Monday, July 01, 2013

Daddy wars and advice for men

Marc Tracy writes in The New Republic:
However, in the past few weeks, there have been a bevy of articles and studies that all point to this news: At long last, the Daddy Wars are coming. ...

Esquire recently published an essay by Richard Dorment on the work-life balance that men face. It was fashioned as a response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” Atlantic feature (which made mention of how men face similar quandaries) and unfortunately was riddled with condescension for the same people—chiefly, feminists—who should be his allies. (Salon’s Irin Carmon did a good job pointing out this curious dynamic.) Still it captured, I think, the feelings of many men, fathers and not, who were brought up to think in terms of career and providing for their families financially, with actual work at home getting short shrift. ...

Like the Mommy Wars, the Daddy Wars are going to require, as Carmon put it, “a negotiation between what’s possible, what they’ve been taught to expect is normal, and what they might really want.”
A Slate feminist Alyssa Rosenberg gripes about Brad Pitt's daddy role in World War Z:
The morning the apocalypse begins, we meet Pitt's Gerry Lane, who has retired from an exciting but risky job at the United Nations that took him to war zones like Liberia and the former Yugoslavia. "Do you miss your old job?" his daughter Constance (Sterling Jerins) asks him as he makes breakfast for his family. "No, I like my new job," Lane tells her, regret flickering across his face as his wife Karin (Mireille Enos) searches for their daughter Rachel's inhaler. "All you do is make pancakes in the morning!" Constance tells him. ...

I understand why a complicated narrative had to be boiled down to a single main character and an simplified storyline for World War Z to make it to the screen. But having mom stay home with the kids while dad goes out and defends them to reclaim his manly honor seems unnecessarily old-fashioned — it's so pre-apocalyptic.
The movie was just about killing zombies, and the plot did not make much sense. If there is a message in the movie, it is that we just wall ourselves off from undesirables, and shoot them on sight.

A feminist war has broken out against a guy writing a book of dating advice for men.HLN TV reports:
To fund the book, "Above The Game: A Guide to Getting Awesome with Women," Hoinsky launched a campaign on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, with a target of raising $2,000. ...

Sex therapist Dr. Tiffanie Davis Henry took issue with some of Hoinsky's advice.

"The problem is that this book is written for men, period," she says. "The author, while assuming that he's well meaning, is encouraging guys with a poor track record of 'getting the girl' to resort to grade school tactics to express interest, and is setting them up for relationship failure rather than success." ...

Kickstarter initially said that while the “material is abhorrent and inconsistent with our values as people and as an organization,” they were not going to take down the campaign “based on their current guidelines.”

However, Friday morning they issued a statement saying, “We were wrong.” The statement explained that they could not stop funding of the project, but they can remove the page from their site.
This is bizarre for Kickstarter to try to censor a project like this. My grocery store checkout aisles have magazines with dating and sex advice for women. That advice is just as crude and manipulative as Hoinsky's advice for men. But now Kickstarter has resolved to censor any advice for men.

Here is Hoinsky's outline so you can judge for yourself. I guess Davis might say that he should have less advice on meeting women and more advice on maintaining relationships. She can write her own book if she wants. Dating advice for women is in mainstream books, magazines, and newspapers, while advice for men is buried on underground web sites. There were even attempts to block my blog.

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