There is only so far you can go into manliness before it turns gay.
The reason why is simple : past a certain point, manliness excludes women and femininity entirely, on every level, and for ANY reason.
A real man doesn’t need women for ANYTHING. Get it?
Male status struggles play a role too. If you are part of a culture that heavily emphasizes manly virtues, you can guarantee that it views women as the weak fragile, and ultimately worthless opposite of that.
Not sure why that is. The opposite isn’t true. You never heard a woman tell another woman to stop being such a man, and woman up.
Well, maybe in college feminism classes.
But if women are the ultimate evil opposite of manliness, how can you expect all your strapping young men to still be interested in them sexually?
No, they are going to be attracted to the manly men around them in your no doubt male only sexually segregated society. Not only are they the only sexual objects present during the vital formative years when we imprint on what sex is TO Us, but you have taught your young men to revile everything feminine and love only masculine things.
And what is more masculine than another man, and his manly parts?
This is how you get societies like the ancient “women are for babies and men are for fun” Athenians, the uber macho and SUPER gay Spartans, the Persian derived cultures that were enthusiastically pederastic, and so on.
Eventually, women simply do not fit into the equation at all. The only chance the heavily cloistered and oppressed women of such a society have of getting any dick at all is when their husbands want to sire children.
And even then, they may subcontract it out.
I can imagine there being an extremely hush hush service that employs a number of virile young men of a broad range of appearances so you can pick the one that looks most like you and have HIM impregnate you wife.
The wife gets some strange dick and you get kids without doing the icky part.
In fact, it occurs to me that societies like that make their women stay in the home and sew themselves into sack not to protect them from the eyes of other men but so that they themselves don’t have to see them.
Because eww, right?
On the other side of the equation, you of course have rampant lesbianism. And generally speaking, it is tolerated and/or ignored so long as it does not interfere with the whole baby making and raising thing.
Ditto with the male homosexuality thing too, come to think of it. You boys have fun together all you like just as long as you father the next generation.
This… I could live with.
Seriously though, personal preference jokes aside, such societies show just how badly distorted and downright unnatural a sexist society can get.
My late father told me that he thought that both genders go crazy without the other one around, and I think he was right.
Try to remember that if you are a heterosexual who is really mad at the other gender.
Admit it : you’d go crazy without them.
More after the break.
My head hurts
So what else is new?
Did the grocery shopping today. Joe was nice enough to bring them in for me as getting to the apartment door multiple times and bending over to pick up heavy bags of groceries on each trip is dangerously taxing on me.
Julian is off dog- and house-sitting, leaving me without his usual assistance for a total of ten days, about five of which are left.
Julian does show up to get me to Wound Care twice a week, which is good. Joe works a 3:30 pm to 11:30 pm shift, and the Wound Care appointments are alway in the morning, so getting up to take me to them would be a major imposition on him.
And getting there by myself would be… tricky.
Even if I took a cab, it would be a nightmare. Because I would have to navigate the uneven part of the cobblestone sidewalk outside our building and that is the very place that I fell twice and that was BEFORE I had to use a walker to get around.
And even if I made it into the cab alive, I would then have to fold up and stow the walker in the cab and that is not easy when you are all alone and can’t stand on your own.
So no cab for me. I get a ride with someone nice enough to help me with the walker and the rest, or nothing.
Dunno why I felt the need to go into that level of detail about that whole thing. And yet, I feel better now that I did.
Neurosis is weird.
But what the hell. Not everything I do needs to make sense, to me or to anyone else.
“I felt like it” is all the justification you need sometimes. And that’s a hard truth for me to accept. Just looking at it there gives me a strong urge to delete it.
But I won’t do it because a big part of my spiritual quest right now is all about trying to expand my mind, my heart, and my soul beyond the confines of mere reality so I can find my source of power and strength and forgiveness the real world has denied me and maybe, just maybe, get my head on straight for once.
Like I told Doctor Costin today during Therapy Thursday, I think that people with healthy minds have this source within them. On some level, probably a pretty damned deep one, they have a mechanism which feeds their conscious mind just enough reward, pleasure, happiness, and so on for them to maintain a minimum level of mood and thus keeping them from sliding into actual depression.
But “smart” people like me don’t have anything like that. To me, there’s reality, and that is it. I have no capacity for religious faith, belief in magic, UFO worship, or any of the other ways in which people access this miraculous mechanism.
As a result, I am deeply mentally ill and can’t do a thing to improve my situation because an ancient severe trauma blocks all my attempts to pull myself together and focus my energies towards anything more than my sad little life.
I want more. But I can’t have it. And that sucks.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.