Men's Memes: Do we surf too much?

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Do we surf too much?

The average person spends two and a half hours per day watching TV. I've written in the past about what a waste of time this is.

But have we swapped one time wasting activity with another...?

The average Internet user in the UK now spends, on average, 164 minutes online. How much of this is just idle surfing and constant checking of emails?

A few caveats are needed here: firstly, how do you actually calculate how much time you spend online? In theory you could say that I am online almost all the day, as I'm at the computer most of the day and the computer is always connected to the web. Equally, many activities like reading the news and listening to the radio can now be run through the web, so is it really sensible to see the web as something totally distinct? It seems to me that the web is going to become increasingly prevalent, and via media other than the desktop PC.

Nevertheless, much of our web-surfing is undoubtedly just habitual. Discipline is clearly called for. Us Humans do have a penchant for activities that put us in a trance state, with no need to THINK. Alcohol and drug consumption, TV, excessive meditation, excessive exercising. In particular, nightclubs, with their flashing lights, repetitive music and lack of conversation seem to return their patrons to the state of 'booming, buzzing confusion' of a baby or even a fetus in the womb.

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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."