Hug, Don't Spank;

Kiss, Don't Punish;

Forgive, Forget, Or Else

The three major news events of the last three years: Clinton/Lewinsky, Princess Di, and JFK Junior all held a single element in common: Their news coverage and their political perspectives (and thereby their final resolutions) were driven by and for Women. Polls taken during and after each of these events show without a doubt that men and women were (in well more than just a general sense) on opposite sides of the emotions and politics. The so-called Gender Gap is getting wider by the day, and it's beginning to underlay the way everyday Americans define each other as good or bad. Each of the major news networks noted a similar phenomenon: that their phone calls and e-mails contained a certain number of negative (and extremely negative) messages from men which they considered to be in such bad taste that they wouldn't report them, while continuing to air quotes, voices, and e-mail from sympathetic, poetic viewers as a tribute to the deceased celebrities and the basic innocence of the president. The polling companies have reported that positive and negative responses have broken-down along gender lines by a large percentage-spread. Men and women have vastly different views of the same events, and they act-out their feelings. When men were hostile, or really couldn't have cared less, women were so offended that they cried and got very angry with men for being so insensitive. The five major TV networks choreographed their coverage to fit the feminine response. As a result, women in general felt sorry for Hillary Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and Bill Clinton; they wept for Princess Di; they mourned for the Kennedys. And they bit back hard with snarling, name-calling anger whenever a man said that the Clinton scandal was an outrage, or that the Kennedys weren't worth all the TV time and pity, or that the People's Princess was an irrelevant, blueblooded twit.

Welcome to the Momming of America. Welcome to the Cultural Pre-School Nursery. The politically corrected land where we all hold hands, eat wholesome sandwiches, and take a nap when were told. Women are coming into "their own" power at the current cultural moment. What with women's sports, women's cable networks, "women's studies," and a whole host of psychological support groups, woman-friendly loan policies, shelters, and federal laws designed to recognize and promote the essentially wonderful nature of women (and their generally pacifistic views), and to protect that vulnerable nature from men, who have been suppressing them for all human history, it's no wonder that "Culture as Mother" has replaced "Culture as Father" in America. You get more of whatever you subsidize. Besides, it takes a whole village of Moms to raise a wayward male nation.

The typical prevailing attitude (as shown time and again in polls) is that women are caring, nurturing, forgiving, tender, patient, understanding, and all-wise. Whereas men are perceived as mouth-breathing, nose-drooling, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal Domestic Rapists, Racists, and worse, unless you're a black man or a gay man or one of a whole litany of victim-men, in which case any anti-woman crime you may have committed is "understood" and "put behind us so we can go forward." Like with Hillary Clinton's own travails.

Whether this whole outlook is healthy or not, there's a hidden hypocrisy which defines it's value more than any heartfelt good intentions. Imagine a young mom who hears her son use a "swear word" to describe one of his female classmates. She bolts out of the house, grabs him by the shirt and tells him that he must respect all women and never say bad things about them. Fearfully he cries and admits his guilt, then promises to be better. Proud of herself, she goes back into the house, turns on the TV, and swoons with desire over Bill (the serial sexual harasser and accused rapist) Clinton, or JFK sr., each of whom embodies the same respect for women as does a mousetrap for mice.

If we need another example, think of the cutie-pie high-school cheerleader who chastises as "sexist" the poor awkward geek who wants to take her to the flower show, and then runs off to the make-out woods with the brutish jock who date-rapes her for the fourth time. She giggles proudly about it to her friends. It seems that the society-wide demand, "respect for women," is applied in a totally subjective manner, and only to men that women don't want. The wounded, disrespected boys are nothing but collateral damage in the larger political battle. They're in a no-win situation, damned if they don't reform, and rendered safely worthless if they do.

And don't think that this hypocrisy goes unnoticed by a few really hurt boys who are willing to wreak their vengeance with deadly force. They've been rejected by every girl they've ever wanted because they're not rich or handsome or sexy enough to suspend the politically correct rules, so they're easy prey for the endless cruelty heaped on their obvious hormonal frustrations. They look ahead into their future lives and see that they will always be wrong, always come in second to the hypocrisy. They will never get the same respect that's demanded of them for others. And however bad it seems now, it will only get worse. In this light, a murderous rampage seems kinda cool.

The situation has progressed to where the female politics of culture require that men and boys actually stop acting out their essential nature as aggressive male mammals. Even worse, essential male nature is usually defined as bad, evil, dangerous, and it must be changed into the more benign female model if the world is to survive in the "right way." We embark on this project without debate, without analysis, and with no sense of what might happen when we start demanding that half the population stop acting like themselves because it's no good. I believe this is the origin of "the angry white man."

Put the shoe on the other foot for a moment. What if we insisted that feminine traits were undesirable and indeed bad, evil, and we insisted that girls and women simply stopped acting like themselves? If we then oooh-ed and ahhh-ed over the girls who acted the way we told our daughters not to act, what would happen? We'd find little girls hiding out to play at politically incorrect doll and tea parties. Inevitably some of them would walk into a school carrying automatic weapons decaled and decoupaged with rainbows, My Little Pony stickers, hearts, and strapped with rifle-sized braided friendship bracelets. Dateless and unhappy, they'd blow away their friends and enemies on Barbie's birthday. Then we'd pull our hair, claw at the skin on our chest, and wail, wondering how this could happen. We'd set up counseling tables and make sure that all the other girls knew how sad an example this was, never realizing that our incessant Momming itself was the problem, not the solution.

How did we get to this silly situation where the healthy, logical anger of the Jacked-Around is labeled "mean-spiritedness" and defined as a social crime, worthy of our hypocritical, myopic contempt (which is seen as fine and good)?  How nutty has our world become?

Agree or not, up until about 15 years ago, any woman who wasn't plug-ugly or butt-stupid (there are other, kinder reasons of course) usually lived on the "Sheltered Side of the Island." First, she was someone's infant, then someone's daughter, then someone's girlfriend, then wife, then ex-wife, then her second husband's second wife. She was constantly supplied with the stuff of life. She never built the world in which she lived. She drove a car bought by a man, lived in a house or apartment built by men, she cooked on a stove designed by men. She spent a man's money. She didn't earn enough to keep a pet alive. Regardless of her well-meant contributions, she always lived in an abstract, artificial, inherited world instead of one she made. She's been protected, hidden away from harm and danger, given food, clothes, and dignity that stemmed from the social status of the men who basically owned her. She couldn't use a jack-hammer or run a load of cinder-blocks up to the 65th floor to save her life, but she could sit on the sofa, play with her children, and learn protected passivity from their favorite PBS liberal morality-play children's shows. Her world views had nothing to do with the real outside world at all world, just the way it "ought to be." Her men busted their butts on her behalf, and that was fine, very secure.

As the economic and political environment changed, women demanded to be let into the workforce because it took more and more money to sustain their middle-class lives. What they found was the angry, cruel, ignorant, insulting, deadly, highly competitive and ruthless life-sapping workaday world in which men have been living since they began walking upright. And women didn't like it at all. It was just too mean, .......too damned icky, if you will.

Hiding behind the shield of civil rights, they struck out at America's workplace (and by inevitable extension, the whole American culture) with the sword of righteous discomfort, demanding that our whole society become one big, safe, sheltered side of the island which is, in the abstract, their birthright. They went to the government, which catered to them, and so began the complex system of laws, schooling, and mass media gender-cheerleading of today, under whose heel so many of our young boys are learning to hate themselves.

Here's the current state of the Gender Gap: Whenever women adopt an abstract, forgiving, head-in-the-sand, "I don't want to hear about it," or "Let's put this behind us," attitude toward the actual crimes of the handsome evil men they truly desire, normal law-bound men go crazy from the hypocrisy, and lash out with virulently opposing opinions. Thanks to reverse psychology, the women become even more galvanized, heaping endless bile and venom on the very anger they've created with their own unrealistic nursery school attitudes. The government, schools, and mass media will take up the feminine viewpoint, censoring the male attitude through omission, and anyone who doesn't like it gets a time-out to think about his male faults. The gap gets wider because there's a political wedge being driven between men and women.

This is the Momming of America. Like it or not, these conflicting viewpoints have to be turned into positive votes for Conservative issues. It's not as hard as it sounds. A tax cut can be sold to women because it gives them more independence from men. It can be sold to men because it disempowers the government that's funding programs to undermine them. School vouchers can be sold to women who want to send their children to the best politically-correct public schools, then to men who want their children out of the politically-correct public schools. And the arguments can be reversed for the independent conservative women and the self-emasculated leftist ninny-men. There's political profit in understanding each side of this great divide.         

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