Men's Memes: Dematerialise Part 2

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Dematerialise Part 2

I said in the last post that just getting more money and buying more luxuries does not make people happy.

Of course, up to a certain point money will bring you happiness - or at least relief from unhappiness. For example, once you have enough money to comfortably pay for all the basic neccessities of life. Yet in the West most people can reach this point pretty easily, which is one of the reasons why the increasing wealth of the West has not brought about an increasingly level of happiness.

But there is a way in which more money can make you more content, and it is this:

If you use the money to do something useful to the rest of the world, in such a way that it projects your unique personality out into the world, amongst your fellow men. For example, if you were a real animal lover, and you won the lottery or made a lot of money, then it would bring you more and more contentedness to set up some big animal-rescue sanctuary. Or if you were a car fanatic, you could plough your money into starting a car museum, displaying all the classic cars of the past, or maybe a design centre where people can come and see concept car designs of the future. It doesn't have to be a selfless charity, it can be a business that makes you a profit (some of which you will plough back into the business and make it ever bigger).

In other words: buying toys and luxury items will not bring you long term contentedness, but investing your money into your own personal dream, a way to put your unique mark on the world will.

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Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."