Déception

We have yet to reach the end of the first month of the new year, and already, I am embracing my geeky side :-)

Yes, that didn't take long, did it...

'Déception' is the French word for 'disappointment'.
Having tackled the etymology of 'pity' and 'mercy' to death, I now turn my geeky attentions to 'disappointment'.

I get it. The French see 'disappointment' as a kind of deception.
This feels about right. I see their point.
In fact, I might go so far as to declare that disappointment feels sometimes like a lance has been driven though one's heart.
Exaggeration? Of course!
But we all resort to exaggeration when we feel pain, don't we...

*

Endurance sports have always been one of my geeky 'things'. There have been times when I have done some nutty stuff whilst under the influence of 'two-wheel craze'.
:-)

To this day, I own a bike which costs more than my old banger of a car. (No joke).

One of my (as yet unfulfilled) aspirations is to do a stage of the Tour de France just once before I die. Preferably a mountain stage :-)
When the Tour came to Britain for the first time a few years ago, I was there...

I wonder - is one of my beefs against feminism due to my dismay at the slogan 'A fish needs a bicycle like....'??

This fish rather digs a bike, lol.
(I know, I know, they were talking about something else...)


My love of cycling has always been there, as far back as I can remember.
But it didn't quite 'go into orbit' until one man's meteoric rise to fame.

*

Around the time that Lance Armstrong won his first Tour, I knew a group of men. They were mostly young (under 40), mostly bald, sick all the time, ghostly pale and were missing a double-appendage that most men would rather keep.

Yep, what these men all had in common was testicular cancer. And at the time I encountered them, they were all intra- or post-chemo.

They were courageous and exquisitely interesting men. With a (dark) sense of humour to boot. Dealing with a condition that ensures you lose your fertility is not funny. But these men were hell-bent on forcing one another to confront their predicament in the most brutal way possible.

In a manner similar to Black men calling each other by a prohibitive word that no-one else is allowed to use, these men called each other names I cannot possibly repeat on this blog...
The fact that one of the chemotherapy regimes (for some of them) had the acronym 'CHOP' did not help matters in this regard. You get the idea...

Testicular cancer is one of the best prognosis male cancers. But like its cruel cousin, breast cancer, it hurts the sufferer where it hurts.
Some of these men were as young as 18. 'Cryotechnology' mitigates the hopelessness of infertility somewhat, I imagine, but knowing you would never become a parent the 'natural' way has its own unique drawbacks. Of that I am pretty sure...



I had not much in common with these men, of course.
Except for a shared love of cycling with (some of) them.

So when a young man (just like them) who had lost his 'crown jewels' (just like them) showed the whole world that he had the biggest ones of all when he won the most prestigious prize of one of the most prestigious sports in the universe, again and again, seven times, these men found a new inspiration that medical technology, in the form of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery could never offer them.

Quite honestly, to these men, and to the rest of us mortal 'groupies' in the world of cycling, Mr. Armstrong was a demi-god.
His book 'It's not about the bike' takes pride of place on my bookshelf.




So, of course, many people are going to be disappointed with this week's news.
Many of us will be feeling deceived right about now.


But, hey, that's life. We'll get over it, somehow, someday.
Perhaps it will help to think of him as simply a young man who beat cancer.

And, perhaps we might even trust that the next guy who gets to wear the 'maillot jaune' at the end of a gruelling three weeks in July, will have won it on merit, and in honour, without the aid of performance-enhancing drugs...



As ever, on this blog, my thoughts always come to rest on the SMP, no matter how far away from this topic I began :-)

I think one of the problems of the current SMP is that everybody is simply disappointed. Everyone feels cheated by the other.

There is a 'marriage strike' because men feel they have been duped out of the option of having at least a 'critical mass' of marriageable women to choose from.
Women, even the few marriageable ones left, feel disappointed by the men who seem to have passed judgment on all women.



It all feels like one big hoax.

 

Blood, sweat and tears?

Or just... drugs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PS: I like this video, so I keep it. But I just notice the lyrics are rather...um... colourful in places. Excuse this, please! 

 

 

 

 

 

MGTOW - good or bad for women?

There are three phrases that strike fear into the hearts of modern marriage-minded women.
'Marriage on the decline', 'MGTOW' (Men going their own way), 'Marriage strike'.

A woman's greatest fear is abandonment. Or worse, never to have been approached in the first place.
Feminism encourages women to hide this fear.
Some do it well.
But here-in lies the problem: a fear will always remain as a fear unless it is resolved.

A quirk of Nature results in the following observations:
A man does not need a woman. He is capable of being a solitary entity his whole life, and he won't care.
His work/passion/hobby is his primary focus.

A woman needs people around her. The most efficient way to increase the entourage who share her DNA is to team up with a man. So technically, a woman needs a man.

A man's greatest physical need is sexual fulfilment (according to Dr Kevin Lehman). A man's greatest social need is his freedom.
These two needs are in direct conflict with each other. Marriage (read: a woman) satisfies one at the expense of the other.
But in the old days, men often chose marriage and hoped for the best with the other need. Sometimes it worked out well.
Other times it did not.

Then feminism separated 'woman' from 'marriage'.

All of a sudden, a man could eat his cake and have it too. A win-win situation!
Being a logical being, he did.

A woman's natural reaction to MGTOW would be something like this:
"Oh no, don't go! Stay!"

Because MGTOW reduces the number of men in her 'parade'.
Because she is a good communicator and needs people around her to communicate with.
But it is a counterproductive reaction.

Because MGTOW is a natural part of manhood. It is a form of 'Initiation'.

In some cultures in the world, initiation practices are still encouraged. Men have their obligatory journey into the forest and women have their preparation rites for womanhood.
There are still remnants of the original deal in modern culture, but usually in a religious context, such as 'Bar Mitzvah' and 'Bat Mitzvah' and 'Confirmation'.

But in the real deal, a boy on the cusp of manhood  would be forcibly taken literally from his bed at night and dumped into dangerous terrain, usually by older men from the same village.

His mother and sisters would cry out, "Oh no, don't take him away" but to no avail.

Because the village elders knew that a man who had not been initiated was not a man.
He posed a risk to the whole village if he did not possess the skills of manhood. He might as well be one of the women, but without her function, either. So this man was useful to all concerned.

The women would protest, of course. But they knew thay had to let the boy go. Because, assuming he survived the rigors of initiation, he would come back a fully-fledged man, a useful member of society.
If he never came back, they would miss him. But he had not made the cut. It was a stigma for that family. They were better off in the long run without him.

There are many false imitations of initiation in today's society. Inner city gangs are a prime example.

Under feminism, many men lost their male 'elders'. Because he was taken away from them by a dominant matriarch. There was no-one to raid their homes in the middle of the night and yank them from their beds into the terrifying unknown, so necessary for the development of their sense of masculine self.

MGTOW might be one of the natural retorts to this male crisis: the lack of initiation.

The motivation for MGTOW in this present clime is certainly not for the purposes of benefiting women.

But in a roundabout way, it could be the best thing a man can do.
It could be the best demonstration of 'inner Game'.

Let the initiation begin.

The heroes will return to the village, with a lot to offer the village.
The women and children and of course the elders will be there to welcome them back to the fold.

The others will not come back.

Women only want heroes on their parade.