Women Own All the Vaginas and Why Men do What They do.

God knows I love controversy so I am going to take on the injustices perpetrated upon men by our society and the favoring of women. I am the first to admit we men have brought this on ourselves by not taking inventory of who we are and why we are the way we are. Compared to women tackling and addressing their issues, we are non-starters.
A good deal of what I will post will come from the writings of noted author, Richard Nocera and his take on Why Men Do What They Do from his book, Women Own All the Vaginas. Here is a sampling of his insights:
Could there ever be a Sex in the City for men too? No way! Men's sexuality would never be celebrated with raised glasses of champaigne in chic restaurants with millions of admiring men proudly watching their heroes toast each other's sexual conquests. In fact, it is just the opposite. Men's sexuality is routinely mocked, ridiculed, and demonized--degrading attitudes women would never tolerate. Consider this: How would our society react if men suddenly started keeping artificial vaginas by their beds, the way women keep vibrating artificial penises next to theirs? It would be seen as just one more indication of how sexually sick men really are. Women as a gender are headed somewhere. They are moving forward; they're improving themselves. Where are men headed? We're headed nowhere. No one is leading the charge to encourage men to move forward and improve their lives. What would forward movement even look like for men? Here's something to contemplate: If men don't improve themselves, we'll be lucky in twenty five years if women keep us around as pets. Chuckle now, but this could happen because no one of prominence is helping guide men to a richer, more fulfilling, and happier life. MEN HAVE NO OPRAH...but more on that and this topic tomorrow.

What's worse is that men don't think for a minute they need an Oprah. Men believe that needing an Oprah would mean they're needy and weak.  Most men would say, "What the hell do we need Oprah for?  We're the ones running the world. Aren't we?"

Not everyone loves Oprah, but name one man who helps men have a more meaningful life the way Oprah helps women.  Rush Limbaugh?  Bill O'Reilly? Dr. Phil? I don't think so.

Men need an Oprah because by nature, human beings are meant to evolve and improve their lives; and since we can, we should!  Life is a process, not an end result. Is there anything men have consciously changed for themselves in the last fifty years?  Sure, we've become better fathers to our children but that's because our wives have pretty much demanded it and many of our fathers were less than ideal.  The truth is men have become participants in, rather than creators of, their lives.  The bottom line is that men are too preoccupied with fulfilling the male agenda to pause long enough to get off their hamster wheels and seriously contemplate what it means to be born male in America.  The enormous demands placed on men to compete, provide, and succeed have left men too distracted to be aware of what they truly want and need.  I know this isn't true of all men, but I am not writing about individual men.  I am writing about men as a gender group.

Wage Gap Between Men and Women has Evaporated.

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.
In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.
The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.
Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.
Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.

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Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.
Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.
Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.
Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.

MEN TAKE SERIOUS NOTE ABOUT HOW THE WORLD VIEWS US

The nation rightly worries about the fiscal crisis and its ramifications for domestic economic stability.  We also worry about the Obama Administration’s fumbling role in international affairs and what this portends for the future of U.S. foreign relationships and America’s position and respect around the world.  Though less obvious, but nonetheless significant, is a sleeper issue: we haven’t come to terms with the crisis of modern male immaturity.  Here is another instance of an oft-neglected axiom: what seems in the moment to be urgent is often not important, and what is important frequently does not seem urgent.
Researchers have produced extensive documentation, and writers like historian Gary Cross (“Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity”), have explored the “sea change that has taken place in the conception of manhood over the past three-quarters of a century.”  Other authors — Guy Garcia and Michael Kimmel, to name two — look at the “decline of man” and the “perilous world” of the American male.  Kathleen Parker published a plea for America to Save the Males: Why Men Matter and Why Women Should Care; Kay Hymowitz’s, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, was just released.
While I have been thinking about this issue since my days as a college professor and university academic dean, I began writing about it back in 2005 with the publication of “Today’s New Girly Men” in WorldNetDaily.  More recently, I wrote “The Crisis of the Disappearing Educated Male,” in American Thinker.  Further, my book, Children at Risk: The Precarious State of Children’s Well-Being in America, details all the ways that children (and women) are harmed when, as is so often the case today, many men are more willing to impregnate a woman than to be a present and involved husband and father.
Clearly, awareness is building that, as Kay Hymowitz said, “Today’s pre-adults have been wait-listed for adulthood.”  Hymowitz believes that we are in the middle of a “momentous sociological development.”  The crisis of the American male is a “major demographic event” where, as Erick Erikson explained, young men between childhood and adulthood experience unprecedented “role confusion, emotional turmoil and identity conflict.”
For those just becoming aware of this emerging crisis, here are what I believe are the three major cultural trends that stunt young men’s maturity.

Decline in Marriage: Historically, marriage has been integral to American life; as the central institution of society, marriage was the typical step forward into adulthood.  Yet the marriage rate today is less than half the level of 1969.  Fewer people are getting married, and they are waiting longer to get married.  The Washington Post reported, “In 1940, less than 8 percent of all households consisted of people living alone.  Now more than a quarter do.”  A majority of people (66 percent) still live as a married couple family, but the proportion of married Americans continues to decline to levels never before seen.  We must recognize that with so many women willing to engage in sex without marriage, males have a limited incentive to “man up” — to be motivated and have a reason to accept the admittedly demanding responsibilities of adulthood.
Decline in Education: More and more men are lagging behind women in educational attainment and thus lack the credentials to compete in the marketplace.  Take college graduation: 34 percent of women (ages 25 to 34) have earned degrees compared to 27 percent of men.  This fact alone leads to fewer men in graduate schools and in the high prestige and high salaried jobs.  Even in areas typically dominated by men —like law, medicine, and business — women are excelling and their numbers and proportion are growing in comparison to men.  Clearly, in our eagerness to level the playing field for women we have seriously destabilized the balance between the sexes to the detriment of males. Kathleen Parker was right when she challenged our culture to “save the males.”  As Christina Hoff Sommers said in her book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men, the fact that “women are significantly more literate, significantly more educated than their male counterparts” is likely to create a “lot of social problems;” the lack of enough well-educated men does not “bode well” for anyone, particularly the growing numbers of sophisticated women.
Unclear Social Identity: Increasingly, men are finding their identity in their hobbies (fishing, hunting, racing, sports, etc.) instead of their careers (where they are falling behind women in achievement and status) or their roles as family providers and protectors — both categories scorned by feminists.  Previous generations of men had clearly identifiable roles and opportunities to show their physical prowess and courage — through providing for and protecting their wives and families both at home and against the nation’s enemies at war.  Men knew that they were needed; today, young women are told that they “don’t need a man” for anything.  Males used to become “men” when they “took a wife” and assumed adult responsibilities.  Now, instead of serious, dignified, and decisive male role models in the movies — like Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper — males today are more likely, as Kay Hymowitz observes, to identify with and to emulate “overgrown boy actors like Steve Carell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Farrell and Seth Rogen.”
As a society, we must revive those values and ideals that provided strong incentives for young men to pass the tests of adulthood.  The first steps of a solution are quite simple: we must begin by (1) scorning and ostracizing those men, no matter how rich and famous, who fail to take up the responsibilities of being a husband when they father a child and (2) demanding that our public school teachers unlearn those pernicious myths absorbed in college and graduate school and start re-creating an environment, starting in kindergarten, that respects masculine traits and behaviors: that is to say, stop demanding that little boys act like little girls and punishing or medicating them for acting like little boys.  Less than this is, on the one hand, to continue to accept what is unacceptable, and on the other to continue to discriminate against our sons and brothers.
We will not succeed in making a new start until we stamp out the myth that young women can do just as well without a man.  Unless we change that thinking, our society will be the poorer.  As long as the male half of the population is disparaged, denigrated, and infantilized, they will lack the motivation to “man up” and become responsible and accomplished men.