Alienation & Loathing in America

What masculinity in America looks like these days.

I trust you’re all suitably recovering from This American Election. I know I am. I’m still grinning ear to ear. My husband asks me everyday how I’m doing (he has done so every day of our marriage) and these days my response is always, “GREAT!”

Meanwhile I’m watching my friends and family on FB recycle through various stages of grief. I’m holding my fire there. However, on Twitter & Gab, I’m letting it all hang loose. I don’t have any IRL friends on those sites, and they’re a little more like the wild west.

But make no mistake, I would love to rub my friends and family’s faces in their pre-electoral smugness and their post-electoral grief. Many of them have truly been some very public, intolerant assholes during this election. But I’m just classier than they are. End of story.

I belong to an all-woman, all-friends private group on Facebook called Estrogen Mafia. The name comes from a friend of ours who used to call us all Estrogen Mafia at a local bar we used to hang out. She’s dead now, and in the wake of her death we created this group. For literally years I tried to preach to these women the importance of voting for women, but they weren’t having any of it. They are the kind of dyed-in-the-wool liberals who for years would interject “I don’t consider myself a feminist” whenever the F-word came up. Of course they all supported Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Starting last year one of them got all janked up by the Men’s Right’s Movement and started reporting from the field. By from the field, I mean her kitchen counter, where she keeps their laptops. This woman is in the most traditional nuclear family I have ever seen. I mean, Amish families don’t have quite this level of division of labor, ffs. But I digress. She started getting the feminist outrage machine fired up and one by one these liberal women fell in line and followed suit. They were outraged–outraged! I tellya–by what some men were doing on the internet. The group became unbearable and while I stayed, I did stop participating. No one has posted a thing since the election.

On February 6, 2015, I warned them. I posted this on our group page:

Not sure what to make of this article, written by a privileged white male who has taken advantage of every inch of his white & male privilege, including the great white male marketing technique to pole-vaulting to fame: the cutsey Twitter gimmick targeting the young, largely female white audience (he is the co-creator of Twitterature).

The article castigates other privileged white males who feel alienated enough to align their views with various aspects of MRA movement. Think of guys you know who are always down on SJWs. This group is a problem, and their alienation should be reckoned with before it grows in force and power. I don’t think he reckons with it very well. Rather, he brings a typical educated urban male tendency to be critical of it without really trying to understand it, in a language with all the alienating tinges of academic acerbity. It’s more than a little annoying and ironic.

I guess my concern is that this blanket of alienation that lays on a couple of generations of men is itching for social prominence. All it needs is a charismatic political leader, and there are several on the horizon. And there don’t seem to be any parallel potential leaders on the opposing side. You think Hillary Clinton could put a damper on this? Not likely. She’d feed it. There is no one on the left or in the middle that I see who could unify enough of the marginalized classes and the white male thought leaders (Rensin among them) who tend to lead them. How does this bode for our immediate future?

I don’t know. I just have a faint wisp of angst about where all of this heading. I might be wrong. Your thoughts?

If anyone is counting, I was 15 months ahead of the curve. Trump announced in June 2015 and he won in November 2016.

In case you were wondering, no one commented on it at the time, even though they were all already in the bag for Hillary. They just didn’t get it, not then, and not now. A lot of liberal / progressive people are like this. They either don’t know or don’t care that so much of their chatter is alienating. And until November 8th they were blissfully unaware that the net result of this dynamic is that it prompted loathing in others. Bernie Bros, suburban moms, Gamergaters, and Reagan Democrats all unified to basically troll the entire Democratic party with a decision that will echo for 4 years. At least.