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Permalink Reply by Andrew Z on March 26, 2013 at 11:27am

I don't know if they're more fringe than they believe or if they just get more attention. Having been in California for 7 years now I can say that, yes, in San Fran and midtown Sacramento and L.A., skinny jeans and hip consciousness rule the day and that population segment is incredibly self-important.

But I live in the mountains where we grow beards, build stuff, fell trees, haul shit around in our pickups. The enormous central valley of California is rodeo country, big time. 

I personally think that while women are young and still essentially girls they like young, fashion-foward hairless boys, but at some point they grow up and see the value in a strong, masculine, capable character that while he may sing, grow whole foods, and know his wine, still pees standing up and can carry heavy stuff and fix the house.

The truth is somewhere in between Peter Parker and Conan the Barbarian. The mistake here was taking seriously a review of masculinity by the L.A. Times that dared to wax political in the same breath that suggested warrior women would be seduced by insecurity.

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Permalink Reply by Rob on March 20, 2013 at 12:36pm

Back circa the late 1960s, early 1970s, the Seattle Times hired an editor who shaved her head and weighed about 300 lbs.

One of her first acts was to demand that the publisher get rid of "the ladies pages". Those of you who can remember, that's where newspapers used to publish birth announcements, celebrity gossip, fashion news, and that sort of thing. According to the editor, women aren't interested in that sort of thing; they want to read about politics.

Roughly the same time, Susan Brownmiller and her pack of lesbian goons attacked the editor of "Ladies Home Journal", holding him prisoner and threatening him with bodily harm.

Bowdlerized version:  http://womenshistory.about.com/od/feminism/a/ladies_home_journal_si...

Instead of pressing charges against those criminals, John Mack Carter caved in on every one of their demands. To this day, LHJ as it is now called is a bastion of male-bashing.

This is true of the old media in general. Man-haters like Mary McNamara dominate the editorial boards. That's because they have friends in high places. Our central economic planners decided that women needed to have careers so that they would generate taxable transactions. They think of the rest of us as livestock that they need to manage for maximum profit.

The way to deal with misandry is to render it obsolete. Hopefully Ms. McNamara will join the unemployment lines once her old-media newspaper goes bankrupt. Her knee-jerk reactions to selective news reporting indicate that she's not intelligent enough to make it on her own. She requires hiring policies targeting people with profiles like hers, to have ever gotten where she is today. When her sugar-daddy goes bankrupt, so does she.

In the mean time, I suggest not living DOWN to anyone else's hostile, insulting opinion of you. If someone refers to you as a knuckle-dragging thug, the last thing you want to do is be exactly that ostensibly to spite her!

The ideal masculine archetype is someone who put up a heroic last stand to save the village--and be a kind, warm-hearted provider to his children. They're not "opposites". Ms. McNamara only sees the negative in masculity because that's all she looks for. By the same token I would guess she is blind to the dark side of femininity--snuffing out babies and playing the victim--because it contradicts her egocentric self-image.

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Permalink Reply by Vytautas on March 20, 2013 at 9:49pm

It's telling that the first charge you hurl against a feminist is that she doesn't look pretty.

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Permalink Reply by StaggerLee on March 20, 2013 at 2:30pm

Bad scripts and bad acting found in individual offerings does not mean that an entire genre of film has lost its appeal. What is interesting to me here is the author desiring so deeply to see the emergence of the metrosexual male that she actually takes his sociological dominance as accepted fact and then goes on to use that dreamed up situation as explanation for why two films flopped when the truth is they were destined to be DOA because they were bad movies in an artistic sense.

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Permalink Reply by Jess Levens on March 20, 2013 at 3:03pm

I just like how she applauded Don Draper, then in the next paragraph shunned triple scotch and womanizing....

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Permalink Reply by Dann Anthony on March 20, 2013 at 7:57pm

"Culture editor." It wennt wrong from there.

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Permalink Reply by Will on March 20, 2013 at 10:33pm

I can't read that link, on two different machines --

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Permalink Reply by Jack Bauer on March 21, 2013 at 8:22am

The link has two "http://"s.  Delete one.

JB

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Permalink Reply by Sam I. on March 21, 2013 at 10:01am

As JB said, a typo. My apologies, it was just sloppiness on my part.

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Permalink Reply by Will on March 21, 2013 at 10:20am

You can edit the post.

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Permalink Reply by Will on March 21, 2013 at 8:36am

All about promoting progressivism and condemning opposing isms.  Doesn't have much to do with masculinity/femininity.  I'm not sure if it's because of her priorities, or her perceptions:

It could be that she links Pope Benedict with He-Man (!) and Reagan with bodybuilding (!) because she's simply trying to denigrate the former in each pair by associating them with lightweight entertainment; stranger things have happened.  Or maybe she doesn't know there is such a thing as masculinity that isn't either cartoonish or subservient to her political views:  that bodybuilding and superhero comics never were at the core of masculinity.  Whichever way it goes, I think her political views consume so much of her perception she can't see -- or won't report on it here -- the rest of the world.  Which is a down side of literary theory.

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Permalink Reply by Michael D. Denny on March 21, 2013 at 9:19am

1. No one cares what the "culture editor" of a newspaper thinks outside of her own little circle of self appointed authorities.

2. It's only obvious that some snarky liberal feminazi leftcoast urbanite would speak in favor of a male identity that women can compete with. 

3. Shes' kind of an idiot anyway.

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