Rancid Monke

I recently ran across a repellant article on my Facebook newsfeed and there is a good chance you saw it kicking around as well. It was called The Case Against Female Self-Esteem. It was pretty much exactly that, a rant about how women with high self-esteem were a bad thing. Mostly bad for the author and men like him, although he also tried to make the case it was bad for the women with high self-esteem, but I doubt they are buying it. Since I haven’t written anything in a while and this particular article is ripe for mockery, I figured I would take a look at it. Do I really need to? I doubt it. I don’t see strong, independent women letting this guy phase them in the slightest and the type of guys that make up the core audience for an article like this have already made up their minds and closed them up tight. That won’t stop me, blogging is all about spewing opinions out into the void to be largely ignored.

Before I hand you a link to his page all willy-nilly I think I need to prepare you a little bit. I did a bare minimum of internet searching on the author and it seems he has a variety of books on Amazon with a range of offensive titles that the blog displays prominently in hopes of getting sales. The guy is clearly from the Ann Coulter/Rush Limbaugh school of media marketing. Be offensive for the sake of being offensive because for all the people who will hate you there will be a small group doing a fist pump at their desk going “Yaaaaa! This guy writes stuff I only think about”. Much like Ann and Rush, you really have to wonder how much he buys into his own bullshit and how much is just for show, to appeal to the lowest form of person so they will snap up his latest offerings. Everyone else is just so much fodder for his continuing crusade against good taste and social sensitivity. So as you head over to read this post of his remember that if it makes you so offended that you want to urinate on his future grave then he got what he wanted and considers it a job well done. Link for the linkless.

http://mattforney.com/case-female-self-esteem/

(I am not going to go line by line trying to refute all of this. First of all, it would take up too much of a lovely three-day weekend and secondly, some of it is so repugnant that it isn’t worth dignifying with a response. Some of this will no doubt stir up a lot of anger and disgust in you but I don’t need to try to turn that anger into words any more than you need me to justify your feelings on it.)

Let’s take a look at some of it and my opinions on it, feel free to leave me any additions, comments or opinions in the comment section below.

“From the moment they’re old enough to speak, girls in America are bombarded with propaganda that artificially boosts their self-esteem. They’re told that they’re shpecialand you-nique because they have an extra X chromosome. They’re told that they’re smart, that they can do anything, that they deserve respect merely for existing. They’re encouraged to derive self-worth not from their inherent feminine nature but from their college degree, their job or the other illusory trappings of achievement in a man’s world.”

He manages to suggest that modern women are encouraged to find self-worth just from being women AND that they are encouraged not to derive self-worth from their feminine nature but rather from education and careers IN THE SAME DAMN PARAGRAPH…AND HE ISN’T HAPPY ABOUT EITHER. Apparently he has put a lot of thought into this.

“In the world of men, respect—and by extension self-esteem—is based on actually achieving something of worth or having some kind of skill or talent.”

First off, respect and self-esteem are REALLY not that interchangeable. The respect he mentions is external, the regard that others have for you and/or your work. Self-esteem is the overall emotional evaluation of your own worth, pretty obviously internal. One can certainly gather self-esteem from the respect people show you but it is only one source from which self-esteem is derived. Others include self-confidence, self-respect, self awareness and acceptance…as well as delusions of grandeur, narcissism, wealth, sexual conquests and the ability to buy shiny, expensive shit. Some of that is probably more healthy than others.

Point is that other people’s opinions of us in not the sole deciding factor in our internal sense of worth. If it was than the original author would no doubt be curled up in the fetal position somewhere, slowly rocking back and forth and whimpering as much of the internet tries to suggest he do something anatomically impossible with his head and his rectum. Instead he is trading insults with people on twitter and having a good laugh about members of the public wishing painful lesions upon his most private of parts. Obviously he is getting his self-esteem elsewhere.

“The same goes for having a job. The vast majority of girls work useless fluff jobs: government bureaucrats, human resources and various other makework positions that exist to give them the illusion of independence. The jobs that keep the country running—tradesmen, miners, farmers, policemen, the military—are still overwhelmingly dominated by men.”

…says the guy who writes a blog. Can you really try to claim fraternity with the tradesmen and farmers of the world if your contribution to society is being an ass on the internet to drive your book sales?

“If every girl was fired from her job tomorrow, elementary schools would have to shut down for a couple days, but otherwise life would go on as usual. If every man lost his job tomorrow, the country would collapse.”

Except if every woman (they are called women, girls are the ones in those school yards he isn’t allowed within 50 feet of) was fired from her job tomorrow it would probably devastate the health care industry, so try not to get sick. Seriously though, it is like this guy lives in the 50’s. I have not had a job in the last 15 years in which women have not made up at least a respectable percent of the workforce, including most of my time in construction/demolition. I wondered if perhaps he was in a very male dominated career but the only thing listed in his About Us section was hitchhiking across the States and writing a book about it. Not exactly a growth industry no matter what gender you are.

Also, let’s not knock the fine people currently spending their days caring for and educating our children so we don’t have to. With the loss of educators and daycare workers we would end up with uneducated, feral youth roaming the streets with nothing to do. Surely they all can’t start blogging on the internet.

“Given their lack of physical strength, a woman on her own should be frightened as hell without men to protect her. If society were to collapse, all the Strong, Independent Women™ who read Jezebeland xoJane would last about five minutes before they either found a man to cling onto or got raped and killed.”

…or found a gun. I mean, this is exactly what guns are for, overcoming an opponent no matter their physical strength.  They are the great equalizer, that is their purpose, it is why cops don’t run around fighting crime with broadswords. Admittedly, training and experience with firearms goes a long way but even an absolute amateur with a loaded pistol is still a force to be reckoned with, just ask any police officer who has had to face one down. I am not even really a gun enthusiast but it would certainly be the first thing on my shopping list if society collapsed.

Actually, I find it a little suspicious that the first thing he thinks that will happen if society collapses is that we men will all be looking for someone to rape/murder. If society did collapse I think the first thing that would happen is people would try to rebuild it. We all like our clean sheets, hot showers and jalapeño poppers too much to want to give them up and join roving gangs of brigands.

“Part of our identity as men based in women needing us, if not necessarily in a material sense, then in an emotional one, though material and emotional vulnerability often go hand in hand. That female insecurity is a crucial ingredient for unlocking our inner masculine instincts.”

So the heart of his little rant is that women should feel vulnerable and needy so men like him can feel like a Real Man™ and take care of them. Question for you, doesn’t that make him the vulnerable and needy one? Answer: Yes, yes it fucking does. He is essentially admitting he needs someone else to bolster his ego and self-esteem on a regular basis by depending on him (which might explain why he confused respect and self-esteem earlier). He then goes on to suggest that this is the natural order of things and this is what all men want and need out of a relationship. On behalf of men everywhere who aren’t interested in this nonsense, can I just say “Ewwwww!”

I imagine coming home to that every night in a relationship and it just makes me tired, bored and irritated. Constantly badgered by another person’s problems and questions that they seem incapable of dealing with on their own, I get enough of that training new employees at work. The feeling that you needed to have all the answers, that you couldn’t rely on the other person to have your back. Even if this was the type of relationship I had, I would be working hard to try and help the person gain the skills and confidence needed to become independent, not basking in the glow of their undeserved awe.

“When I first went on a date with the only girl I would have ever married, her hands were trembling in nervousness. She later admitted that she was openly intimidated by me and the idea that I found her attractive.”

I obviously don’t have any specifics about this relationship other than he speaks of it in the past tense. He had what he wanted and couldn’t keep it, so that should tell you a lot of what you need to know right there.

Confidence doesn’t give men erections; vulnerability does.

Ummm, if we are going to be honest, boobs is probably the realistic answer. After that it is down to individual taste but I am pretty sure telling women that vulnerability gives you an erection will make you seem like a serial killer.

“If I’m not the center of a girl’s world, I’m not going to be in her world period.”

Jesus man, how needy are you?

“I can already see the Jizzabellers angrily pounding away at their Macbooks: “You just can’t handle a Strong, Independent Woman™!” We men can handle you just fine; the problem is that we don’t want to.”

If he could stop speaking for our gender as a whole, that would be great.

“Girls don’t want the six-figure cubicle job, the shiny Brooklyn 2BR, the master’s degree, the sexual liberation, none of it. They want to becollectively led back to the kitchen, told to make a nice big tuna sandwich with extra mayo and lettuce, then swatted on the ass as we walk out the door.”

WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THE SANDWICH THING? You can’t read an internet comment section or twitter feed without some ass demanding that an imaginary women come to his house to make him a sandwich. He is always screaming it to the internet because clearly no sane woman is within earshot. Seriously though, when I reached an age where I was capable of holding a butter knife properly it was pretty much a given that I would be making my own damn sandwiches. When I see a grown man demanding life present him with someone to make him a sandwich I start to think he might need help with wiping himself or getting dressed. If the author is the one who needs someone dependent on him, shouldn’t he be the one making the sandwiches. If he is supposed to be the manly, capable provider, then why can’t he even seem to feed himself?

Now that I am done with this nonsense of an article I am going to make a nice big tuna sandwich with extra mayo and pickles WITH MY OWN TWO DAMN HANDS LIKE A GROWN-UP.

Rancid Monke