I read a story when I was a kid that made a lasting impression on me. It was about a teenage girl who passed by a bakery every day and developed a fixation on a particular cake in the window. Eventually she reached the point where it became imperative to her that she have that cake. She saved her money and when she had enough, she went in to buy the cake. The clerk tried to talk her out of it and offered to have another, freshly made, cake exactly like it ready for her the next day.

No sale. She had to have that cake.

So, the clerk boxed it up for her and she took it home. She took it out of the box and grabbed a knife to cut into it, eagerly anticipating its delicious taste. But, the knife encountered a strange resistance for a cake, then went “thunk” right through it. She turned it over and discovered that it was not actually a cake at all, but just a cardboard box covered with icing made to look like a cake.

I know that I am something of a Luddite, but seems like everywhere I look these days I see little except cardboard boxes covered with icing and people who believe that they are cakes.

At The Thinking Housewife (skip the snark, guys, we have bigger fish to fry) I found links to three of the most egregious examples of cardboard boxes being sold as cakes that I have seen in recent memory.

The first involves a woman who was past her expiration date who slickly eluded her Wiley E. Coyote moment by paying two other women to gestate her babies as she might also pay other women to clean her house for her because she can’t be bothered.

The second involves our favorite destroyer-of-families, Joe Biden, saying that same-sex marriage is inevitable.

And, the third, merges those two themes into the possibility of laboratory reproduction for same sex couples like 63-year-old Elton John and his male “partner”, who have had a child via a surrogate mother. From an “equality” standpoint, if women are “empowered” by paying other women to do what they, as women, squandered their ability to do, on what grounds would it be possible to deny the “fairness” of allowing men to do it as well?

There is an old joke that goes – how many legs does a sheep have if you call a tail a leg? The answer is 4, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg. There is a reality to it which transcends and denies labeling, and a tail remains a tail, and not a leg, no matter what you call it.

It is truly sad to me that the Social Conservatives have isolated and marginalized themselves by drawing the requirements for membership among them so narrowly and rigidly. For, in truth, I am generally fairly socially conservative. If the SoCons had been a bit more willing to support my rights as a man, and a bit less enthusiastic about throwing me under the bus in the name of female pedastalization, they probably would have had a pretty committed ally in me, instead of a sworn enemy as they have today. Sadly, agreeing in spirit but differing on detail is not good enough for most SoCons – it seems to be their way, all the way, or the highway.

If you look at the number of “men” today who are opting out of traditional masculinity – either as gay men, transgenders, or male feminidiots – you will see that they are so uncomfortable with the rigid constructions of traditional masculinity that they are refusing to go along with them despite extreme social pressure. It is a fairly universal characteristic of human nature that the harder you push someone trying to force them into doing something they do not wish to do, the harder they will push back.

Or, to put it another way, the more difficult, painful, and rewardless you make it to follow a “traditional” path, the fewer people who will do it and the more hostility they will have toward you for trying to force them. Push them long enough and hard enough, and they will eventually get pissed off enough that instead of leaving you alone in the institutions you are trying to force them into, they will counterattack and try to co-opt and smash them.

To me, a “man” who has himself castrated and a hole created in his body has no more right to call itself a “woman’ than I would have to cut off my legs and replace them with wooden ones and call myself a “table.” Calling a tail a leg does not make it one, and calling a mutilated man a “woman” does not make it one either.

Nor does the odd case of the female who is no longer a “woman” as we understand what a woman really is – a creature capable of gestating life within her body – “outsourcing” her womanly role and still trying to call herself a “mother.” At best, she is self-paid day (or night) care. At worst, she is playing “let’s pretend”, and requiring everyone else to go along with and support her self-delusion.

As we plunge ahead into this Brave New World Order of the 21st century, we face a landscape where everything is considered nothing but a “social construct.” Born with a male body but believe you are really a woman (or vice versa)? No problem, just get some surgery and some hormones and you can call yourself whatever you want to call yourself. Does it make you really be what you are calling yourself? No, you’re still just a cardboard box covered with icing pretending to be a “cake”, a tail pretending to be a “leg”, an over-the-hill female pretending to be “a woman”, or confused creatures of the same sex pretending to be “married.”

Born with tits too “small”? No problem, just pay some shyster $5,000 to pump bags of foreign substances into your body. Have a real and unique face? No problem, just grab a trowel and slather on a few layers of paint which will make you look pretty much exactly like every other woman out there (while making billion$$$$ for the cosmetic companies). Born with genes for male pattern baldness? No problem, get yourself some funkly looking corn rows implanted, or a prescription for Rogaine or Propecia. Getting older and slowing down sexually as a man? No problem, just go out and spend $6 on a pill so you can function like a flesh-and-blood vibrator with a fresh set of batteries, to get you in the mood to do what a lot of women consider to be “rayyyype.”

We live in a culture which gives you the opportunity, the means, the sanction, and even the mandate, to pretend to be whatever you want to pretend to be.

Except, underneath it all, you are still a tail, and not a leg.

Women have “Take Back the Night.” Well, I would like to suggest that men start a campaign to “Take Back the Real.”

Avoid fake anything. Don’t date, or pay attention to, fake women with fake faces, fake boobs, or fake personalities. When some fake SoCon gets on you about how you “should” be acting, spit in their faces and tell them that if they weren’t hypocrites and pedastalizers, and had fought a bit for the rights of fathers to be part of their kids lives and the rights of men to be attracted to women – even their own wives – that they would not have shot their credibility all to hell.

And, above all, don’t get fooled by cardboard boxes covered with sugary crap to try to fool you into thinking that they are sweet cakes.

/rant