Nico Addai

This has been on my mind lately, now that I’m working on my ‘Men are Trash’ phase that followed my ‘I Am Trash’ (for being a woman) phase, I understand why our parents and grandparents say they miss from ‘The Good Ol’ Days’ when ‘men were men and women were women’ in reference to the abysmal state of society now.

There are so many things to blame it on: lack of religion and faith, civil rights from minority groups, or just advancement in technology in general. To be honest, it’s a combination of all of those things and more.

Modern day is a crazy animal; always has been, and always will be. But what makes the 21st Century different from others is the fact that today we don’t need much. We don’t need to hunt, we don’t need to gather, we don’t need religion or faith in a higher Power (because science, cue eye roll), we don’t need to get married or have kids because advanced technology has made these things simply wants.

And as a result, when you take away the impetus of the human animal, their mortal spirit and hang it in the air as a question, strange things start to happen. Little problems become big ones, and bigs ones that still plague our consciousness are challenged and philosophized about. You get the mess we live in now.

People want the traditional gender roles in marriage, a lifelong commitment if you do it right, but not in the rest of life. It’s not just cooking and cleaning and providing and sex, it’s the nature of our personality in that context.

Men of the Past:

1. Were the breadwinners and providers. They made more money than women in every industry and even before pencil pushers were expected to hunt for the most calories in anyone’s diet.
2. They were independent at an earlier age. They learned to join the hunting pack or army, or the workforce to start protecting the home. They learned to lead and improvise and all the other things that make film heroes look so hot. They went out of their way to get what they wanted.
3. They were decisive. Those who were family-oriented stated that from an early age. Those who wanted to be hos stated that from an early age. They were not as indecisive as they are today.

Women of the Past:

1. Were stay-at-home mothers and homemakers. Although women were gatherers in ancient times and did often work outside the home in the 19th and 20th centuries, the bulk of their work was to protect the home’s values, principles, and virtues in the next generation.
2. They were feminine by being slim, submissive, and more emotionally vulnerable than their mates. They trusted their mates more. Men had someone to find their ‘feminine side’ with.
3. Whether you like it or not, they were chaste. Men more so then women want to feel like they own some part their partners, and since no one can own a mind, they decide that they can own body, namely their wife’s body. Sure, women own their husband’s, but their’s no jealousy quite like the jealousy of previous lovers.

How has this Changed?

1. Children are growing up in broken homes where they don’t have good relationships with their father or mother, or resent them both. They don’t have a healthy relationship to model their own relationship off of. This has had huge implications for the past half-century, and it’s only getting worse.
2. Women are carrying the weight of the world because they more educated then men, and if current trends continue, they’ll earn more than them in the near future. That kills any hope of a financially induced paradigm. Women can’t trust men to provide for them even in the event of marriage and children because the economy now requires two incomes for a stable home. They still work however to try and balance the expectations of a good wife and mother: homemaker and caring. But since they’re also working for a career that they will most likely have to quit mid-career in to take care of their family, they try and live their wildest years before settling into the mold of ‘femininity’ so that they can bake their cake and eat it too. After all, they are making the money now, right? Nevermind how those wild years take a bite out of your time (placing you in your thirties when pregnancy is harder), energy (getting so used to trash that you treat all men like trash), and ability to be emotionally vulnerable.
3. Men are expected to do less and less, while women are expected to do more and more. Perhaps since most men do not appreciate the ‘invisible’ qualities of women which in many posts can be reduced to getting a cleaning lady and hiring out a prostitute, they assume that because they are men, their relationships will fall into place because of their ‘masculinity’. They learn to both underestimate and overestimate what a woman can provide for them in their lives, and flip-flop between the thought that women can be replaced with sex dolls and cleaning robots and that society is crumbling because women don’t know their place. They don’t lead anything in their community, and just watch it crumble before their eyes.  They mistake that frustration about not being able to make up their minds as a righteous anger that they call ‘masculinity’. They then become apart of men’s rights movements whilst living in your mother’s home, working part-time to have more time for yourself, and not being sure of what you want to do in the next five years, whether you want a family, a career, or children.

I’m angry about both of these things, and how I’m been somewhat saved from the worse of it not because of my own power, but because of my faith and my family’s strong values. I don’t know how society is going to repair this mess, but it ought to quickly, or else there will be nothing to save. It starts with people being less selfish, both men and women.

This Article is in Response to many things, but I think Eddie Fews: We Miss Femininity,  a reasonable article and great blog, and to the worst that both sexes have to offer.