with his father? Did his mother teach him to hate (or be afraid of) his father? Does the singer, as an adult, wish his relationship with his dad could have been better?

Now let’s rewind to the verse that comes immediately after the one about Grandma & Grandpa’s relationship:
I used to think men had too much
Thought the world could use a woman’s touch
Was told the promise would be worth the trust
That we’d all be one or near enough
But that isn’t what happened…

The singer, like most of us guys, must have grown up being taught that girls were sugar & spice & everything nice, but after reaching adulthood saw that illusion shattered. Again, maybe the cycle of marriage & divorce repeated when his own marriage fell apart.

And now the pair of lines with which all verses end:
All I see
Is the hatred of women for men like me

“Hatred of women for men like me.” Again he scarcely says which specific women showed hatred toward him, as opposed to other men or the male gender in general. Does writing one gender off as harboring hatred toward the other really advance the goals of either one, or of the society in which they live?

A song like that could negate any efforts by a website or its radio show to give a voice to men who for one reason or more feel frustrated by their interactions with women, law enforcement, family courts &/or criminal courts. We should be fighting feminism (the ideology), not women (the biological demographic)! A song like that could reduce the MRM to merely one side of a coin on whose other side feminism rests. Feminism & Men’s Rights would merely be mirror images of each other.

A man going his own way does not need an ideology to guide him in whatever “his own way” might be. He would do well to be aware of issues like paternity fraud & false rape accusations, but in the long run, affiliating himself with a movement might do him more harm than good. I have done all I can to help the MRM bring to light the issues we face as men. I wish them well, but shall follow them no more.

As always, Caveat andro.

Multiple Men’s-Issues Items in One Newspaper

In my local newspaper this morning (June 13, 2012) I found a few interesting news bits & opinions. The first was a letter to the editor concerning 2 women who apparently had recently sued the US Army & Department of Defense for gender discrimination because they were denied combat positions. The guy who wrote the letter opined: “If women want full participation in the military, they must be required to register for the draft as men are. . . . As usual, women liberals want equality but don’t want the same requirements & consequences.” Well, I don’t care if they’re liberals or conservatives or anything in between; women who want options without obligations can come in all political stripes. But otherwise I say amen.

The 2nd item that caught my eye was an op-ed written by a woman. Shortly after moving to eastern Idaho in 1985, she had experienced a tire blowout on a highway. Just as she was getting ready to use her tire jack, a farmer pulled to the side of the road behind her vehicle & prepared to help her. She told him, “It’s OK, my dad taught me to change a tire.” He replied that even so, if he (the farmer) had just passed her by, her father would have frowned on that. She thereupon accepted his help. Chivalry dies hard, don’cha know? But if a male driver who experienced a tire blowout were to be offered the same help from someone of either gender, at least that would be civility (a 2-way street, as distinct from chivalry, a one-way street).

The 3rd tidbit of note to me was of the “oddball news” sort. It read: “Nikoleta Karoly of East Naples, FL, is accused of choking her boyfriend because he refused to marry her for the purpose of getting a new Visa, according to an arrest report.” In other words, she wanted to marry him not for love, but for a green card. I’ve heard of immigrant women exploiting a loophole in the Violence Against Women Act by falsely accusing American-citizen husbands of abusing them in order to speed up the green-card process, but in this case it was the woman who dished out the abuse. I don’t know what, if anything, she will get beyond the arrest, but at least she was arrested.

For 2 decades or so, the MRM has developed mostly inside the womb of the Internet. The appearance of multiple men’s-issues items in one edition of a mainstream newspaper may be a sign that the MRM is finally (though slowly & painfully) emerging from that womb into the outside world.

Lucky Compared to Many of My Fellow Males

Having lived my entire life in eastern Idaho, I have experienced few of the injustices that many of my fellow males in the industrialized world have faced or are facing. Thus it may seem strange to most people that I would gravitate toward a movement like the MRM. Nevertheless, once I learned of it via the Internet circa 2004, it somehow clicked with me.

For most of my formative years I was raised by both parents; not until I was 15 did they divorce. Afterward my mom, to her credit, allowed (in fact, encouraged) me to visit my dad every now & then. He suffered from multiple sclerosis, so I usually saw him in bed whenever I’d visit him at a small house in a small town, where he lived with an unrelated female caregiver until his death in the fall of 1999, by which time I was 23. As much as I hated to see him suffer, I consider him & me lucky compared to many dads & their kids today.

Having watched both parents work outside the home during the first dozen years of my life (& my mom for many years afterward) I have believed, from the time I was old enough to date, that the guy & the gal should split the cost as evenly as possible. Whenever my mom would tell me that I should pay for my date’s dinner (or movie ticket, or whatever the sit’n may have been)  as well as my own, I would think, What about gender equality? Something’s not right here! Thankfully, on the few dates I did get during my high school years, the gals involved agreed to split the expenses with me.

Some male college students these days report being pressured into rituals such as “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes,” wherein a throng of males march around in high heels to raise awareness of violence against women, esp. at the hands of intimate partners. But during my Idaho State University days in the mid ’90s, I was far removed from much of the campus life; I never joined any fraternities or the like. After 3 years I collapsed under the workload & dropped out, still blissfully unaware of any misandry. But knowing what I know now about campus politics in the US & Canada, I’m glad I’ve been out for a decade & a half & resolve never to go back under any circumstances.

Neither I nor anyone I know outside the Internet or MRM has ever been accused of rape or other sex offenses, but my blood still boils whenever I read about the Duke Lacrosse case of 2006-07, the Hofstra false-rape case of 2009, the false rape claims against Julian Assange & Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or any case similar thereto. If too many females cry wolf too many times, then one day the public will turn blind eyes & deaf ears when the wolf attacks for real. So anymore, whenever a girl or woman claims to have been raped, I take her claim with a grain of salt.

While I lack the firsthand experience with injustice that tends to draw others into the MRM, I nonetheless am no longer the idealistic Luke Skywalker I was in my teens & early 20s. Now in my 30s, I am more like the world-weary Han Solo. I am prouder than ever to be single & childless & to have sustained fewer battle scars from the Gender War than have many of my fellow males.

Random Thoughts on Gender Dynamics

A number of thoughts have been in & out of my mind for a long time. One pertains to whether we humans, over the last 50 years, have leaned away from pair-bonding characteristics & more toward tournament-species characteristics. By tournament species I mean the kind of species in which a bunch of males compete with each other to the death, or at least serious injury, for the privilege of mating with one or more females. As I learned from watching a video by Girl Writes What, one such species is the mountain gorilla. Another one that comes to my mind is the lion.

The inner-city ghettoes of the United States today also have a tournament culture. Women will have sex with the physically strongest male, the drug kingpin, the guy who kills a lot of other males in competition for those women & other resources. The guy does not stick around to help the woman raise the kids. Instead he goes out to impregnate as many more women as he can before he is hauled off to jail, or killed, or whatever happens to him.

Barbarossa & others note how women are hypergamous, i.e., they seek out men who can gather more resources than the women can get for themselves. A woman seeks resources from a man in exchange for giving him sex, which often leads to them having one or more children together. She will stay with him just long enough to produce however many kids she wants, then she will kick him to the curb & court the ultimate provider & protector: the state. Ultimately the kids belong to her & the state. She will use the force of the state to collect alimony &/or child support from the bio dad, who at the same time is not allowed to be part of the kids’ lives. This is Briffault’s Law in action: once the man can no longer provide the woman’s perceived benefit, he’s history. So while the state cannot impregnate women directly, it does fill the role of the alpha male that ultimately wins in the tournament species that we humans have become.

Another thought pertains to the occupations men & women choose. An article I read in my local newspaper a month or 2 ago spotlighted 911 dispatchers. What the article didn’t specifically say, but I noticed nonetheless, was that nearly all the dispatchers were women. It also prompted me to think how bank tellers used to be male, but over the past century that occupation has turned almost all female. The 911 dispatchers, who spend nearly all their working hours at a desk, are nearly all female, while the people they send to respond to fires, crimes & serious injuries are almost all male. I think our evolutionary programming has something to do with that. Back in the caves 20,000 years ago, the women & children lay low where they could be safe, while the men risked their lives hunting for food & fending off predators. By the same token today, men are more willing than women to take on dangerous occupations like coal mining, garbage collecting, skyscraper building, & law enforcement, while women tend to gravitate toward desk jobs where they don’t put their lives on the line.

For a twist on this dynamic that I find interesting, in the Ghostbusters film series & the TV cartoon series based on it, Janine starts out as the guys’ secretary, sending them on their ghostbusting calls & holding the fort while they’re gone. But the character does evolve as the viewer watches the cartoons chronologically. In one episode of Season 1 (1986), Janine finds her apartment haunted, but ghosts in other parts of town are keeping the guys busy, so she puts on a spare uniform & arms herself with a spare proton pack & learns how to deal with the ghosts in her apartment on her own. Later in that same episode, & in a couple of episodes in later seasons, ghosts kidnap the guys, so Janine (with help from accountant Louis &/or ghost mascot Slimer) rushes to the Ghostbusters’ rescue. By the end of the series (1991) she has her own pink uniform & busts some ghosts alongside the guys. From secretary to full Ghostbuster in 5 years, now there’s some “girl power” for ya! Back in real life, you may find the occasional woman on a police or firefighting force, putting her life on the line, but for the most part that task still falls to men. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Another thought pertains to the old male-female relationship dynamic of asking & paying for dates, buying an expensive ring & proposing marriage. It almost always has been the men who have done all that. But given that male college enrollment has steadily declined during the last half-century, & that men in the industrialized world, one by one, are waking up to the risks involved in marriage & relationships, part of me wonders if there will come a time when the dynamic will be flipped. Women will be the ones to ask men for dates, propose marriage to men, & prove that men can trust them enough not to walk out at a moment’s notice & leave them with nothing. But if there’s any truth to Briffault’s Law, then that day is highly unlikely ever to come.

I also think now & then on the politics of violence. In the 1960s girl-group song “My Boyfriend’s Back,” the guy to whom the girl is singing has sexually harassed her, & she warns him that in retaliation for said harassment, her big, strong boyfriend is gonna beat the crap out of him. This is an example of what is known in the MRM as violence by proxy. She initiates the violence, but the boyfriend carries it out. That way, if anyone goes to jail for assault & battery, it will be the boyfriend, not the girl. Also, in the movie Forrest Gump, when bullies attack Forrest, he runs away. But whenever he sees his love interest, Jenny, being assaulted, he beats the crap out of whoever is hurting Jenny. Not that Jenny necessarily appreciates what Forrest does in defense of her, but the message to boys & men is clear: Never dish out violence in defense of yourself; save it for defense of a woman (or your country; Forrest also serves in the Army in Vietnam). A man’s job is to dispense & absorb violence on behalf of women & society.

Which brings me to the relative value of a man’s life vs. a woman’s life. The woman carries the next generation inside her for 9 months at a time. If she dies, the baby dies, so the woman’s life must be protected at all costs. But if anything happens to the man during that 9 months, the next generation still has the chance to be born; for example, Malcolm X & Robert Kennedy each had daughters born to them after their deaths. Also note that during sex (animal or human) millions of sperm race toward one egg, but only one sperm gets to fertilize that egg; the rest die trying. By the same token, the entire male individual (esp. in a tournament species) dies or gets seriously injured competing for the entire female. And in the human dating dynamic (esp. at a website like Match.com) dozens of men compete for the attention of one woman, but few if any ever get a reply, much less a date. Just as the sperm is disposable, so is the entire male.

That’s all for now, but till next time…Caveat andro!