This truly bizarre piece came out in January and purports to tell men how to be better. Its suggestions are, in essence, stop being a man and become subservient and freakin’ useless.
So you don’t feel the need to actually click on the link and give them the satisfaction, here are the “obsolete man skills” and their suggested replacements:
1) Hunting: instead learn how to cook
2) Fighting: instead, learn how to mediate
3) Repairing your car: instead, learn how to code
4) Fixing things at home: instead, learn how to decorate (urk)
5) Being a leader: instead, learn how to collaborate
6) Being a disciplinarian: instead, learn how to communicate with your children
7) Holding your emotions in: instead, learn how to talk about your feelings
The thing that stands out immediately is the “instead.” I’m not a hunter… but every hunter I’ve ever heard of has known perfectly well how to cook. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. The closest to mutual exclusivity would seem to be #7, where instead of having self-control the author advocates for constant whining about your feelings.
I suspect that chances are really good that the author no more really believes this nonsense than most of the readers of this blog would. However, by posting outrageously ridiculous “think pieces” about nonsense that he knows will annoy rational people, he knows that people will complain about the piece elsewhere… and link back to it. An article that suggested truly obsolete man-skills – say, how to shoe a horse or auto-de-fey an infidel – won’t be that remarkable and won’t get that many clicks, thus lower ad revenue.
Which makes me wonder how much of present day outrage culture is driven by the simple desire for increased ad revenue through clickbait. Th more conspiratorial part of my brain makes me wonder if this guy is being paid or otherwise influenced by China in an effort to not only make western men useless in terms of national defense or economic competition, but also useless in terms of being truly interesting to western womenfolk (or at least the women who have not been infected with modern man-hating feminism). Perhaps the author is, unwittingly or not, part of the grand Chinese effort to not only defeat the west but to wipe out its population by driving down the birth rate.
