A no-holds-barred critique of the methods used by women, mothers in particular, to shape a man’s thoughts and behaviour. Recognise any of it? (Originally posted here)

This is The Rude Guy. The Medicine Man of Men’s issues. The audio antidote, to the mass Shaming of Men.

On earlier shows I talked about how our country is run by feminized men. Men who are winsome and charming and tricky and changeable. Men with no detectable moral center. Duplicitous men who lie and deceive. George W Bushes and Bill Clintons and Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys. How the hell did this happen? How did the worst possible species of men, the most feminized men, the LEAST honest men, become the most successful men?

And how come so many of our young men join gangs. What do they get out of that? Protection? Honor? Sense of belonging? What?

Here’s an email that just floated into the inbox, on the same topic.

Thanks for another great podcast. I think it is extremely important for us to have a unique voice, uncensored by the mainstream media? I am thankful every time I listen to one – thankful that other people understand what is really happening in our society.The feminization of our media has created a pseudo-reality, where men are portrayed as tools for women. This has had a huge effect on men in general, who I think have become beaten down by the persistent brow-beating from the media.
I wanna make a donation to keep the show going.

Regards, Adam M.

Once again we’ve popped the top on a huge topic – What’s happening with men? – and we cannot cover it on one show. But I’m gonna turn over the mic to Rich Zubaty, and let him read to you from his book: What Men Know That Women Don’t, to try and get some answers about this.

Rich

[start Zubaty]

What Men Know That Women Don’t: page 111

Says Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture:
Those who function inadequately in any society are not those with certain fixed ‘abnormal’ traits, but may well be those whose responses have received no support in the institutions of their culture. The weakness of these aberrants is in great measure illusory. It springs, not from the fact that they are lacking the necessary vigor, but that they are individuals whose native responses are not reaffirmed by society. They are alienated from an impossible world.

Who, these days, affirms the right of men to be men? The institutions of our time are vicious, emasculating, feminized, structures. That includes government, corporations, schools and media.

Janet Saltzman Chafetz has some opinions about how we came to inhabit a society run by feminized men.

Says Chafetz:
Female babies learn to do things by copying mom. Given the relative absence of male figures during his waking hours, the male toddler is hard-pressed to find out what he is supposed to do.Dick must identify with a cultural definition of masculinity that he pieces together from peers, media, and a series of ‘don’ts’ from his parents. Dick has to make the mental effort to comprehend what he is supposed to be . Males develop greater problem-solving abilities because of this early mental exercise. Moreover they become more concerned with internalized moral standards than females, who rely more on the opinions of others. [unquote]

It is surely a significant observation that boys develop internalized moral standards more readily than girls. I’m glad it was a woman, describing the process of being raised by women, who came up with this one. Absence of the father, incomprehensible complexities from the mother, drive the young man out onto the ball field to make sense out of life. Fish swim and boys play games. On the playing field he is away from mom’s manipulations. If he does something good his mates cheer, if he does something stupid they yell at him. To the extent that boys listen to their peers more than they listen to their dads every American boy is responsible for reinventing society. It is an awesome responsibility – a rudderless ship. The ones who find a higher meaning make it across the sea of Change. The ones who get stuck in materialism do not.

America expects too much of its boys. According to poet Robert Bly, the love unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution is the father-son bond. Fathers are the ones with the Spirit, the ones who dispense a vision of HOW to live – not what you are going to be when you grow up – that’s mom. And fathers are the ones who through job commitments and divorce and feminized education are being ruthlessly excised from the family unit.

The school used to mean the church, the temple, the mosque. Boys went to school to learn how to read the holy language so they could read the holy book so they could learn how to live the values revered in their culture. School was where boys went to learn how to be men from men.

And what is school like now? School is where boys go to be shamed by women. School is where boys go to learn how to be men, from women, in the absence of God or religion or clear value systems. When I talk about feminization and secularization and materialization of society I am talking about the same thing. These processes are equivalent.

According to Patricia Cayo Sexton in The Feminized Male:
The feminized male, like Kennedy assassins Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, are ‘nice’ guys; quiet, controlled, dutiful sons – whose male impulses are suppressed or misshapen by overexposure to feminine norms. Though run at the top by men, schools are essentially feminine institutions from nursery through graduate schools. Women set the standard for adult behavior and favor those who are polite and clean.

And what of the male teachers? Undeniably there are many fine men and there need to be more in a country where 85% of all teachers are white women – but, a man who is less than a man, can be more damaging to boys, than a domineering mother. And the chance of hiring feminized men in schools is fairly high because those eligible and willing are those who made it through a feminized school system in good standing without conflict or failure.

Methods of school instruction require little more than passive receiving and repeating. Learning is passive and feminine. The boy sits, listens, reads, writes, repeats and speaks when spoken to. School bores some boys and feminizes the others. They are rewarded for hewing to female norms. Boys who are boys have a troubled time in school.

Most boys have friends and hang out in groups. Gangs of boys are 300 times more common than gangs of girls. Boys clubs seem to know more about how to educate boys, than teachers, schools, or child study experts. Boys learn by DOing. They solve problems by being ‘in’ them. Boys are united in flocks. It is almost impossible for them to avoid teamwork. Girls seldom get together in groups above four, whereas for boys a group of four is almost useless. [unquote]

Says Jules Henry in Culture Against Men, in boys’ groups the emphasis is on masculine unity; in girls’ cliques the purpose is to shut out other girls.

School is the place where boys go to be shamed by girls. It’s never happened before in history. Schools set boys to competing with girls in subjects like handwriting, where girls have a biological fine-motor advantage. Girls aren’t required to pass baseball, where boys’ visuo-spatial aptitude gives THEM the advantage, but boys have to pass handwriting.

On a Sioux Indian reservation, Says Patricia Cayo Sexton:
The MISconduct condemned by authorities is a badge of honor for the boys. By the time he finishes eighth grade the Sioux Boy has many fine qualities: zest for life, curiosity, pride, physical courage, sensibility to human relationships, experience with the elemental facts of life, and intense group loyalty and integrity – none of which were learned in school. Nor has the school managed to teach any of its values: a narrow and absolute respect for ‘regulations’ and ‘government property’, routine, discipline, diligence. [unquote]

What is the future of these vital human beings? Menial jobs and alcoholism, while women and feminized men plot their grief on computer screens. We are making the American man, and the Native American man, obsolete. We are killing off the very people who led their families across the land bridge from Asia 12,000 years ago, as well as the men who took the ancient Greek ideal of Democracy and made it live again in a New World after 2000 years of dormancy. We have been invaded by the meme [female value] which asserts that the more organized society is the better it is. The better for whom? Women and manholes. Feminized men.

College is the haven of middle class culture and feminized behavior, says Sexton. Boys who survive college are the ones who have been successfully feminized:

Says Patricia Sexton:
A preschool boy grabs toys, attacks others, ignores teacher requests, wastes his time, asks for unnecessary help, laughs, squeals, jumps around excessively, is more tense at rest, stays awake in naps, breaks toys, rushes into danger, and handles sex organs more than girls. [No doubt the periodic onslaught of male hormonal secretions has something to do with this hyperactivity.] The preschool girl is more likely to avoid play, stay near adults, dawdle at meals, suck her thumb, avoid risk, fear high places, refuse to eat, twist her hair, and be jealous. [unquote]

An obvious female bias in the classroom is the meme [female value] that a physical blow is sinful or uncivilized, whereas humiliating people and assaulting them with verbal blows and shame is perfectly OK. Any male would rather be punched than shamed. The punch goes away, the shame doesn’t.

Male suicides outnumber female 70% to 30%. The suicide rates for women and non-white men remain consistently low throughout life.In mental institutions boys outnumber girls 3 to 1.

Considering there are 200 miscarriages of boys to every 100 miscarriages of girls, there are more males brain-injured at birth, and that blindness, deafness and epilepsy are commoner in boys, it is amazing there are any men left at all. Real men are as rare as bald eagles and just as worthy of saving.

Says Sexton:
Schools have feminized boys mainly because society turned education over to women and feminized men after 50,000 years of letting men do it. The ensuing secularization and ignorance of male values is appalling. For instance, girls typically see no dishonor in ‘brown nosing’ and usually even fail to see it for what it is [a military expression for shoving your nose up the captain’s butt crack]. The boy code regards most forms of apple polishing as unmanly. The male code of honor also tends to discourage many forms of cheating and to favor conduct that is open, honest, and above board.Many schools and academies are dehumanizing and unmanly places. Boys who succeed in them often do so by grossly violating many codes of honor and the norms of boy-culture. [unquote]

The Information Age is the Female Age, make no mistake about that. Sorting, counting, organizing information, has always been a female forté. The idea that we are going to live in a society where everyone just spends their day passing information around to everybody else is obscene. Who the hell is going to do anything? How is anything going to get done? Property can be bought and sold without realtors. Disputes can be settled without lawyers. But for paint to appear on a wall someone has to actually pick up a brush. To fix the hole in the roof someone has to get up on the roof. What this country needs to light a fire up its wazoo is a one-week strike by anyone who considers himself a ‘real’ man. That would be more devastating than Hurricane Andrew and the San Francisco Earthquake all rolled up into one. Just one week of real work not getting done. Out with the assholes, up with the men.

And why don’t we do it? Why won’t we men revolt for one week? Because men are addicted to praise.

Esther Vilar in The Manipulated Man Says that the manipulation of men begins when they are born:

Mothers, with some fantasy cut-out in their heads of what boys are like, and suffering from the deficiencies of their husbands, set about to make junior a perfect little man. He is such a ‘good little boy’ when he learns to pee pee inside the round white hole and resists smacking the cat with his toy bulldozer. Mothers love their daughters, but they wax with pride over their sons. They immediately set about trying to make them into everything the husband is not.

The mere fact that a man is accustomed from his earliest years to have women around, to find their presence ‘normal’, their absence ‘abnormal’, tends to make him dependent on women later in life. Dad is a character that comes and goes, but mom is the rock in junior’s life. He learns from her that taking directions from women who act like they know what they are doing is normal. It is almost impossible to underestimate the psychological power of this early social dynamic. A man’s whole notion of security and safety throughout life comes from giving himself to this dependent relationship. Like an imprinted gosling he spends his whole life looking for a certain shape to attach himself to.

We spend our marriages trying to wrest the same affirmation from our wives that we got from our moms, way back when, before we could even ‘think’. Our wives accuse us of trying to get them to mother us and it’s true, we are, that’s how we were trained. I know a phone-sex vendor in Chicago named Valerie Craft who stated unequivocally that her entire business consists in comforting men in the manner of their mothers. Astounding! But not really.

Says Vilar:
One of the most useful factors in conditioning a man is praise. Its effect is better and much more long-lasting than say, sex, as it may be started early and continued throughout a man’s life. Furthermore, if praise is applied in the correct dosage a woman will never need to scold. Any man who is accustomed to a regular and conditional dosage of praise will interpret its absence as displeasure.

Most jilted male lovers and husbands have an explosive mental meltdown at their beloved’s infidelities, which is vastly out of proportion to what they are being deprived of. It feels to them as if they are being torn away from their mother’s bodies, and indeed, that’s just what is going on down deep in their psyches. They are losing the basic unit of security, the emotional lifeline ingrained in them when they were still peeing in their pants. That’s why men rage and want to beat people up when their lovers leave them. That’s why most breakups involve women leaving men rather than men leaving women. Why would a man leave? After years of adolescent drunken degradation and self-abuse he has an hour-glass-shaped praise-giver back in his life again. That’s normal. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s what mom showed him.

Says Vilar:
Training by means of praise has the following advantages: it makes the object of praise dependent (in order for praise to be worth something it has to come from a ‘higher’ source, thus the object of praise exalts the praise-giver to a superior level); it creates an addict (without praise he no longer knows whether or not he is worth something – automatic existential shame – and he forgets the ability to identify with himself); praise increases his productivity (it is most effectively meted out not for the same achievements but for increasingly higher ones). Only mothers and wives, not other men or women, dispense the hugs and praise that men so crave. A boy, like a monkey, will repeat the actions that called forth endearments and, if at any time recognition is not granted, he will do everything in his power, bar nothing, to regain it.

He will climb mountains or work in coal mines or eat shit, allowing himself, like a junkie, to be totally shamed. And, says Vilar, the happiness he feels when praise is restored will already have assumed the proportions of an addiction.

Shame, that deep feeling of worthlessness and helplessness, is precisely the result of withheld praise. Regarding my own mother I’ve always referred to it as ‘withdrawal of love’. Even now, 43 years after the fact, she can set off an awful, depressing, manic, physical grinding in my stomach simply by withdrawing her love. Clearly she trained me to respond that way eons ago, before I had any sense of how anything works. In its way, it is sheer brutality. This is the meaning of Jesus’ admonition that we must learn to hate our mother and father if we expect to find God – find inner peace. Dependency training is like teaching a puppy to come on the word ‘go’ and then sending him off on a walk with a total stranger. The entire phenomenon of praise, and shame, and withdrawal of love is a very distorted garbling of signals imprinted in babies’ heads. God says surrender your ego. Mom says hang onto your ego so I can continue to use it to shame you into doing what I want. Who do you want to believe? God or mom?

Men have huge unaddressed issues with their mothers – and they’ll kill themselves with drugs, alcohol and bad marriages rather than confront them. Men always blame the problem on dad – DAD didn’t do this or DAD didn’t do that – but the real problem is mom. Mom is the one who trained you to mistrust dad. Mom is the one who trashed dad to your face – behind dad’s back, while he was gone from the house, working his ass off to support you – so she could bind you more closely to her needy self. Mom is the one who imprinted you with her flawed, ego-driven worldview and her vicarious dreams of success. Mom is the one who controlled you with praise and shame. Mom is the one who resents your wife for usurping her decades- long, praise-dispensing leverage over you. What do football players shout on TV? ‘Hi mom!’ Here I am! Look at me now! I did what you said! See me! Praise me.

Do you wonder why so many more men than women drink and abuse drugs? Here is the substance of addiction. We were strung out on praise early in life and without regular doses of praise we hurt so bad and feel so useless we have to try to kill the pain somehow. Ah, that first glass of beer, that first joint, how it took the pain away!

Responsible older men used to be available to initiate younger men away from this bondage to women. Without the mental breakdown that accompanies initiation men remain enslaved to female praise. It’s a fact, and an outrage. We are letting them rent free space in our heads.

And what do we do for young boys today?

In the Catholic Church we dress them up in gowns like women, and have them eat flat bread. My son, who was bar mitzvahed, got to put on a symbolic hat and read some Hebrew. What we should do is take them out into the woods and splash them with mud and make them kill a chicken with their bare hands – and then tell them the chicken is their MOTHER! Shame on us for allowing our society to become so sanitized, so womanized, that an idea like this seems brutal and without merit. We are all wearing female blinders fixed to our heads with a loving pat from our mothers.

It’s takes men, to turn boys, into men. Men are not born, men are MADE. MADE by the intervention of older men who take them under their wings, and teach them healthy, ethical responsible, male culture.

Problem is, initiation is tough. It’s not wimpy. It’s not a classroom discussion. I offered to put my son through a native American initiation ritual, and my ex wife offered to have me arrested for child abuse if I did. This is the problem. We confuse toughness with cruelty. That’s precisely backwards. It’s the most feminized societies, like Mexico, and Arabia, where healthy male culture has been smashed, that produce the most macho men. The most fucked up men. The men who strut and preen to gain attention. The men who were raised by women, and controlled via Female Praise Addiction.

It’s pretty well known by now that when the U.S. Marines first entered Baghdad, they were polite and considerate of the local people and they were well-received. Then came the Army, shooting anything that moved – they horrified the local population and turned the entire country against us. Marines are not just tough. They are INITIATED men. They know when to shoot and when NOT to shoot. That’s what healthy masculinity is about: knowing when to hold your fire. Something that women and feminized men won’t learn in 20 generations.

I’m gonna talk more about male initiation on another show. But, rather than waiting, you’d be better off to pull out a credit card, go to amazon.com, and buy the book right now: What Men Know That Women Don’t, by Rich Zubaty. It’s a life changing book. I’ve been told that hundreds of times.

[start Rude Guy]

Or go the therudeguy.com and click on the links. You’ll find it there. And email us. So we know we’re not just talking to feminized wimpy ass men. In fact, one of the more exciting emails we got lately was from a 23-year-old female film animator in Los Angeles who thinks that corporations are horrendous, urban living is an automotive nightmare, and feminism is just plain dumb. Really happy to get that email from Catherine B. And Rich just got an offer to buy his Thai Buffalo Girl painting, to keep the show rolling, so things are looking up.

This is The Rude Guy. We’ll be back. Stay strong. Don’t let anybody intimidate you. Don’t let anybody shame you.

No more bullshit. That’s out motto. No more bullshit.

Ahhhhh – feels a little better already.