That’s the amount of idea I have of what I want to write in this thing tonight. I actually have negative idea of what to write. As in, if you allowed a normal idea for a blog entry to collide with the amount of idea I have right now, they would both be annihilated in an explosion of thought.

Not a lot on my mind today. I continue to find ways to struggle against my afternoon ennui. Today’s solution was to do my baking at 5 pm instead of 11. That gave me something to look forward to all afternoon.

And that kept things going, more or less. I felt the edges of the pit of depression I tend to fall into every afternoon, but I managed to keep out of it this time.

Although part of me still wants to just lay down and cry. And later on, I probably will.

Crying is amazingly important. And yet we men are raised to see it as a weakness, or at least, a crisis. Like, if we are crying, it must mean something is terribly wrong, like you just lost all feeling in the left side of your body or see blood in your vomit. And this simple bit of machismo is astonishingly crippling because crying is actually a vitally important part of how humans cope with their emotions.

And just like having a runny nose, nobody actually wants to do it, but it serves an important function and things would be a hell of a lot worse if your nose didn’t run.

You’d drown in snot! Trust me, as someone with chronic sinus issues, it’s possible.

And the thing is, men don’t even feel safe crying when they are all alone. A typical man raised in my culture could be ten miles out in the woods in the dead of winter, with no human around for miles around, and still be unable to just break down and cry because of that Inner Male inside of all of us that is just waiting for a “sign of weakness” to pounce and grind out face into the dirt. “Oh, look, the little baby is CRYING!” he sneers.

And while being an openly gay man gives me an out for some of the more homophobic stuff (because I am not worried that someone will think I am gay, like a lot of straight dudes), that’s only part of the whole male paranoia deal.

It’s like we are constantly fighting an inner dominance battle against an invisible opponent. Who is that opponent? Who knows? Maybe it’s a specific person from their past, like a bully, or a parent. Or maybe it’s more like an abstract concept, like “society” or “the universe” or “life”.

But one thing’s for sure : you can never let your guard down for even a moment, because that is when he/they/it will GET you.

And it’s this kind of thing that drives a lot of male insanity. A lot of really aggressive men are responding to a deep and terrible feeling of vulnerability and insecurity that drives them to constantly prove they are the alpha male and that makes them feel being feared is the one way to be safe.

Where women have the Beauty Myth, men have Performance Anxiety. Women think men have it easy because they just have to show up clean and dressed whereas woman have to go through the whole bizarre female grooming marathon.

What women don’t get is that sure, he just has to show up… in an expensive enough car, with enough money to buy her gifts and take her out to fancy restaurants and above all signal that he is an alpha male who can treat her like a queen.

Oh, and he has to have a cool, alpha job, and an apartment that meets the woman’s high status standards, and so that cool job had better pay a lot of money, and oh, lest we forget, while woman with respond with righteous ire if you dare to suggest they conform to any prescribed gender role, the man has to be upright and manly and strong or he’s branded a “wimp” or “loser”.

Now I am not saying these perceptions are actually accurate. They are only as accurate as women feeling like they are fat and ugly and nobody will ever love them because they don’t look like supermodels.

Men have their own gender hell, is what I am saying, and it is just as destructive and unrealistic and corrosive as the one woman live in. It’s different, but it’s just as bad.

There’s been a meme going around about this MIT professor who left a long, heartfelt, anguished comment on some message board on what it is like to be an omega male nerd and why that might make some people like him hate feminism.

It’s not really feminism they hate. It’s women. Feminism merely makes for a good scapegoat, a way to hate women in a way that is cloaked in the far more acceptable form of objecting to an ideology, or a movement.

They hate women in the exact same way that some women hate men, and for a lot of the same reasons. They view the opposite gender as something they can’t help but want but can never had because they are somehow not good enough, as society judges it, and never will be. And this causes incalculable pain to people of both genders.

Because of this, there will always be extremely bitter people of both genders who lash out at their hated opposite via whatever means they have at their disposal. In this day and age, they can do it with the most hurtful words they can think of on all the various fora of the Internet.

Both side have valid points, but then ruin those points by using them as a cudgel to beat on each other.

The only way out is to just plain stop making blanket statements about any group.

That’s part of what humanism is all about. We are people, not labels.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.