Shattering the imperative male.

In our society the natural response of the male beast is generally repressed. We are told to compromise, to be team players, to do what the boss says, even when they are completely wrong, and cannot do their job.

And most of the time we are as simple as the code monkey. But code monkey called creep.

And the imperatives of men must not be allowed. Because ideology.

Even fun is not allowed.

In any case, I was scrolling down through the article’s list of strategies for eliminating gamers, trying to keep an open mind, and actually thinking there were one or two somewhat valid points. Then I got to item #11:

We stop upholding “fun” as the universal, ultimate criterion for a game’s relevance. It’s a meaningless ideal at best and a poisonous priority at worst. Fun is a neurological trick. Plenty of categorically unhealthy things are “fun”. Let’s try for something more. Many of the alternatives will have similarly fuzzy definitions, but let’s aspire to qualities like “edifying”, “healing”, “pro-social”, or even “enlightening”. I encourage you to decide upon your own alternatives to “fun” in games (while avoiding terms like “cool” and “awesome” and any other word that simply caters to existing, unexamined biases).

That paragraph represents everything that is wrong with social justice thinking in less than 100 words.

The trouble is that…. relationships are risky, and gaming is safer.

The current legal system, despite any consequences of these decisions, is set up in such a way that the older code monkey is still at the mercy ephemera. The security of a family is seen as less, much less, than happiness, or spiritual development.

The argument is been going over three sites, and I’m going to extract from them.

Are there situations in which a single-parent home is better than the alternative? Sure, many. I’m not arguing that we should outlaw divorce or force 15-year-olds to marry. But that doesn’t mean pretending there is no difference. There is a big difference — and a systematic difference between the way the affluent and the poor form families is going to mean systematic differences in the outcomes for affluent and poor kids.

Trying to explain this all with a bad labor market or insufficient government benefits won’t wash, either. It doesn’t explain why people in 1930, who were much poorer in every sense than people today and had virtually nothing in the way of a government safety net, managed to get and stay married. As David Brooks notes, to explain the problem — and to fix it — you also need to talk about community norms.

The problems are feminism. The cardinal virtue to the second wave of feminism is unilateral divorce law. This is used as a “threat point” to keep husbands in line, to give their wives marital “headship” in their marriage. Basically, he must do whatever she says OR ELSE she divoces him and takes half. The “state” besows upon the wife cash and prizes (the house, alimony, child support) at any moment she wishes to divorce her husband. This gives her the power. So now, an entire generation and half of young men who raised under “threat point” have learned NOT to marry. So, marriage simply doesn’t exist in significant portions of our working cl@ss. With only sticks in which to whack him and no carrots to entice him, there simply is no reason for men to marry.

Child support, far more than no fault divorce, abortion, and contraception, is the legal force which underpins modern feminism. Child support is the solution to shotgun weddings, unhappy marriages, and strong husbands & fathers. No fault divorce is designed not just to destroy families, but to weaken husbands in all marriages. However child support is the economic arm which makes divorce an attractive option for wives, and therefore makes divorce a credible threat when there are children involved. Child support is also the incentive which makes it more attractive for single mothers to remain single than to marry the father.

In short, long before we convince Hollywood that marriage is sacred and fathers matter, we will have to convince conservatives and then moderates that this is true. By the time we get around to selling liberals on the importance of marriage and fathers we won’t need Hollywood’s help anyway. In theory it should be easiest to convince Christian conservatives that marriage is sacred, but realistically it will probably be secular conservatives who come around on this first. Merely being vocally ambivalent on the role of husbands and fathers is now at the extreme right of modern Christian culture. While convincing anyone, even conservatives, that marriage and fathers matter may seem impossible now, this will become easier as the full cost of the broken homes underwriting feminist “empowerment” becomes harder and harder to ignore.

That which cannot go on will not. That which is not going to work, that will end up in disaster, will not be subscribed to.

This may be why I find chick movies, with the heroine walking into the sunset with the hero, leaving human wreckage behind, are making me more and more angry. It is not the wedding or the first bedding that makes a marriage. But the daily putting the needs of others before yours, building a life out of sweat, blood and tears.

For true joy does not come out of some magic packet. It requires hard work. It always has. If is far easier to talk about empowerment, spirituality, and how hard the choice to damage another was than to see how you are judged.

For it is not by the creepy or cool male imperative: if you are James Bond or Code Monkey. Instead it is how the lives of those you touch are improved. And our society is set up in a way which is at toxic to families as it is to our waistline.