men make moans

Recently, while out disc-golfing in a nearby state park, some friends and I came across a guy and his gal being professionally photographed. The couple would walk a few paces, fall into each others' arms, kiss, hug, and lean, generally acting in the manner of drunken fools with smiles plastered on their faces. Then, as we were kicking through the dry leaves trying to find our discs, the man got down on one knee, took the girl's left hand in his, and pretended to slide a ring onto her finger. I have never been married, I do not plan to ever get married, and I don't think much of the ordeal; therefore, I put my head down, kept walking, and ignored the love-fest going on up the hill. Two of my companions, however, an overweight man in his late thirties and his overweight son, upon seeing the man drop to one knee, began to moan and coo and aw, punctuating their girlish behavior by stopping in their tracks and applauding. The love-struck man then stood up and made it clear through a few brief words and hand gestures that he was not in the act of proposing and that he and his betrothed lass were merely having their pictures taken as if they were, which dampened my companions' spirits considerably. When, later, I asked the man and his son why they had applauded the lovers' actions, they said because they thought it was “Nice.”

At sometime in the past, I fell for the lie that I had to express my emotions out loud and show everyone my sensitive side, that my feelings were things that had to be expressed and talked about, that vulnerability was a masculine virtue. I have found the exact opposite to be true: the more I have tried to express my feelings, the less control I've had over them, and the more I've tried to show my sensitive side, the sooner my past girlfriends have left me. In part, I blame modern Western society's lack of manhood rituals for teaching boys how to become men, rituals in which their role in society is explained to them and the dos and don'ts of the self-respecting male are spelled out. I've had to try to figure these rules out for myself, stumbling blindly down one dead-end after the next; I wouldn't have minded being suspended from a tree by hooks looped under my pectoral muscles and beaten with buffalo femurs so long as, afterwards, my uncles had told me what was up. As far as why Western men have begun to act in the manner of women, research points, in part, to our increased exposure to plastics: we eat off them, heat them in microwaves, wear them, sleep in them, and add them to our soaps, poisoning our bodies in subtle yet powerful ways and causing our boy children's genitalia to shrink. In part I also blame our society's obesity rates, with expanding waistlines signaling men's bodies to increase estrogen production, Mother Nature cursing pear-shaped dudes to act as if they were women. (I have no problem with women, or with women acting womanly, only when men do the same.)

Whenever I see couples acting romantically and looking at each other with stars in their eyes, with hands tightly intertwined and cheeks flushing with excitement, I immediately think of Doug Stanhope's bit regarding the ultimate conclusion to every single such instance of foreplay, that being male ejaculation. All the chocolates in the world, and all the bunches of roses, all the time spent talking on the phone, and all the pronouncements such as “I miss you” and “I love you” lead to one thing: the man shooting his sperms into or onto the girl's body. (I am neither gay nor lesbian, and so I cannot really speak to homosexual liaisons.) Since getting in shape, simplifying my life, and putting myself through a number of manhood rituals, I have found it easier to reject the old ways and to replace them with ones that play to my inherent masculine strengths; next time, then, I'll skip the foreplay and go straight to sleep. Mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

risky political correctness

A dangerous trend has spread throughout these shakily-united States: the trend of political correctness. Damaging to honesty, truthfulness, and the very concept of Liberty itself, a person is being politically correct when, before speaking out loud, he stops to ponder whether or not what he is about to say might or might not offend someone within earshot. Rather than encouraging him to speak his mind freely in the knowledge that he has no – nada, null, zero, zilch – no control over the mental processes of other people nor the ability to control how others will react to whatever he chooses to say or do or sign or write, our society demands that he take everyone else's emotional and mental well-being into consideration and censor himself instead of just coming and saying whatever the deuce he intended to say in the first place.

Political correctness is un-American in that it forces us to be liars, to hide our prejudices and our stereotypes deep within the recesses of our souls, where hatred and malcontent tend to fester; it decreases the Safety of all Americans by allowing the bigot to mingle freely amongst open-minded people, his cruel heart filled with a resentment for people of color and a hatred for All Things Strange; it harms the Safety of all Americans by allowing bigotry and racism to build up in the mind of the sad and confused individual until he can no longer stand it, which makes him more likely to lash out physically against the object of his ire, a person with skin slightly darker than his. During more than one conversation between me, an American of European Descent, and Americans of African or Mixed African and European Descent (i.e. between a white person and brown people), I have heard these humans say that they would rather have their racist right out in public, where he can be tagged and avoided rather than for him to have to pretend to be color-blind when he really could care less if he saw a Negro being chained to a pickup truck and dragged.

Furthermore, political correctness emboldens the nitpickers and busybodies among us to wag their fingers at anyone even toeing the line of impropriety, and to say to them with self-righteous but artificial indignation: It's not nice to say this, and you shouldn't say that, because you might hurt this bunch's feelings, and cause that lot to be sad. There are many views espoused by religious extremists in this country – they who are trying to shut down Planned Parenthood and who want to amend our preciously secular Constitution to define marriage according to their and only their religious text – views I vehemently oppose and risk Life, Fortune, and sacred Honor to combat; yet while standing out in the snow counter-protesting nuns and stoking the ire of entire church parishes, I chose to speak my mind and to say hurtful and offensive things directly to them, right up in their faces, hardly flinching when they called the cops to complain about the public display of the word vagina, which is the medical term for one part of a woman's sex. I shall stop harping on the past and start encouraging the few lovers of Liberty left on these shores to end self-censorship, to encourage clear and open debate, and to fill their hearts with emptiness; together, we can conquer the scourge of political correctness, preferring honesty to deceit, choosing the Truth over lies. So stand up and speak freely – do it now, or forever scold your niece.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit