“I’m Sorry, I Just Don’t Keep Up With The Ladies’ Gossip Magazines.”

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Every few days, a reader sends me a link to some head-exploding lunacy lobbed from the tie-dyed tents over at Camp Vagina. The guys mean well. Most are just offering grist for the mill, or something they want me to “get out there” to a wider audience. I think sometimes they are hoping to prod me into some kind of thumotic rage, so that I’ll tear apart the offending essay and write down the words that they feel. 

But I don’t need to get angry. Like Dr. David Banner, my secret is that I’m always angry. This upside-down world is infuriating enough. When I hear the story of some petty indignity or injustice suffered by a decent man, hours later I’ll catch myself alone in a car arguing with his enemies out loud, on his behalf. Because, yeah, I’m that guy.  I’m angry for men everywhere, all the time.

It’s worth something to point out bullshit when you see it, so that other men don’t walk right through it. I like the sober and even-tempered way that W. F. Price does it over at The Spearhead. The arguments advanced by liberalism and feminism do need to be addressed and deconstructed periodically—even repetitively—because there is always a guy out there who is hearing this stuff for the first time. A piece that gets a lot of media attention does offer a teachable moment and a way to reach men who are still a little brainwashed by teachers, girlfriends, single moms, and MTV.

I’ve done my time with feminists. But, after playing the game for a while, I started to feel like I was the one who was being played. I started to think about whose opinions I was reacting to, and why, and what that meant.

Who are these people, and why do they get to determine what I’m going to write about?

I’m writing this in response to a request from Greg Johnson that I comment on Hugo Schwyzer’s recent contribution to Jezebel, titled “Why the ‘End’ of White Men Is Actually Good for White Men.” I’ll get to Hugo shortly, but let’s look at Jezebel for a moment.

Jezebel

Jezebel wants to be the updated, online equivalent to Cosmopolitan magazine.  As of this writing, here are some headlines from its right-hand sidebar.

“The Remote-Controlled Vibrator Is, Um, Coming” (also by Schwyzer)

“The Rise of the Needy Man”

“How a Woman’s Orgasm Can Save a Man” (Schwyzer)

“Vibrators and Clitoridectomies: How Victorian Doctors Took Control of Women’s Orgasms” (Schwyzer)

“Sexytime Talk: Endless Boners, Bald Vaginas and Internet Infidelity”

“Keira Knightley Picks Pink Lipstick and Pockets for the Anna Karenina Premiere”

“Lindsay Lohan Makes a Surprise Bewigged Appearance on Late Night”

“Kristen Stewart Dons Yet Another See-Through Ensemble at the FinalTwilight’s UK Premiere”

“I Fell in Love With My Shrink”

Basically, Jezebel is a sex, fashion and celebrity gossip magazine for tech-savvy office sluts. It’s also associated with yet another gossip magazine that I am often asked to comment on.

Gawker

It’s been a while since I worked an office job, but I get the sense that Gawker is what giggling receptionists and gay administrative assistants read after they’re done cooing at the pictures of shirtless actors and celebrity fashion foibles they find on Perez Hilton. A few months ago there was a Twittersphere dust-up between Gawker editor Max Read and Takimag writer Jim Goad (something along the intellectual lines of “dats rasicsts!”). A reader wanted me to comment on it or get involved. I looked up Max Read, and I saw at the time he had recently written a string of posts about actress Zooey Deschanel. His last post as of this writing is titled, “What’s Happening on the Rihanna Plane? Dispatches from the Front Line.”

Why am I supposed to take this person seriously?

I guess people expect a reaction because this is the kind of online supermarket tabloid garbage their friends repost on Facebook. These kinds of writers have a big audience, so they drive the national conversation, however inane.  I wouldn’t want to be seated next to these people at a restaurant, but people expect me to waste my time engaging them—probably because they command the attention of hundreds of thousands of airheads.

Let’s move across the web to some of the other sites that determine what men who write about the conflict between masculinity and modernity are supposed to react to.

Feministing

Samhita Mukhopadhyay is currently the Executive Editor at Feministing. She has a BA from the State University of New York at Albany in Women’s Studies and Sociology and an MA from San Francisco State in Women and Gender Studies. Feministing is generally an online ghetto for otherwise useless Women’s Studies majors, pro-abortion activists and rape fetishists, but a standout contributor is “Sharkfu,” who bills herself as “co-founder of the United Church of Bitchitude and Latter Day Drunks, sister, dawg guardian, activist, soul food addict, hockey fanatic (Go Blues!) and Mistress of Bitchitude at AngryBlackBitch.com.”

Feministing relies partially on Google ads, so every time we link to them, we drive up their traffic, make them more relevant, and help increase their ad revenue by selling more of whatever their target demographic is buying. My guess is kitty litter and vibrators.

The Atlantic

The Atlantic is supposed to be some kind of serious magazine because it’s over 100 years old and has an impressive pedigree, but when it comes to anything having specifically to do with men, these days it’s a higher rent version of Feministing. The Atlantic regularly publishes rehashed progressive feminist propaganda (I addressed most of the themes and gave you their playbook in No Man’s Land) and every so often the editors post the neurotic LiveJournaling  of menopausal divorcees.

Slate XX

Slate XX is the online home of Hanna Rosin, author of the notorious “End of Men” article in The Atlantic as well as its obligatory (and apparently lackluster) follow-up book by the same name. Other authors include Alyssa Rosenberg, Amanda Hess, and Amanda Marcotte. The byline for Slate XX is “What Women Really Think,” but these women are hardly representative of all American women. To a one, they are Democratic Party shills. Many—and this is true of the contributors to the sites above as well—live somewhere in Brooklyn, which is about as much like America as Brooklyn is like Moscow. When they’re not praising Obama, scolding men who have affairs, or encouraging women to murder their unborn children, the women of Slate XX debate about who is really the sexiest man alive, and—like every single one of these blogs—obsess about anything pop singer Rhianna does.

Why Them?

Again, why should I allow this incestuous clique of celebrity-obsessed, gossiping Internet hipsters and Women’s Studies majors set my agenda?

I’m not going to do it.

In real life, I don’t go down to the local bagel shop and interrupt clutches of kvetching yentas.  Trolling them online can be fun, but it’s not terrifically productive, and it ultimately increases their traffic, their influence, their asking price, and their revenue. I don’t need to help Hanna and her sisters sell kitty litter and vibrators.

I’m not going to get angry about what they said, or what they said about what some celebrity or politician said.

After all, I’m always angry, so I’m going to write about what I think is important to be angry about.

I’m going to write about what I think is important to men, and what I think will interest the sort of men who I would actually talk to on purpose.

To engage these catty bitches is to put them on equal footing—to pretend they are teammates on the same big American team, arguing in good faith, and interested in finding some sweet spot in the middle where we can all compromise and get along. The truth is that I have little or no respect for these people, and I’m pretty sure they don’t want anything to do with me, either.

Why should Counter-Currents take a break from publishing original translations of metapolitical thought and Nietzschean perspectives on Sparta to engage people who care about what Lindsay Lohan wore to the award show last week?

I don’t want to merely react to their liberal bourgeois degeneracy. I want to be a catalyst that pushes in another direction.

From now on, when someone asks me what I think of something written in Jezebel or Feministing or Gawker or The Atlantic or Slate XX or any number of other gossipy, celebrity-focused, left-wing publications with a predominately female readership, I’m going to reply:

“I’m Sorry, I Just Don’t Keep Up With The Ladies’ Gossip Magazines.”

Because that’s exactly what they are.  These web sites are People and US Magazine and Ladies Home Journal for upscale educated women who think they’re too good to shop at Wal-Mart. In a world where God is dead, these women are the new church ladies—always scolding and telling other people how to live, always whispering and giggling about who sinned and what they were wearing when they did it.

Finally, Regarding Hugo Schwyzer . . .

Put aside for a moment the creepy number of articles he’s written for Jezebel on vibrators and female orgasms.

The Schwyz has been bouncing from feminist publication to feminist publication for years now, looking for one that will have him, but which will never publish anything that offends his dutifully obedient feminist sensibilities. He’s desperate for that pat on the head from a woman, especially if she’s also grinding her high heel into his hand and putting her cigarette out on his tongue.

Men aren’t born equal. Some men are born to lead, some are born to follow, and some are born to shine shoes. Rest assured, no matter who is in power—and The Schwyz is tickled that it’s no longer white men—there will always be a Hugo at the ready with his shine box.

Hugo’s entire career is a refrigerator magnet scramble of feminist talking point copypasta marketed on the marginal novelty of his XY chromosomes.  He’s writing what he thinks progressive women want to read.  He’s not a creative or critical thinker. He’s a sniveling suck-up.

Let’s look at a few of the ways Hugo Schwyzer thinks the end of white male power will be good for white men.

“We’ll probably live longer.”

Like a woman, The Schwyz exists in an emotional security-seeking world of fear and thinks a long life is the same as a good life. Never one to make an original point where an old, scientifically specious one will do, Hugo busts out the old “stress-from-white-male-privilege heart attack” trope.

Yes, I’m sure it’s the burden of ALL THAT POWER that sends average 99%-er working-class guys to an early grave. Not shitty mainstream American diets or sedentary lifestyles. PRIVILEGE.

What’s funny about this is that, like a good multi-culti stooge, Schwyzer points to the long-lived Latino man as an exemplar of evolved manhood—forgetting that long-lived Latino is probably Catholic and far better than any white man at keeping his woman pregnant and in the kitchen making tacos.

“We can finally stop the unhelpful whining about our white guilt.”

Who does this? Is white guilt even a real emotion?

Sure, there are probably a handful of old men who remember lynchings and few reformed skinheads who genuinely feel a sense of guilt and remorse for hurting people of other races. But when it comes to those guys, one always wonders whether they are truly sincere or if they merely experienced a conversion of convenience to avoid prison time or got tired of paying the substantial social and financial costs associated with being openly pro-white. The number of men who can remember a time before affirmative action—or even a time when anti-racist messages weren’t ubiquitous and institutionalized—is getting smaller every day.

Today’s young American men have been carefully trained to say “the right things” about race. They know when to express “outrage” at supposed instances of racism. They’ve seen the carefully edited documentaries and the maudlin feature films about racism and slavery. But, how real can your expressions of guilt about things that happened before you were born really be?

White guilt is more of a sanctioned social convention than a genuine emotional experience. It’s a form of theatrical empathy that’s socially and financially rewarded. When you learn to say and perhaps even believe the right things about race, doors are opened for you. When you say the wrong thing, those doors slam shut. Then, the gossips and church ladies will shame you publicly, demand that you be fired from your job, and use every avenue available to them to coerce a confession, a public apology and a staged conversion that contributes to their progressive narrative.

If some white men are truly whining about their white guilt, they’re doing it for attention and social status, like teenage girls who cut their arms. Otherwise, they’re saying the right things at the right time, like Patrick Bateman giving that dinner table speech about ending apartheid and world hunger in American Psycho.

I can’t think of anyone who gains more social status from talking about white privilege and the evil of white men than feminist kiss-asses like Michael Kimmel and Hugo Schwyzer. And they don’t feel guilty, either. They don’t think of themselves as evil white men, they think they are better—more evolved, more “fully human,” more like women—than the caricature of white men they throw under the bus.

“Women — and everyone else — will be more likely to tell us the truth.”

LOL.

“We can — maybe — trust our successes are due to our merit.”

My best pal likes to say that, “If you show up to a fair fight, your tactics suck.” He probably got it from a movie. I’m not sure which one. The point is that everyone has advantages and disadvantages, and just because you don’t use your advantages doesn’t mean your opponent won’t use his. If white men tie their hands behind their backs, there is nothing to block other men from socking them right in their smug little grilles. The idea that everyone naturally wants to play fair—and that white men are the cause of all unfairness in the world—is childishly naïve and obviously ahistorical.

Finally, Hugo concludes:

The choice is stark. On the one hand, we can retreat, as conservative columnist John Sullivan warns we might, into “defensive minority consciousness . . . defending every item of privilege and resenting every loss.” That’s a recipe not only for electoral defeat but also increasingly bitter alienation from the two-thirds of our fellow Americans who aren’t white men.

This is actually an interesting point, but for different reasons.

You know what would happen to white men if they retreated into a “defensive minority consciousness”?

They’d end up just like everyone else. Retreating into a “defensive minority consciousness” means letting go of white man’s burden of overseeing the multiculturalist project, and becoming as tribal and self-interested as any other American minority.

If the goal is to make everyone a minority, why shouldn’t white men have their own lobbying groups and why shouldn’t they throw a big public tantrum every time someone says something bad about them—the way that gays and women and blacks and Muslims do? Why shouldn’t they nurture as much anger and resentment as Black or Hispanic men? The end of white male power means the end of this artificial race and sex blind universalism that everyone but pampered and protected SWPL social climbers knows damn well is an absurd scam.

What The Schwyz doesn’t see is that the end of white male “privilege” also means the end of affected white male guilt—and the institutionalized social convention of white male guilt is the only thing that keeps the multicultural, feminist, minority-rights racket going.

The expectation of white male self-flagellation is also the only reason Hugo Schwyzer has a writing gig, and the only reason the too-good-for-Wal-Mart feminists have anything to write about—aside what celebrities are wearing, and whatever Rihanna is doing.

I can’t think of any factor more indicative of Western decline and decadence than the inescapable cultural primacy of vulgar parlor gossip. It sickens me to feed into it, to validate it, to let a handful of husky Hedda Hoppers in yoga pants and hangers-on like Hugo lead my “national discussion.” For me, it’s a crucial part of my spiritual secession from this grotesque bourgeois mainstream to remove myself from earshot of their chatterboxes and start the kinds of discussions I want to have, with the kind of men I respect and admire. It’s not enough to simply react to or criticize the sick and sad TMZ mainstream. It’s more important to construct a new cultural movement and build momentum pointed in different directions—to offer something better, something that men have longed for but haven’t been able to find.

These days, I’m just too busy working on that to keep up with the ladies’ gossip magazines.