The Invisible Man: Where Have all the Cowboys Gone? Part Deux of a Series About the Battle of the Sexes

I’ve been writing about the difficulty of modern romance, specifically talking about the debate between radical feminists and men’s rights activists. Links below:

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/2481

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/2408

I discussed how “the personal is political,” while it is true, it isn’t merely true for radical feminism. It is a basic truth that applies to all sexes. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Wasn’t that the whole point of the feminist movement to begin with?

I have two more points to make, and will likely devote a post to each, at the rate I’ve been going. They are:

2)The forces of Power desire nothing more than for us to lose our identities and become mindless automatons complying with their commands. The message of Liberal Feminism has nearly succeeded in forcing men (except for the Hegemons) into the state of passive obedience, effectively slashing possible opposition by nearly 50%.
3) The forces of Power not only don’t care about women, they actually hate women more profoundly than the men who have been silenced. And since the Hegemons wield more and more power, but face less and less opposition, the terrible suffering women have just begun to reduce, will instead intensify as the Hegemons use their power to break the spirit of women in general.

My best friends feel I go too deep into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Possibly I do, but I can’t help but feel that a great deal of the last fifty years has been orchestrated. Likely I need to defend that point more strongly, but I fear if I do that here I will get too far off topic, so I will possibly do that later. But I think it is safe to assume that both radical feminists and men’s rights activists believe the deck is deliberately stacked against them, and if the deck is deliberately stacked, there has to be a “stacker.” The radical feminists say there is a Conservative Patriarchal conspiracy, and men’s rights activists say there is a Liberal Feminist conspiracy. I won’t prove it here, but I’m going to suggest that either 1) there is no conspiracy, there are simply natural or cultural forces that are causing these situations, or 2) there is a conspiracy, but it is more behemoth than either the Liberal Feminists or the Men’s Rights movements. I am going to write under the assumption that the truth is somewhere in these two statements. I’ve already used the term, but I’m going to loosely define Hegemony as the leadership/dominance of the few richest people over the rest of the world.

For centuries the father has been accepted by the church and state to be the head of the household. And we have to be careful here. The Feminists say this is the very root of Patriarchy, that White Men amassed all the power, and became brutally oppressive of women. On the other hand, the Conservative Right paints a picture of wise fathers in the past, always doing what was right, sacrificing for the good of the family, loved and adored by their wives and children, but then (so the propaganda goes) the evil Feminists came in, dupes of the Communist party, and they overthrew this paradise by burning their bras and getting jobs and not being submissive wives.

I suggest that both these images are bullshit.

I’m going to discuss 1) that men are essentially running away from this society. 2) I’m going to explain why this is happening. 3) I’m going to explain how this serves the Hegemony. And then we will go on from there.

All my life the church has been complaining about men. “Men won’t take responsibility.” “Dead beat dads need to be held accountable.” “Men don’t grow up anymore.” “Men just won’t work hard enough to support a family anymore.”

Let’s examine what is going on with men.

We’ve already discussed how marriage is at an all-time low. According to 5degreesbranding.com, “The gender gap is the widest it has ever been in higher education — for approximately every six women enrolled in an American college or university, only four men can say the same. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and higher education institutions found themselves with 1.5 million fewer students enrolled than five years prior, 71% of that decline could be attributed to men.”

So we are not getting married, nor are we going to college. Then what are men doing?

I think this site may give us a clue as to what is going on, even if it doesn’t tell us where all the “cowboys” have gone. It has been a real eye-opener for me…

https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-mass-disappearance-of-men-from-college/

Specifically, let’s look at this quote:

““We’re more focused on money,” said Adon, 17, a senior at a public high school here. “Like, getting that paycheck, you know?” Whereas, “if I go to college, I’ve got to pay this much and take on all this debt.”

“That’s among the many reasons the number of men who go to college has for years been badly trailing the number of women who go. And the Covid-19 pandemic has abruptly thrown the ratio even more off balance.

“While enrollment in higher education overall fell 2.5 percent in the fall, or by more than 461,000 students compared to the fall of 2019, the decline among men was more than seven times as steep as the decline among women, according to an analysis of figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.”

So while it has been a trend for a while, covid has drastically accelerated that trend. I quote the above site again: ““In a sense, we have lost a generation of men to Covid-19,” said Adrian Huerta, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California who studies college-going among boys and men.”

On another note: “Meanwhile, the shootings of Black civilians by police and the resulting outrage has left some young Black and Hispanic men who are still in high school “disenfranchised almost to the point where they’re feeling like they’re invisible, that the community doesn’t value who they are, at the very time that they’re developing their own identities,” Ponjuan said.”

Hopefully, I can be forgiven for adding…us white dudes from poor families feel similarly. That almost perfectly describes my experience twenty five years ago after I lost my scholarship and become persona no grata.

So it costs too much, and the universities alienate male minorities (possibly males in general, but let’s let that point slide for now, and on the last point before I move on…

While Hechinger Report does deal with this topic, I don’t want to seem like a one-trick pony. So what if young men can’t afford college (“Um…question…how come women can afford college…aren’t they the oppressed ones?” “Shut up Tired Blogger and mind your own business!”). So what if we no longer rule the roost and feel valued for who we were? At least college is a great place to find women! More so now, right, since there are so many more to choose from?

The data here is, for a Tired Blogger, very confusing. I find site after site saying the odds are very good you will find your spouse at university. So far every site I look at agrees that the figure is 28 percent. So, 28 percent of college graduates found their spouse at university. This sounds, honestly, like great odds. Maybe I will be wrong, and college really is still a great place to find women. Why is my Spidey Sense still tingling…?

Likely I’m just not looking at the right site, but I am not finding much. Lots of “Sexual abuse is rampant in colleges,” but numbers are vague. Let me think…let me think…

https://www.onlinedivorce.com/blog/how-many-college-relationships-last/

So I look at this site, and I find a statistic that is trying to tell me something.

“But these days, only 20% of adults (18-29) are married. Almost 60% of the same age group were married in 1960.

However, the marriage rates for people with higher education have dropped less dramatically than for adults with less education. According to Pew Research data, 65% of 25-year-olds with a Bachelor’s degree tied the knot in 2014, compared to 53% of those without higher education. The gap could be partially explained by higher financial stability and earnings of college graduates required to support a family.”

I think I’m seeing a pattern here.

So let me get this straight. Marriage is at an all-time historic low…but not among college graduates. But men are at the lowest college enrollment rate vs women since…best I can figure since the college system began.

After a bit of searching, I think I’ve found the answer: I think the poor are the dynamic that is being ignored. It’s not so much about white, black, Hispanic, or even sex. It’s about rich versus poor.

https://slate.com/business/2015/06/college-graduation-rates-for-low-income-students-why-poor-kids-drop-out.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/if-you-grew-up-poor-your-college-degree-may-be-worth-less

I don’t mean to hop up and down too much here but…poverty makes college harder. You fit in less. The girls are profoundly less interested in you. You can’t afford the best computer. You have to work full or part-time (and the college itself is a full-time job unless you can get someone else to do the work for you…I wonder which socioeconomic strata can afford that?)

And if you are looking for a mate, a man has to be an economic advantage to the woman, she need not be an economic advantage to him. And the odds of a man accusing you of harassment vs a woman accusing you…In my experience, the biggest barrier was my past. I can’t speak for women, but I can tell you as a man, a college girl is absolutely not interested in your dark past. Maybe in the movies, Anastasia wants to know all about the poverty-laden childhood of Christian Gray, but in real life, I’ve only seen them interested in the past of the rich. The poor are evidently boring.

And even when you graduate, the degree that you spent two to five years of income to get (as opposed to one or fewer years for the upper class) will earn you significantly less than the rich.

Why would a poor man go to college?

I think I’ve talked enough about this point. While I haven’t truly proven anything, please entertain a suggestion. Is it possible that the wealthy have always wanted to control who is allowed into the inner circle? Is it possible the wealthy have felt for a century or two that too many of the riff-raff are making into their ranks? Historically, how has “old money” felt about the nouveau rich? Last of all, if there is some cabal running the world, wouldn’t a pandemic be a perfect opportunity to corral the poor?

So the Hegemony has the poor man right where they want us. They took C. S. Lewis statement “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful” and turned it on its head. Rather than a cautionary tale, they take 1984 and The Screwtape Letters as “how to” books. We have taken away what makes a man’s life have meaning, and then point at the dejected monster he becomes and say “See!? He deserves this!”

Ladies, I don’t write this for you to pity us. I write this to warn you. When the Hegemony has broken us, (saying they haven’t already) they will come for you next. Don’t believe me?

Well, perhaps after all I am full of crap. Right now I’m at 2496 words, so I’ll finish up in my next post. Hopefully, I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew, but my aim is to show that the Hegemony is no more pro-woman than it is pro-male. Till next time.

Roll credits.