Some people who have come here off and on may be wondering why these pages are gone. I was just going to nuke them, but I felt that I owed people who come here an explanation. After a lot of thought, here is my best shot at it.
I spent the first half of my life stressing about feminism and women. I expended a lot of energy thinking about women: personally, romantically, politically, and socially. I've lost count, but let's say that it was twenty years of energy. That's a lot of my life spent stressing about one thing. I like to write, so I started writing. I analyzed and picked apart feminism and feminine behaviour. In particular, I took the analysis methods that feminists use to criticize society and turned them back on feminism itself. Feminism didn't stand up very well.
At some point along that journey I started writing online, not to get my fifteen minutes of fame—although that may have been an unconscious purpose—but to try to sort some of this out for myself: to arrive at some conclusion. That's why I eventually stopped writing here: I saw myself going in circles; there seemed to be no conclusion. I couldn't see where I was wrong, but then neither could I see myself nearing a satisfactory resolution to it all. These pages, then, weren't doing what I had wanted: they weren't resolving my obsession with the female / feminist thing. If anything, they were feeding it. I had hoped that writing here would personally benefit me by clearing my vision and liberating me from stressing about women and feminism. Instead, it had adverse effects: both personally and externally.
Along the way I got married, and I recognized that writing about how women weren't what they claimed to be wasn't helping my marriage at all. No, my wife has done nothing make me doubt what I've written here. She has even done much to re-enforce my negative opinions. Nonetheless, I'm still trying to make a go of my marriage, and I'm determined to get rid of whatever hurts rather than helps. Writing about the bad side of women was leaving me always focused on the negative; I'm not claiming that there is no negative side to women, rather that my relentless focus on that dark side wasn't helping me resolve problems in my marriage and it was having a negative effect on me, personally. I was reading my own material, too, and I found that it fostered a bitter, angry attitude toward the world, which didn't do anything to fix the problems I had discovered in society. Rather, it just made my life more painful.
As well, I'm a practising Catholic now. Yes, I can hear the groans from the few readers who still stop by here, but my reasoning is, I hope, accessible even to the non-religious. I asked myself whether having these pages here was making the world a better place or a worse place. I had to admit that the only effect I could see was to make the world a more cynical, bitter, angry place. So, I decided to take these pages down. They were never "for" readers anyway: as I explained, they were for me to work out my demons, and it didn't work. In the end, these pages just made me angry without provoking in me any constructive action, and I suspect that they did the same for others, too.
Does that mean that I think I was wrong about any of this? Do I think that what I wrote was somehow factually or logically inaccurate? It was one-sided, certainly, but then I never pretended that it was balanced, and quite clearly told critics that it was one-sided and meant to be so. It was, simply put, my opinion and only that part of my opinion that I was "working on." No, I don't think that what I wrote was technically wrong. However, it was wrong in the sense that it provided a focus for obsessive people like me to follow a path that just leads in circles, provoking bitterness and frustration without leading to a course of action. I've always believed that the whole "I'm raising others' consicousnesses" claim that you hear from self-styled "activists" is a pile of crap... a weak rationalization used by people who like to complain a lot but don't like to take constructive action and its associated risks. I realized that although it was unintentional, these pages were doing the same thing. Even if it is true that feminism's claim to seek "equality" are a crock, and women have a dark, calculating, manipulative side (which I still believe)... stressing about that for years did nothing for me but waste my time and distract me from what I could have done to make the world a better place.
So is that it? A lame explanation and then the delete key? Well, in addition to an explanation I figure that I owe people stopping here some sort of an answer. With God's help, I think I've found one. Again, for the godless I offer the following in the most accessible language I can manage.
Like most obsessions, the answer isn't "yes" or "no." In this case, it isn't, "Feminists are right, I was wrong," or "I was right and feminism is a crock," or anything on that axis between the two extremes. Like most obsessions, the answer is on another axis. The answer lies in putting the thing I was stressing about, women and feminism, in its proper context. Whether I was right or whether I was wrong still matters, but not nearly as much as I thought it did.
The answer, in the end, is that there are more important things to worry about. There are millions of people dying in Africa. There are people living in cardboard shacks in Latin America. There are refugees coming to our church with nothing but the clothes on their backs. There are gangs killing people, both directly and by dealing in life-destroying drugs. There are people who want to learn what I know. There are kids who need parents. Whether men are getting a fair shake in Canadian society is just one problem amongst many, and it's not even the most important one.
Now, that could just be a recipe for stopping stressing about one thing and starting stressing about a whole lot of other things: a simple change in obsession. Lucky for me, the Catholic Church has a suggested formula for dealing with these big problems. Even if you don't like the Church, at least listen to Mother Theresa, who voiced this same opinion: the way to change the world is through love; through personal, individual contact, one person at a time. Pick something you can deal with. Something real, something tangible, something personal. Do your best to help that one other person. Leave the rest to God. Then, when you've done what you can, look around and find another person to help. Change the world one person at a time. Focus on the immediate tangible problem, rather than waiting to act until you come up with the brilliant sistemic solution that fixes everything.
In the end I realized that all of the time I spent scribbling here could have been better spent helping just one man recover from his bitter divorce. Or, perhaps, building one home for one family in El Salvador. Or spending a year teaching school in some rural school in Africa. Or volunteering at a drug addiction centre downtown. All of that time and thought and stress that went into writing all of this stuff didn't change the world nearly as much as helping one person or one family. In that sense I'm ashamed that I wrote what was here: I could have done so much more with that time and energy and actually helped someone by it. I'm not ashamed in the sense that I think that my ideas were completely wrong-headed; I'm ashamed in the sense that it was a waste of precious time and energy. I was chasing mosquitos around a burning house. Yes, it would be nice to have eradicated the mosquitos, but the burning house matters more.
I was hung up on hypocrisy, but if I made one discovery it's that there is no sistemic solution to hypocrisy, whether it's feminist hypocrisy, liberal hypocrisy, conservative hypocrisy or Catholic hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is part of the human deal, just like lying, changing your mind, and farting. You can try to stop yourself from doing it, but the best you can do for others is simply understand the weakness and then move on to something constructive with your time, maybe even working together with others, even though they may be hypocrites, because no matter how you try, you're a hypocrite, too.
Getting rid of these pages is my attempt, then, to move on. I still think that I was sold a bill of goods in high school, back when I believed in feminist "ideals." I still think that any man who waves the feminist banner is a dupe, and any man who is waiting for feminine companionship to complete his life is in for a rude shock. I still think that in many ways women are idolized by our society and that they often use that to their own advantage--even as they claim to hate being idolized. Nonetheless, I'd rather build one house for one poor family in Mexico, or help one immigrant family, than spend another hour stressing about any of those things, and I'd rather that you did, too.