The LA Times just published “Day of the lout,” an editorial in the entertainment section that is an unveiled rant against men — young men in particular.
The article focuses almost entirely on criticizing young men.
If you’ve seen a beer commercial in the last two years — and how can you avoid them? — you know the type. He’s a twenty- or thirtysomething, sort of a slacker, with a beautiful and adoring girlfriend who just can’t seem to pry his attention away from his suds. She expresses ardor, he looks ardently at his mug or can of beer. She wants to talk romance, he wants to talk anything but. She gets exasperated, he snuggles obliviously with his beer as she departs in a huff.
[...]
Louts have few needs and no shackles. Above all, louts may ogle women and snicker about them, but women are pointedly never their top priority. At most, women are objects, just like in the old days. That’s the revenge part. Louts don’t have to make any concessions to women. Louts barely need women. Just give a lout a Bud and his buds and he’s happy.
Of course, embedded in loutishness is the idea that the lout is irresistible to women even as he disdains them — in fact, because he disdains them. In this view, women, who have allegedly been overpampered for the last few decades, just love louts, even when they pretend they don’t. As this male fantasy goes, men are so cute when they act like galoots. So not only does he not have to make concessions to women, he can do or say whatever he wants without any consequences because in lout culture insensitivity is the new sensitivity.
The bitterness just shines right through, doesn’t it? I have to admit that I find the piece amusing, because while it has been annoying to deal with the nyah nyah taunting from feminists about how lousy men are for the last twenty-odd years, the tone has changed from smug to something approaching “alarmed.”
Here, he gets into analysis:
More, young men are always searching for a means to assert themselves, and loutishness is not only a form of revenge, it is a form of empowerment — a way for twenty- and thirtysomethings to show that they aren’t going to allow themselves to be subjugated as many of them, no doubt, feel their fathers were under all that feminist lashing.
Finally, he ends with some shaming language, and a dare to “man-up”:
So much of it is gleefully wallowing in irresponsibility, in a lack of maturity, in self-gratification and a general indifference to other people. This may be the real male nirvana, and it suggests that the ubiquitous culture of loutishness speaks to something less obvious and perhaps more interesting than anti-feminism. It speaks to a widespread desire not to have to be men at all.
What do women want? Sigmund Freud famously asked. Well, we thought we always knew what men wanted, but it turns out we may have been wrong. Men don’t want sex. In a world of unrelenting pressures and of threatening sexual equality, men just want to be boys. Or at least that’s the way it looks judging by the new masculinity of loutishness … which, it turns out, really isn’t masculinity at all.
Hear that guys? By embracing freedom and shunning the feminist line, you are rejecting masculinity (as defined by an obvious feminist). This is just too rich — it’s a wonderful Valentine’s Day gift for single men who might have thought they were missing out on something.
I am really coming to appreciate Valentine’s Day — it has become one of those “count your blessings” days for men who have taken the red pill.
