How A Man's Heart is Murdered...

[Lians]

No, I don't think or feel this is true. I think my posts on other threads have reflected that.

 

I think the point I was trying to make was that I don't know how to have this conversation without reference to females. This may entirely be a projection on my part and I may be missing something important here.

 

I'm sorry, I should have clarified that my questions weren't directed at you, but the FDR ladies in general. The feelings I expressed at the beginning are the only part of my post that is related to what you said.

[meeri]

I'm sorry, I should have clarified that my questions weren't directed at you, but the FDR ladies in general. The feelings I expressed at the beginning are the only part of my post that is related to what you said.

Thank you for clarifying. Would you like to tell me a bit more about that anger and self-attack?

[Kevin Beal]

That's a fair point and I agree, I don't think you should if it's irrelevant to the argument. I get annoyed by the mostly female-centred conversations in society too and definitely think there needs to be more intense focus on male-centred conversations to balance things out. 

But I'm not sure how we can really look at the two in isolation because a large part of men's inner lives is related women and vice versa. 

I don't think I really considered that. I'm really curious what you mean. Could you elaborate on that?

[meeri]

I don't think I really considered that. I'm really curious what you mean. Could you elaborate on that?

Sure, it's not entirely clear to me either. I still feel a lot of confusion and a kind of helplessness surrounding this whole topic. But I feel like we're treating the male issues and female issues as two separate topics when in reality they are one huge conversation with equal weight on both, and both being pretty interlinked. And I don't mean any of that all-is-one nonsense. It just feels to me that treating these two issues as separate is another thing aimed at keeping men and women apart, increasing the isolation. I still agree with Stef that women bare more responsibility as they have more power in this regard.

I may of course, be projecting and avoiding something from my own history, or completely misunderstanding.

[Kevin Beal]

But I feel like we're treating the male issues and female issues as two separate topics when in reality they are one huge conversation with equal weight on both, and both being pretty interlinked.

I would like to hear more if you're open to it. I know I said I just want to talk about guys, but I've changed my mind. I'd like to hear more. Childhood isolation is the issue ultimately, I think, not necessarily the isolation of boys in particular. I have a big investment in the perspective of young boys, but I'll confess that I don't really know a whole lot about the experience of young girls.

 

Even if you were projecting somehow, I'm still interested in hearing it.

[meeri]

I would like to hear more if you're open to it. I know I said I just want to talk about guys, but I've changed my mind. I'd like to hear more. Childhood isolation is the issue ultimately, I think, not necessarily the isolation of boys in particular. I have a big investment in the perspective of young boys, but I'll confess that I don't really know a whole lot about the experience of young girls.

 

Even if you were projecting somehow, I'm still interested in hearing it.

Of course, if that's helpful. But I admit I need to give this a lot more thought, and get the male perspective. It would definitely be good to have a chat about it.

[Lians]

Thank you for clarifying. Would you like to tell me a bit more about that anger and self-attack?

 

I think I found the video to be so valuable because I view it as a form of permission that allows my inner boy to re-experience events from the past; events that were walled off in my mind. Stef managed to tear down those walls and out came a torrent of feelings. I suspect the feeling of anger may have come from my inner boy. As a kid, I didn't know anything about the complex interplay between the sexes. I wasn't aware of how it shapes us all as individuals. I learned that at a much later point in my life.

 

All my younger self wanted was to be acknowledged. It wanted women to recognize my inner life and stop mocking and dismissing the pain. I knew I wasn't going to get that from other men. Sadly, none of that ever happened. My mother, sister, teachers and female friends rejected everything about me that didn't serve their agenda. A constant game of "good boy" and "all boys are difficult to deal with." Mind you, "boys are difficult" is one of the nicest insults I got when I wasn't convenient for them. I enjoyed getting sick as a kid. It meant that I was going to get some attention. I also liked showing my injuries to my mother because that meant she'd fuss over my carelessness and patch me up. I was that starved for affection. The same thing was true for all my male peers.

 

I got the same treatment from the media where all men were either immature fools or pieces of meat you threw at enemies. They abolished the mandatory military service a few years before I was supposed to "serve my country" and there was an almost universal outcry from women: "How are boys going to become men if they don't serve in the army?" To be honest, my outlook on women was very negative before I joined this community. One of my biggest motivations for working on self-knowledge is the desire to have a good relationship with a woman at some point in my life, so it's not all anger and defensiveness. However, it took all my strength to get over that unconscious distrust of women.

 

I suspect that every time you tell a man that his negative experiences involve a lot more than what he acknowledges, you'll be met with his angry little boy. Intellectually, he may understand what you're talking about, but the emotional side would strongly oppose you. It takes quite a bit of self-knowledge to recognize this dynamic at play. I, for one, don't think we need a balance of attention, but proportionality relative to the scope of the issue. There's no attention scale that needs to be balanced with women and men at both ends. We all need different things to get to a healthy place in our lives.

[PatrickC]

Damn, that was a good post Lians.. Thanks for sharing.

[meeri]

Wow Lians, I'm terribly sorry you had to go through that.

[Wesley]

The worst feeling for me as a child was to feel completely alone while surrounded by people. Emotions were not allowed in my house and were often expressly punished.

 

I just could not fake it like they could, and I could always tell that they were faking it. Everyone was just empty with a nice facade up. My father especially was in sales and knew how to fake a fun-loving guy you wanted to do business with. People would ocme over and he would be jovial and fun-loving. People would leave and the only emotions I saw were disgust, contempt, rage, and emptiness.

 

I shut down by becoming a good student who could relay empty facts and had no emotions because then I was valued and not punished.

 

I also would date women long term who I should never have even dated because I was so starved for attention and the idea of love where I would not feel so alone by hanging out with a girl with the pretense of "being in love". Of course, the eventual break-up lead to me feeling very depressed as I would realize for a brief period how alone I was until I could shut down and become empty again.

 

I would have loved to have had a blanket negative view of women as it would have lead to me not dating these people as the drug to satisfy my lack of attention and love and may have lead to self-knowledge much sooner where I could develop my emotional experience.

 

Addition:

I can relate to your post Lians. However, it appears my self-destructive searches for attention and love were not wanting to be sick or hurt, but to get in relationships where I would be used for my emotional dependency and eventually rejected so that I could feel the loneliness and depression of having no real relationships.

[PatrickC]

I also would date women long term who I should never have even dated because I was so starved for attention and the idea of love where I would not feel so alone by hanging out with a girl with the pretense of "being in love". Of course, the eventual break-up lead to me feeling very depressed as I would realize for a brief period how alone I was until I could shut down and become empty again.

 

I would have loved to have had a blanket negative view of women as it would have lead to me not dating these people as the drug to satisfy my lack of attention and love and may have lead to self-knowledge much sooner where I could develop my emotional experience.

 

You touch on a very private thought I've only shared with a couple of close friends Wesley. Men do not experience intimacy to quite the same degree that women do. From the outside women get to experience touching and intimacy with their female friends all to often, which rarely happens amongst men, except in sporting events perhaps. Not that I'm suggesting men should necessarily exhibit that intimacy in quite the same way as women. But it kind of figures that we are often lacking in an important part of ourselves, as men.

 

I'm not clear where that can improve for men entirely, but I consider it a distinctive difference that we don't share with women, if that makes sense at all.

[Kevin Beal]

I keep running out of positive votes, lol.

 

Thank you guys for your openness and vulnerability.

 

This whole issue of isolation is so frustrating because it seems so completely unnecessary. It's so hard to make real connections (at least for me) with people when I keep thinking this really shouldn't be this difficult. This area is ripe for projection for me, so tell me if I've got it wrong, but I look around at people who are looking for love and just to connect with other people in general and it's so hard, and it seems like people are quick to just give up like I had years back.

 

And why should they try? If all the "love" relationships they are surrounded by are mutually depressive or fake or otherwise suspect, then that doesn't make it look all that appealing. It was only after listening to FDR and Stef's arguments about what a love relationship should be that I became motivated again. Anxious as hell, but motivated.

[Lians]

I would have loved to have had a blanket negative view of women as it would have lead to me not dating these people as the drug to satisfy my lack of attention and love and may have lead to self-knowledge much sooner where I could develop my emotional experience.

 

Addition:

I can relate to your post Lians. However, it appears my self-destructive searches for attention and love were not wanting to be sick or hurt, but to get in relationships where I would be used for my emotional dependency and eventually rejected so that I could feel the loneliness and depression of having no real relationships.

 

I've done that too. You're not alone in this. My first serious relationship ended up with her lying to me about a really important issue and refusing to acknowledge it until I brought up evidence. She then tried to keep me as a friend, but I was having none of that. What prevented me from repeating the same mistake was anger. I was so angry with her, I publicly declared that I never want to speak to her again. We were classmates and I kept my word for 2 years until we graduated. I found FDR shortly afterwards, so I haven't dated anyone for more than 5 years now. I was very involved with sports at that time and anger was the one feeling I never truly repressed. In hindsight, that relationship may have been the catalyst for my pursuit of philosophy and self-knowledge. What if the pain you inflicted on yourself through these relationships was the only way of preventing your emotions from going numb?

[Wesley]

I've done that too. You're not alone in this. My first serious relationship ended up with her lying to me about a really important issue and refusing to acknowledge it until I brought up evidence. She then tried to keep me as a friend, but I was having none of that. What prevented me from repeating the same mistake was anger. I was so angry with her, I publicly declared that I never want to speak to her again. We were classmates and I kept my word for 2 years until we graduated. I found FDR shortly afterwards, so I haven't dated anyone for more than 5 years now. I was very involved with sports at that time and anger was the one feeling I never truly repressed. In hindsight, that relationship may have been the catalyst for my pursuit of philosophy and self-knowledge. What if the pain you inflicted on yourself through these relationships was the only way of preventing your emotions from going numb?

I think it was a test. Similar to the heart paddles that stop a heart when its in a rhythm that isn't productive. Either I was going to normalize it and be lost to the world (heart stays stopped) or be able to recover and spend some time recovering (return to normal rhythm and rest/enter physical therapy).

 

I also was in a 3 year relationship that I shouldn't have been in from the start.

 

After it was done I didn't want to do it again and so I actually started pushing towards the philosophy and psychology things and trying to find a way so that I wouldn't be in that situation again.

[Panoptic]

I feel strange and left out of right field because I didn't have much of a reaction to the podcast. There really isn't anything I disagree with in the video, but I don't feel anything different. I wonder why.

 

Pepin, I coincide with you. I watched it, it all made sense to me, but I had almost no reaction, no feelings of anger or resentment. This is hard to admit, but I think for me it might be because I still have some sort of horrid vestige from my childhood that is still causing me to think that the man should be disposable. I constantly fantasize about getting a girlfriend and taking care of her, doing the dirty work, where she can lay back and not have to worry about much. For some reason I enjoy the idea of serving a woman even though this was the case when I had a girlfriend and I only felt anger and rage the entire time.

[PatrickC]

I've been meaning to answer Kevin's questions, because I thought them rather interesting. Not sure if my answers are of much help, but here goes. 

Is it also the case for other men that they feel it's really difficult to bring up men's issues?

Hardly at all on the boards, but much less so on social networking and a select few personally. However, it's always with a feeling of intrepidation

Is it difficult for women to bring up women's issues?

Anecdotally, no, they bring them up with relative ease for me.

How do you feel when the opposite sex says: "what about (wo)men?"

Annoyed, particularly when I've already caveated my position.

Is it true or is it not true that boys generally receive more indifference?

Yes, although of course it really depends on the way a child is brought up. So I imagine there might be boys brought up that way. My suspicion is that they are all taught to put girls first.

Is it true or is it not true that (being that women are the primary caregivers) women are (more) socially responsible for the arrested development for the men?

I think they bear more responsibility if they find themselves as the primary caregiver. But if that happens to be a man, then it should fall on his shoulders of course. However, the secondary care giver, should be able to intervene and support the primary caregiver.

Is it true or not that men have thicker walls around their capacity for vulnerability? And if so, doesn't that piss you off?

Yes it does, and breaking them down is like floating into the unknown, not quite sure what you're meant to do sometimes which pisses me off too.

[King David]

The size and scope of the subject of male disposability staggering, and all the more daunting due to our emotional and economic involvement in it.  Personally I have gone a little too MGTOW for this website (I still intend to donate when I have the means), but I'm glad to read this thread as there are some great responses here and have a parallel mindset to xelent.

 

I think if you want to accurately acknowledge human history you simply have to observe how the Chinese civilization has had it.  They had more history before your civilization was born than you have accumulated since then.

 

Anyways, the political structure of the east has always been that every single individual soul was about as valuable as soot in your furnace, in that once you are expired it is a burden to have to remove your waste.  The reason why this was acceptable throughout their entire course of history was because in the context of family each and every individual family role was honoured, and incidentally serves their yin and yang.

 

So what comes as a shock to westerners, that people are disposable is simply a reality for the majority of the population of the planet.  To deny that is folly.

 

So speaking of the west, part of the reason that people are so heavily deluded about our political status (which you could argue was further diluted by enabling the female vote) is that throughout much of our history, women simply were the exception.  There you have it, the only class of people if ever that was not entirely politically disposable is white aristocratic women, sorry womyn.

 

If that seems elitist, that is because that is what it is.

 

I picture Stalin contemplating a photo of Hitler thinking "I could take better care of his women than he could, his women need a strong man and a stronger moustache to show them what they really want".  And when I say want, I mean work.

 

Utility, like Stefan points out in his livestock metaphor is what is desirable. The Chinese know it, Stalin knew it, and fortunately Hitler DNGTM.

 

So there is my two bits (which since the great socialist inflation is more like $12), that all your daughters and nieces prancing around in their favorite Disney Princess outfits are celebrating and flaunting the aristocratic hall pass from slavery.  

 

Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of fantasy, which is something that Stefan underestimates IMO.  Fantasy is a huge part of human psychology and serves as a launch pad into individuality and ego, but when productivity is never expected  or demanded of somebody the fantasy can continue and they will become psychologically dependant on it.  Anti-social behavior is learned and can be utilized to support the ego.

 

Anti productivity and anti social behaviors are rampant in our culture today and show the decline of western primacy.  It would take a colossal effort to improve, focus, and repair our culture even if we were ready for this discussion and the economic consequences.  That would be what they call hitting a grand slam, anything less over significant time periods will surely lead to the downfall of our society, just like so many before that overvalued any particular classes importance and cherished similar ideals.

 

Like I said, I'm going MGTOW and feel betrayed by a culture that has demanded my slavery and submission with no regard for my well being, opinions, or needs.  People en masse have little appreciation for the oppressive power that women yield yet examination of any species on the planet reveals that females exclusively hold the key to breeding rights and male will be anything that is desired of them.

 

King David

[PatrickC]

Interesting historical perspective there, thanks. I'm enjoying re-looking at history again from a more philosophical outlook, as so much of what we were taught, was mostly from a Marxist perspective.

 

In contrast, I'm having a rethink about the disposability theme of late, which you might find interesting on a seperate thread here. They are just ideas I've been formulating in my mind of late for what it's worth.

 

Like I said, I'm going MGTOW and feel betrayed by a culture that has demanded my slavery and submission with no regard for my well being, opinions, or needs.  People en masse have little appreciation for the oppressive power that women yield yet examination of any species on the planet with reveal that females exclusively hold the key to breeding rights and male will be anything that is desired of them.

 

King David

 

Since meeting up with a local London MGTOW group recently I have some sympathy for this position. If any of there stories were anything to go, they made my own difficulties pale into insignificance, Just some harrowing stories frankly.However, I have found philosophy to be a more kindly mistress (scuse pun) than ideology in the long run. I worry that MGTOW will become less about young men forging a future for themselves and more about the ideology itself. That said, it does make some rather compelling points about modern culture.

[nathanm]

Hmmm:

 

Product DetailsThe War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men by Sommers, Christina Hoff (Aug 20, 2013)The WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers (Jun 12, 2001)

[King David]

Interesting historical perspective there, thanks. I'm enjoying re-looking at history again from a more philosophical outlook, as so much of what we were taught, was mostly from a Marxist perspective.

 

In contrast, I'm having a rethink about the disposability theme of late, which you might find interesting on a seperate thread here. They are just ideas I've been formulating in my mind of late for what it's worth.

 

 

Since meeting up with a local London MGTOW group recently I have some sympathy for this position. If any of there stories were anything to go, they made my own difficulties pale into insignificance, Just some harrowing stories frankly.However, I have found philosophy to be a more kindly mistress (scuse pun) than ideology in the long run. I worry that MGTOW will become less about young men forging a future for themselves and more about the ideology itself. That said, it does make some rather compelling points about modern culture.

I don't see why MGTOW should be considered an ideology, the central principle is to take care of your own needs and do not tread on any other mates whom are discovering their version of masculinity.

 

That seems like a philosophical angle to me.

[PatrickC]

I don't see why MGTOW should be considered an ideology, the central principle is to take care of your own needs and do not tread on any other mates whom are discovering their version of masculinity.

 

That seems like a philosophical angle to me.

 

Yes, I'm cautious in my criticism of MGTOW, because I've known some self aware men that certainly approach it in that manner. In many ways I approach life in a similar way I guess. It's just I see some exponents denigrating men that have found good relationships with women.

 

I do like how the men's movement in general (inc MGTOW), has really improved my relationships with men. I now place a higher value (than I did) on those relationships now.

[MysterionMuffles]

It's actually thanks to this podcast that gave me a huge realization about Brony culture. One common thing they like to think caused Bronydom is because of 9/11 and the apathetic state of the world in the past 10 years, which I can understand, but that doesn't go far enough.

 

I don't consider my self a Brony, but I do enjoy the show My Little Pony, and after this podcast, alongside watching some of John Bradshaw's stuff, I can easily see the childhood voids the show fulfills. I'll probably write a lengthier article about it at some point, but because I came in here out of nowhere about it, in no relation to anyone else's posts here, I'll keep it brief.

 

Interest in such a show that depicts ideas of peace, love, and understanding, in a way that isn't all too girly, I believe stems from the empathy boys have been lacking in our society. Just like Stef says in this podcast, boys are cut off from their emotions and shamed for being sensitive, then all of a sudden when they are grown men, they are SHAMED for being sensitive.

 

With a little bit of John Bradshaw influence and how he talks about how many unmet childhood needs manifesting themselves in adult lives, the cartoon serves as a safe avenue to provide the touchy emotional stuff, that I suspect most Bronies didn't get as children.

 

These grown men can easily be watching any other show and I won't make the case for MLP here, but I think the fact that it's a cartoon that is highly driven by 90's inspiration plays a big role in it as well. The fact that most of the cartoons we had in the 90's although great in their own ways lacked some of the heart that MLP has. 

 

To be interested in that show and to watch it is just basically giving back to the sensitive inner child the cartoon they always needed as a kid. Not one riddled with goofy antics and comical hijinx, but something of emotional depth that touches upon the principles of friendship. 

 

Anyways just my two cents!

[Guest Exceptionalist]

That was the same in my family.  Mother's feelings were all important, but that's just narcissism.  My mother is that way because she wasn't loved as a child and basically has never been loved.  She is starving for affection, but unable to truly give any in return.  

 

A great blog about narcissistic mothers is

 

http://narcissists-suck.blogspot.com.au/2008/06/best-of-posts-on-narcissists-suck.html

 

 

 

This guy - link - obviously hates narcissists. I don't get if he distinguishes narcissists from NPD- phatological narcissism.