With Love as the Casualty

I have to confess I am at a complete loss as a man. Due to what can only be described as the almost continuous rolling coverage of the war on women.

Each day, each moment, each week reveals yet another atrocity. Whether it’s:

• the Cornell 7/57,
• the Callaway shoulder charge,
• Sam Wood (Australian Bachelor winner),
• the sexual assaults by Sydney (NSW Australia) private school boys,
• a male teacher at Melbourne’s (Victoria Australia) Methodist Ladies College , or
• the strangulation death of a Sydney (NSW Australia) 16 year old girl.

All of which leaves me with the sense of being under fire. And I’m not a victim. Meaning for the victims, it would be torture, a continuous bombardment, with an evil purpose.

Meanwhile hundreds or thousands or even more women are telling their sexual assault stories whilst outing themselves as Jane Doe. Whilst thousands upon thousands maybe millions remain privately silent (somebody will tell me it is tens of millions at least and most probably even more). The war on women is endemic.

And that’s only the last few weeks. Not the last decade, or century or thousands of years past.

And in these enlightened modern times, we have blamed social media algorithms, male role models, men being bystanders, consent training, podcasts, deepfakes, etc all to no avail.

But if I can make myself old-fashioned for a moment, I didn’t have any of those back in my day (sorry for sounding like my dad). Anyone who pushed back way back then was labelled cissy or gay or a poofter (the insults haven’t changed greatly have they?). As happened for the last several thousand years.

Now each day, each moment, on social media, an army of quite angry men rally to defend these violations. Their responses are almost on repeat – not all men, false rape allegations, she was asking for it, it’s only a joke and/or the usual boring recycled insults. If they’re using AI, AI isn’t working. Neither are the insults. Insults don’t change behaviour.

Each day, these men when called out on their behaviour distract : they focus on the women’s behaviour or abuse the accuser or even thrive on the attention (like Hilary Clinton’s Deplorables in 2016). All desperately scrabbled from their tattered copy of the narcissists’ playbook.

Why? Because they know they cannot defend their own actions. There are those (you know who) who do defend their actions and dismiss it as “locker room talk,” but none of the mob dare.

Because these men (almost all men? millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, anyway too many men to tell if any are safe) don’t want peace, not even a truce or ceasefire.

They want the complete, absolute and total defeat of women. Because peace would mean men would have to be accountable and responsible – as per Human 101. No they want total world domination – effectively the death of all women as persons.

Which means they know exactly what they are doing. They’ve heard all the messages, watched the videos, etc. They’ve had their behaviour called out. They’ve been publicly outed. And nothing has changed.

Men know that they know they are violating women. They just won’t say it in public. Instead they tell their fellow perpetrators all of whom become proud in private as any member of a cult, or gang, or frat would know. And those men that fall in battle, know they have a system to protect them – legislation, law enforcement, courts, and media allies that cast them as a good bloke who snapped.

This isn’t a fight that requires an easily changed attitude, it’s a battle against a cult that has declared war.

And the men that are in this quagmire are foot soldiers without an exit strategy. They are stuck. They have no alternative choices offered by the manosphere. The expectation is that if you act towards women as prescribed, you’ll be happy because you have a submissive, compliant, obedient woman.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Because in their war against women, men have made love a casualty.

And if your victory destroys love, what victory is that?