By Craig Willms

While I was perusing several Internet stories and Youtube videos (see the story of Cassie Jaye and The Red Pill) of the phenomenon known as the Men's Rights Advocacy and by extension the Internet-based subculture called the Manosphere and MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) I came across another meme that I had never considered before. Male disposability. By this I mean our society and every society in human history consider men, mostly young men as largely disposable.

Historically women, the bearer of our children, were far more important for society to protect as only they could replenish the population after war or disaster. Men on the other hand are merely sperm donors. Only men were conscripted to go to war and only men did highly dangerous jobs. If one man or a hundred or a thousand men were killed society would go on – in this men are disposable.

This is - in my humble opinion - one of the valid side arguments some Men's Rights Advocates make. It's hard to argue with. Women through the ages have had their grievances against so-called male dominated societies, many of them completely valid, but they were never considered disposable and routinely sent off to die for a cause that had no personal import. Being chewed up and spit out by the war machine, which I will come back to, is one thing, but the case for the degrading of the masculine mystique in society is presenting unforeseen problems.

Only until very recently and against the better judgment of many for the very same maternalistic reasons have women joined men on the field of battle. It remains to be seen the wisdom of this movement. The way for this has been paved by the larger societal change in the 60's and 70's that has seen babies now eligible for disposal. Much as they were in the Roman Empire babies are not necessarily automatically cherished. The Christian era that was in part responsible for the fall of the empire has run its course in Western civilization. A concerted rejection of Christianity for better or worse has made the most remarkable aspect of the female of the species a burden rather than a blessing.

Thus the modern young male is a changed animal from those of us born in the middle of the 20th century. We were mostly married by 21 and raising multiple children before our thirties. Unfortunately many of these men ended up divorced and many cases cut off from the day to day life of their children. This is largely what has sown the seeds of today's Men's Right movement. The movement consists of older, mainly middle-class men who have seen their value to society diminish culturally and economically. Some blame it squarely on radical feminism and others lay the blame on government expansion into the family by virtue of the welfare state and, of course the curse of globalism.

Men of GenerationX and the Millennials as well as other men of the West - even in parts of Asia are foregoing female companionship and fatherhood all together. Man-boys now routinely live with their parents into their 40's until their parents start dying. Many of these men never have a meaningful relationship with a "real" woman. When the men of my generation die so too will the Men’s Rights movement. The Millennials simply won’t care having known nothing else but strong-minded, grievance based women and a dearth of male role models.

To be fair there will be pushback by men, the framework is already set. Within the so-called Manosphere they take pride in hookups with and even humiliation of the female gender, preferring to hone their craft as alpha-male wannabes and manwhores over taking a wife and raising a family. The art of the score and psychological warcraft against worthy conquests is the name of the game. Game is in fact the word they use for it. Casting judgment fairly or unfairly on women based solely on their looks is only part of it, female behavior and female entitlement is a particular area of grievance for these men. If they do take a wife often they have gone overseas to mine a pool of non-westernized women who they perceive as less entitled. While someone on the outside would consider this movement despicable they do themselves a disservice not trying to understand why these attitudes exist among so many healthy young males.

MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) is perhaps the most startling and depressing aspect of this cultural shift. These men don't really care to explore women or relationships at all. Internet porn satisfies their sexual curiosity with all the visual stimulation that men crave and none of the stress (or distress) of a real relationship. Many of these guys will never become absentee fathers or divorcees because they will never have an intimate relationship. The ones that do give up after a bad experience or two and eschew women from then on. For them it isn't as bleak as it sounds, they become satisfied and do not feel they are missing anything. Who's to argue with that - after all isn't the point of life to be happy?

Intuitively in a societal sense and obviously in their real world experiences young men feel unappreciated. The last two generations of boys have been drugged up in school for being rambunctious. They’ve seen their education taking a backseat to that of their female contemporaries. They have become more or less a burden in the classroom, where fewer and fewer male role models exist. Later they see women as rivals in the workplace, where desirable jobs just as regularly go to women. If the dirty jobs are all that’s left then playing video games in Mom’s basement certainly holds more appeal.

Historically young men have been merely fodder for someone else’s desires. Look at the high school or college athlete - chewed up and spit out. Look at the factory line worker or the construction worker, the modern IT worker - chewed up, spit out. Look at the soldier... Consider the VA and the plight of the ones who are not killed in battle. Entirely disposable.

In fact a careful reading of history shows that there is a war with a large loss of life for the grunts every twenty years or so. Using simple logic one can see that this is the average amount of time it takes to produce, raise and train a new batch of grunts. Disposable? Just since the beginning of this young country the periodicity of major wars falls fairly neatly into this pattern. American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), The War of 1812(1812–1815), Mexican–American(Texas)War(1846–1848), American Civil War(1861–1865), Great Sioux War of 1876(Indian Wars)(1876–1877+), Spanish–American War (Philippine–American War)(1898-1902), World War I(1917–1918), World War II(1941–1945), Vietnam War(1965–1975), 911/Afghanistan/Iraq(2001-present).

While I'm not pushing the notion of a grand multi-generational, multi-millennial conspiracy to cull the population every twenty years or so, it is curious. One presumes this pattern of recharging economies to make the powers that be richer may not necessarily be the result of conspiracy - although one could come to such a conclusion – however, this scenario has played out over and over for hundreds of years. I suspect it's just a reasonable fact that an army will run out of grunts and new ones will need to be procured. That takes about twenty years or so - just a fact.

The trouble now is that men of the West are not creating families for the reasons described and because of that the fresh batch of war fodder is not being produced. The war machines have been busily pursuing unmanned drones and smart missiles and any number of automated weapons of destruction, which they gladly sell to both sides, but they will always need soldiers. Will the soldier of the future be a woman? It makes me shudder.

First male disposability, then babies and finally the females. We had better rethink some things, right?

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:29 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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