Being male makes you a force for good in the world

Sexual guilt. This is something ingrained in the modern man.

We cover it up either be acting in a thwarted, embarrassed way, or we smother it in sexual bravado, sex-addiction and misogyny.

The psycho-feminists are right in one regard – that nice-guy syndrome and misogynist ass-hole are flip-sides of the same coin.

However, these are not essential features of being male. They are not even signs of “toxic masculinity” (a phrase I used to use a lot, but won't anymore).

These two forms of neurosis are ways men negotiate their sense of sexual guilt in a world that has changed rapidly since their grandfathers and, even their fathers, were young.

Instead of evolving new ways to express wholesome sexual identity and communicate our sexual needs, men are in danger of retreating to neutered personae, or reactionary aggressiveness.

What we need is a new culture that captures the fierce power of male sexuality, but which embraces the fluidity of a culture transformed by women's empowerment.

It is essential that shame, guilt, apologetics and paranoia play no part in this new culture.

It is for this reason that I have been, and intend to be in the future, unabashedly critical of the campus feminist culture.

In the past, much of male self-esteem was based on a sense of rank and superiority over women, at least in the public sphere, in the political culture.

Now that has changed. Political and judicial equality have been achieved. What hasn't changed is the way men form their self-esteem, their sense of themselves.

A lot of people think going on about this is just “male tears”, and there is a sense in the Guardianosphere and HuffPostosphere, that “rubbing it in” for men is the solution.

Populist feminists think that they need to write books called “The End Of Men” and “Lost Boys” and drive it home to them that they no longer have the power.

As I have said before, I reject the Marxist subtext of the campus, Laurie Penny style of feminism.

Sexuality is not a class war. Gender is not a clash of economic forces.

In fact, one of the great achievements of second-wave feminism was to eradicate these factors from the arena of sexuality and gender.

If anything, we are now free to create a new form of sexuality and gender relationship, from the ground up. We have the great feminists of the past to thank for that. Men have been liberated as much as women.

We are in this together.

It is for these reasons that I wholly reject the nonsense headlines of pseudo-liberal newspapers that try to harness female grievance and turn it into a political campaign.

That is just a corporate trick. Grievance sells products. Black Lives Matter, campus feminism, and the rest of the victim-minded noise culture found on social media and the web in general, is making a lot of people very rich.

Time to ignore it.

For men, it's time to reinvent masculinity. Not to please the HuffPost feminists, but to reignite the critical, frictional and civilisational power of male sexuality.

I take as a given that men and women are biologically different. Gender is not a construction.

On that basis, I see the peculiar male challenge as this:

To harness the raw power of our primitive sexual drive in such a way that it is not only compliant with civilised culture, but also acts as a driving force for its survival.

This is what our ancestors knew. This is what the Laurie Penny-psychos of the world can never admit.

You will find no apologies for masculinity here.

I take it as a given that masculinity is not only good, but that it is a distinct, beautiful, and a crucial ingredient in unleashing the expressive power of human potential. 

Courage is your birthright!

Last week I sat with two friends of mine from school in a bar in Kensington. We talked as we normally do, about politics and ideas, sexuality and the memories of the crazy people we knew more than twenty years ago now.

I doubt if it takes long for any group of men to start talking about courage and respect, whether it's in terms of particulars or just abstractly, and that's where we ended up.

A friend of mine, who is gay and who has never been the macho type, talked a lot about his idea of courage. The older he gets, the more traditional his ideas of masculinity are, and he basically said a man must be ready to fight, to defend himself physically.

That was the high ideal of courage, and I suppose I would have to agree with him.

I love reading masculine writing, from Hemingway to Homer, there are great examples of fearless feats in the long history of western literature.

High risk masculine courage is revered, or was until very recently. All of this is for good reason. It should be obvious why.

The trouble I had is that it brought home to me that this kind of courage doesn't really speak of me.

For a while I felt ashamed of that. I haven't been tested like Achilles, or Muhammad Ali, or any number of young men who have grown up to defend themselves with their own hands.

Does that make me a coward? I felt for a few days that it did, and I felt like shit about it.

But today I went for a long walk, in one of my favourite parts of London, and I started chewing over this idea of courage.

I haven't abandoned the love of warrior energy that me and my friends were talking about. But it did occur to me that there are other kinds of courage.

This same friend, the gay one, came out to me when he was 19/20 – after knowing me for years.

I fully admit it now, I didn't take it well, and was shocked, felt something of the masculine relationship was lost (another blog post, suffice to say I am over it).

Coming out, to a friend that you know might not take it well – that's courage.

Gay men to me are the perfect examples of emotionally courageous men. What they have to go through a lesbian will never be able to imagine (get over it, it's a truth).

Since the Orlando shootings this special kind of dissenting, isolating courage, has come into sharp relief.

And there are other examples of male courage, that don't involve simple physical bravery.

Men who choose typically non-male professions – male dancers, male nurses, male child-carers and therapists. It takes courage to buck the trend, because as any man knows, masculinity is already fragile, you're not a man until you have proved yourself.

I write about all this, because I know I am not the only one who feels guilt about not being fucking James Bond.

What we forget though, is that most stories of courage and risk are designed to be unreachable fantasies. It's called catharsis.

I came to the conclusion on my long, very non-macho, walk today, that stories of great courage like The Illiad or For Whom The Bell Tolls, speak to us not just because we have excess testosterone.

They speak to us, because the great trial for a man is to be fully himself without losing his masculinity.

Masculinity depends a great deal on social standing, on virtue and leadership.

Very often the movement to be wholly authentic challenges the easy shortcuts society has designed for assessing these qualities.

If I look at the long list of male heroes I have, all of them are embodiments of a specific kind of emotional courage. Whatever physical prowess they have is really symbolic to me.

I admire and look up to men who have dared to speak unpopular opinions, who have challenged social expectations, who have chosen their own path and who have had the intuitive self-command to trust an inner voice over the external, cultural onslaught that we all get from family, school and peer groups.

I suspect that this is the real courage that men admire, and the courage we read about as boys and which still fascinates us in the cinema, is a cathartic reassurance of that inner, emotional courage we know we need.

Being a man is not about living up to social expectations – from women, family or anyone else.

It's something we have to discover and grasp with both hands, and very often the shocking truth about who we are does not fit in with the cultural memes we have grown up around.

It takes courage to discover your masculinity. It takes courage to choose it too.

To be a man, is to live with courage, even when the truth about your masculinity terrifies you.

So it's time we gave ourselves a break. Courage is an emotion, and we all have it.

Feels good, doesn't it?  

I'm baa--aack!! The return of the Brando masculinity

Marlon Brando represents a sophisticated masculinity

I am reigniting this blog.

It is time. For about four years I wrote consistently about male issues, and I explored areas of my own mind and subconscious and sexuality that I didn't know were burning away inside me.

I don't know why I stopped. The sneering, hipsterish campus feminists had something to do with it. The PC, affronted look people gave me when they realised what I write, as if I had somehow betrayed them just by offering a perspective they refused to see as legitimate.

What is that view? Well, it's not a dogma, or a world view.

It's simply what happens to be in my head at any given time, on the topic of masculinity and male sexuality.

Marlon Brando is the patron saint of this blog, and he will continue to be. Brando embodies my vision of a sophisticated but no less powerful and fearless masculinity.

The difference between the Brando masculinity and every other mode of masculinity I have come across, is that the fearlessness is internal as much as external.

Brando had emotional range. It's not just about “letting the men cry too”.

It's about what emotional experiences the culture allows men to explore without stigma. And the dimensionality of those experiences.

Brando blew it all away, and for a brief moment, masculinity looked like it had an alternative path of evolution. I really believe that, and I believe history will prove me right about Brando.

But another theme of this blog has always been the vested interest in limiting the emotional range of masculinity.

The feminists talk big about breaking down barriers. But it is my experience of the kinds of women that preach about female emancipation, that they are the most reactionary and conservative when it comes to masculinity.

It's one thing to emancipate women. Quite another thing to challenge traditional masculinity.

It's very trendy to be feminist. It's very unacceptable to apply the same critique to masculinity.

There's a lot to lose. Feminists like to challenge what it suits them to challenge. But change masculinity, then the whole house of cards falls down.

That's why these same women are so resistant to it. They will say all the right things, but how they act, and how they treat the men around them, tells a different story.

But unlike in the past, I am not going to waste time trying to persuade stale, middle-class, boring women about my view of masculinity.

There are plenty of women out there who get it. Plenty of women who genuinely love men. Not just male cultural forms, but they really love men, and they refuse to see their insecurities as the product of some class oppression.

They don't believe that we live in a rape culture (ridiculous idea) and they don't believe that men are some higher class that exploit females as a resource.

But like I said, I am not going to try and persuade anyone. None of what I write is an invitation for your opinion.

You have had too much scope to voice your opinion. It's time to shut up for a minute.

This blog will focus on celebrating masculinity – the kind of masculinity that I want to see in the world, and which does not pander to the safe, bourgeoisie tropes that allow it to sit alongside the campus, rape-obsessed feminists that I am not allowed to criticise.

So this is just a shot across the bow.

Daddy's back, and he's smarter, more pissed off and more relentless than he's ever been.

Men's mother-need is a cause for understanding not shaming

Men spend most of their time trying to deal with the need for a mother. You either become a dick, and cut off your need for intimacy with a kind of rage and abusive materialism in your approach to sexuality, or you become a dependent, someone completely at the mercy of your need for emotional fulfilment in women. Misogyny and 'playing nice' are the same thing at the root – a way of distracting oneself from feeling helpless in the face of feminine sexuality.

As with all things in life, a balance between the two is needed. Not for the good of women, but for the good of ourselves. The aim, and it is not small feat, is to recognise the primal nature of the mother-need. It isn't going away. It is basic, and it is essential to us. The need for the mother is a yearning for the source.

The shame about the mother-need is a popular issue in post-feminist culture. It is often relayed to a man that 'he just needs his mummy' or 'I am not your mother' etc. etc.. And this is done with a sneer and scorning smirk. However, the motivation behind such accusations should not be taken as some neutral intellectual barb. It is a form of manipulation.

The truth is, whether we like it or not, we as men function under the pressure of having to negotiate a number subconscious desires and needs which we feel threaten to overwhelm us. One is the need for the mother, and one is the procreant urge for sex. 

 

The need for the mother should be nothing to be ashamed of. The need for the mother, when repressed, is what creates sexual abuse, fear, power-games and dishonesty. Contrary to what people like to think, shaming men for the mother-need does not force them to 'mature' or 'become a man'. Rather, it requires them to bury the most natural desire of all, an already complex urge that becomes quickly toxic if it is not integrated into the personality.

The mother-need is an ambivalent thing. It captures the true nature of love – where hate, passion, need, desire to be independent, helplessness and power all converge in one attachment. If the complexity and emotional conflicts of this attachment are not faced up to and recognised and, as I say, integrated on a conscious level, relationships with women are going to be an impossibility for men.

The Freudian desire is not as relevant as the simple conflict of need and desire for release. This conflict holds men in a double bind for most of their lives, and a failure to face up to it imprisons them in either blind co-dependence, or an aggressive and often misogynistic aloneness.

Post-feminism's attack on men, the denigration of male sexual urges, and the shaming of the male mother-need and its use as a form of social manipulation are threatening to bring about deeper and deeper crises for the culture of masculinity as a whole.

Why does this happen? Power. Sexual politics uses the language of feminism, and liberation, and equality, but actually it entrenches the worst of so-called patriarchal values.

What is more, it puts up ever widening barriers to the reform and evolution of masculine psychology. It deepens the hold of the original disease of masculine abusive tendencies towards women, rather than liberating them. And it does this in the name of feminism. This is Orwellian, and grossly dangerous.

The sad fact is that for all the posturing of third-wave feminism, what has happened is nothing more than a false revolution. True reform of masculine pathologies, and this blog recognises these as being pathologies and abusive to women, requires a wholesale revolution in sexual awareness. That means helping men to understand and face up to the true power of of the mother-need. Sarcastic, debonaire whining about men's dependency on their mothers is not going to help this. It is, in fact, part of a wider attack on masculinity, entrenching repressive tendencies in the male mind.

Surely the great feminist revolutionaries would want us to reform male culture, rather than entrench the abuses in the name of silly sexual power games and gender politics?

Letter to a young masculinist: You're young, you're handsome and you know what you are. Fuck everyone else

Hero: Brando doesn't care about your opinion

Masculinity is difficult to define. And actually it can't be defined. But we all know it when we see it. 

As I write this, it is only now that I see the beginnings of who I am as a man. 

I always knew my own mind. I always knew my own values, though I struggled to articulate them. What's changed? Not my idea of who I am, but my experience of who I am. You go through enough, and you test yourself enough, suffer enough, to realise who you are. I have been pleasantly surprised by how much the person I now experience myself to be, is the person I always thought myself to be when I was younger. 

The big thing here is not thinking of yourself as enlightened. It is just knowing that the needs you have are natural needs, and in the acceptance of those needs you find a kind of peace. Maybe peace sounds to self-congratulating. What I mean is... rest. 

Whatever the truth is, I still need a mummy-figure sometimes, and maybe I will always feel a certain amount of lack in that regard. But what's different is that I don't attack myself for needing those things now.

Other people, they think they know things but they don't. The think they see the truth about you but they don't. As soon as you show that you need something, that you lack something, and that you harbour a desire to get that something from them, they either treat you with suspicion, or they delude themselves into thinking they have power over you, even if that power is simply just being able to 'see' you.

These people are idiots. They know nothing of the Socratic maxim, 'the wisest man is is he who knows he is not wise.' They think phrases like that are just cool things to say, or that they pertain only to the natural sciences. Of course this is not true at all, they pertain mostly to the sciences and explorations of the mind. They become most relevant in human relationships.

It is a factor of our generation that we mistake familiarity with knowledge, fanatical connoisseurism with wisdom. What our generation does not realise is that true wisdom is the ability to be able to empty the mind of its own concepts. To empty the mind of its cleverness.

As Sun Tzu says in the art of war, he who knows the enemy but does not know himself, will win half of his life's battles. He who knows himself, but knows nothing of his enemy, will lose at least half of his life's battles. He who knows his enemies, and knows himself, is indestructible.

So what people say about you is irrelevant. And I do mean completely and utterly irrelevant. Those who like to espouse on other people's lives will think I am being ignorant. Or that I am advocating a kind of arrogance. I am not. None of us needs a lecture on seeing things from other people's perspectives. What we do need to cultivate, however, is the habit of trusting our own natures, the in-built wisdom of our perceptions, and putting a greater trust in those things than external, second-hand reflections.

Contrary to what the self-congratulating types think, this is not ego. Ego, as the Bhagavad Gita tells us, is attachment to external identifications of the self. The quickest way to root out the narcissistic tendency, is not abnegate the self. Rather, it is to acknowledge, with compassion and perspective, the instincts and desires that have become the basis of our negativity.

Yes, you may be vulnerable. Yes, as a man, you will feel shame about your vulnerability. It is the hardest thing, however, to be able to accept your vulnerability. Other men will hear it and avoid you for it. Women, sadly, will mistake it for immaturity. Most people, will use it against you. 

Even if they won't admit it, they will feel better about themselves in witness of your vulnerabilities. 

 

The task is to be able to practice self-acceptance in such a way that does not condone a shameful rigidity and lack of growth, but which also doesn't increase the shame of our wounds by masking those vulnerabilities.

The tough love here, is that you can't get help from other people. You ARE alone in this. However, it is in that aloneness that you cultivate the confidence to be yourself. Alone does not mean cut off, or alienated. On the contrary, the chances of resonant relationships forming in your life greatly increase when you are comfortable with yourself.

It can't be emphasised enough though, that this doesn't mean some false, zen-like ideal of 'being at peace with yourself.' No. It's about being at peace with your unrest. Resting in your turmoil. Stop looking for the elusive place of permanent poise. Stop trying to 'be a man.' Be a boy. Be at peace with that within yourself. Be needy, be volatile, be angry and whiny. Once we become able to live with these things within ourselves, and not deny the power they have over us, then they affect our external relationships less and less.

Do you come over as a dick-head to others? Fine. Do women pass you up because they can't associate emotional wounds with their socialised ideas of what a man is? So what. The test of moral integrity does not lie in external judgement. People enjoy seeing the worst in you, because it makes them feel better about themselves. It's a quick fix, isn't it. Feel superior, rather than heal. It's the easy way out.

These days I don't care if people think I am weak. Or if they think I am infantile. I don't care if their opinions of me are that of a self-aggrandising judge. These people appoint themselves.

Nor do I care what women think. Not really. I like to feel desired, and I like to be wanted. I am not over my neediness. But I can honestly say now that what's more important to me is my inner space, the validation of those needs, rather than their fulfilment. Whether those needs are met or not is no longer my chief concern. The truth is, we all know that as we get older, many of our needs will NEVER be met.

I feel no need now to either force those needs on others, not hide them from others. I don't care if I never get laid again. Do you think I am lying? I am not. The validation of my sexuality and my sexual needs is more important to me than their fulfilment. I have my methods! What matters to me is the standards to which I hold myself. And being a human being, with the privileges of modernity and Western heritage, I am perfectly capable of holding myself to account.

I don't need a woman to tell me how much of a man I am. I don't need society to tell me whether I am a 'good' person. And I certainly don't need the full-time censorious chorus of snippety opinions to validate my existence for me.

I have learned the hard way, that my own experience is enough. Right or wrong, in the validation of that experience, I find my growth. 

This is a non-normative truth. I am not talking about morals. I am talking about virtue. I am talking about empowerment, and without empowerment, morals, opinions and academic or back-slapping chit-chat aren't worth a damn.

I know who I am. And who am I? I am boy with a mother-complex. I am man with a sexual appetite big enough for three grown men. I am not very clever, I am outright dumb when it comes to analytical intelligence. I am very intuitive. I am very impatient. I am aggressive. I can be fanatical and judgemental, and I can be thoughtlessly overbearing in conversation. I am lazy, and spoilt and self-obsessed. I can be idealistic to the point of irritating pretension. Above all of that, I am blind to my weaknesses, and therefore arrogant.

I have some decent qualities too, I think. But so what. The point is that I am a real pain in the ass, and the more so as I get older. I don't care though, because I accept those things. 

That doesn't mean I condone it or justify it. Just that I see myself for what I am, and I don't want someone else's desire for me to mask my nasty parts. In my nasty parts I find a necessary honesty with myself. I know that whatever the truth is I am trying my best, not just to get along, but to improve – to grow. And that's enough for me. 
 

Those of you who want to stand in judgement of me - as men in a competitive way, or as women in a sexual-selection kind of way – can kiss my cock. Fuck you.

The sexual rage of Elliot Rodgers and the dangers of reductionist explanations

 John Milton’s Paradise Lost is one of the greatly misunderstood works of English literature, and theological poetry. His epic, an attempt to 'justify the ways of God to man’, is thought to be an apologist manifesto of misogyny and Eve-hating, a perfect example of blaming women and reducing them to inferior, and infantile animals driven by emotional contradictions that subvert the masculine rationality of humanity. Now to deny that Milton’s classic has repeated examples of misogyny would be dangerously naive.

However, what is equally destructive is to turn that same puritanism towards male sexuality entirely. More often than not, the very word ‘misogyny’ is used as a by-word of hate and resentment against all forms of male sexuality. What men and women alike don’t want to admit is that male sexuality is driven by dark forces. These dark forces are extremely necessary forces. They require hate, they require a blood-lust, they require rage and jealousy, in order to be fully expressed. Violence and hate are at the very heart of male sexuality, just as much as love, compassion, sensuality and tenderness.

What constitutes an empowered man is not the extent to which he has denied the drives and the hidden forces of his psychic needs, the narcissism and the pride and the rage, but the extent to which he has looked these realities in the face and transcended them. However, unlike the hippy-dippy angel-lovers of modern New Age religions, to transcend does not mean denial. To transcend one must experience the darkness before one sees the light. In fact, without the darkness, there is no light.

This brings us back to Milton.  The point of Paradise Lost is to show the role of the devil in the Kingdom of God, and the role of evil rebel in the human heart. The very glory of the good, the supremacy of God’s love and compassion and his power, can only be understood in relation to the works of the devil. The sacred needs the profane, and this is the war of the heavens.

It is not beyond Milton to have understood that this war in heaven was really the war of the human psyche, the continual battle between self-destruction and survival, the need to destroy what one loves because what one loves leaves us feeling powerless.

At the beginning of Book III of the poem, God sees Satan flee hell on his journey the Garden of Eden where he intends to corrupt mankind and thus corrupt the rule of heaven. Rather than interfere God tells his ‘Onley Begotten Son’ why he allows Satan to trespass, and how he predicts The Fall. However, God sees the grande plan, that man must fall in order that he can show his grace, forgiveness and mercy.

‘Onely begotten Son, seest thou what rage
Transports our adversarie, whom no bounds
Prescrib'd, no barrs of Hell, nor all the chains
Heapt on him there, nor yet the main Abyss
Wide interrupt can hold; so bent he seems
On desparate reveng, that shall redound
Upon his own rebellious head. And now
Through all restraint broke loose he wings his way
Not farr off Heav'n, in the Precincts of light,
Directly towards the new created World,
And Man there plac't, with purpose to assay
If him by force he can destroy, or worse,
By some false guile pervert; and shall pervert
For man will heark'n to his glozing lyes,
And easily transgress the sole Command,
Sole pledge of his obedience: So will fall,
Hee and his faithless Progenie: whose fault?
Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of mee
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all th' Ethereal Powers [ 100 ]
And Spirits, both them who stood and them who faild;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have givn sincere
Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love,
Where onely what they needs must do, appeard,
Not what they would? what praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When Will and Reason (Reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoild,
Made passive both, had servd necessitie,
Not mee. They therefore as to right belongd,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate,
As if predestination over-rul'd
Thir will, dispos'd by absolute Decree
Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed
Thir own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less prov'd certain unforeknown.
So without least impulse or shadow of Fate,
Or aught by me immutablie foreseen,
They trespass, Authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge and what they choose; for so
I formd them free, and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change
Thir nature, and revoke the high Decree
Unchangeable, Eternal, which ordain'd
Thir freedom, they themselves ordain'd thir fall.
The first sort by thir own suggestion fell,
Self-tempted, self-deprav'd: Man falls deceiv'd
By the other first: Man therefore shall find grace,
The other none: in Mercy and Justice both,
Through Heav'n and Earth, so shall my glorie excel,
But Mercy first and last shall brightest shine.’

Man has free will, and God cannot interfere. But the issue goes deeper than that. It is only through a confrontation with the devil, it is only by looking the beast in the eye, that we understand the glory of God.
To put it in more secular terms, for us as humans to fully experience the fulfilment of our potential - moral, political, sexual - we have to be prepared to face the truth of violent natures. Our abilities to subvert primal desires through moral purpose, do not come from our ability to deny Satan, but our ability to confront him and beat him. The weakness of our natures is what enlightens us to the strength of our potential. Milton’s epic poem is a pre-Freudian allegory for the struggles of the human heart. What Milton tell us is not that we must revert to the Garden of Eden, but through our sins, we come to know the true face of God.

‘Man shall not quite be lost, but sav'd who will,
Yet not of will in him, but grace in me
Freely voutsaft; once more I will renew
His lapsed powers, though forfeit and enthrall'd
By sin to foul exorbitant desires;
Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand
On even ground against his mortal foe,
By me upheld, that he may know how frail
His fall'n condition is, and to me ow
All his deliv'rance, and to none but me.
Some I have chosen of peculiar grace
Elect above the rest; so is my will:
The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warnd
Thir sinful state, and to appease betimes
Th' incensed Deitie while offerd grace
Invites; for I will cleer thir senses dark,
What may suffice, and soft'n stonie hearts
To pray, repent, and bring obedience due.
To Prayer, repentance, and obedience due,
Though but endevord with sincere intent,
Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eye not shut.
And I will place within them as a guide
My Umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear,
Light after light well us'd they shall attain,
And to the end persisting, safe arrive.’

Milton’s work then is concerned chiefly with the theological ‘problem of evil.’ However, this problem, and its solution, is often misunderstood. If evil exists, and tragedy is the most common human experience, why doesn’t God interfere? The answer is, as Milton’s God tells us, free will. But rather than being a Christian cop out, the principle of free will is an important piece of the psychological puzzle. Beauty, truth, moral goodness, and the triumph of the rational will are meaningless unless they are in some sense achieved. That is why God stands by and watches the tragedy of the The Fall unfold. For love to be worth anything it must be freely chosen, actively pursued. Otherwise we are not truly human.

We are not entitled to our integrity, to the moral boundaries of our true selves. Just as Milton knew all too well that a country cannot be ruled through entitlement. We earn the right to be ourselves, by conquering the inner darkness, by looking deeply into it and seeing the light of our own powers not to be consumed by it. If we fail to confront Satan, he will haunt us and flag us down. Our inner rage and narcissism, if it is not faced, will dominate our actions.

Milton’s message reflects the injunctions of Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. In Chapter 11, Krishna explains that Arjuna will find God not by shying away from his duty, or from hiding behind false morality. He must be who he is, a warrior, and face the terrors of battle and sanctify the life that is before him. Only then will he understand the true nature of God. God, or truth, or Self, are not things other than life. We do not transcend and fulfill ourselves by denying our reality, but facing it head on. Only then will the power of bondage through the senses release its grip on us. But we must face it:

‘Thou seest Me as Time who kills, Time who brings all to doom,
The Slayer Time, Ancient of Days, come hither to consume;
Excepting thee, of all these hosts of hostile chiefs arrayed,
There shines not one shall leave alive the battlefield! Dismayed
No longer be! Arise! obtain renown! destroy thy foes!
Fight for the kingdom waiting thee when thou hast vanquished those.
By Me they fall—not thee! the stroke of death is dealt them now,
Even as they stand thus gallantly; My instrument art thou!
Strike, strong-armed Prince! at Drona! at Bhishma strike! deal death
To Karna, Jyadratha; stay all this warlike breath!
’Tis I who bid them perish! Thou wilt but slay the slain.
Fight! they must fall, and thou must live, victor upon this plain!’

In her book Men In Love, feminist author Nancy Friday shows that the sexual desire men have for women is one driven by rage. it is in the confrontation with that rage that the love is expressed. Men she insists, begin their sexual lives in a state of conflict and that conflict is played out throughout the rest of their erotic encounters.

Friday describes her own shock at reading case studies she had requested of men, men who gave meticulous accounts of their most depraved fantasies and repressed desires. Many of these men were polite and and extremely grateful to be heard, but what she read was disturbing, violent and far more aggressive than the female fantasies she had come across in similar research.

‘....my research tells me that men’s love of women is often greater than their love of self. They worship women’s beauty to the unhealthy exclusion of of their own narcissistic needs. They discredit the male body as aesthetically displeasing, only to be labeled bestial when they adore women’s bodies too openly and enthusiastically.’

She later adds on the same page: ‘Rape or force may be the most popular theme in female fantasy (though I have yet to meet a woman who wouldn’t run a mile from a real rapist), but men’s fantasies of overpowering women against their will are the exception. A closer reading will usually reveal that a woman is a volunteer or has given her consent first. Even in the grimmest S&M fantasy...pain or humiliation is usually not the goal.’

So what Friday found in her research was that the majority of men develop their sexualities in a bizarre paradox of the subconscious. Yes they are looking for their mother. Yes, they want power over women, and yes that power is often violent and comes from a violent place. They fear women, and they fear that power. But rape is not the gal. Submission, perhaps, but it is a loving submission, a submission that admits to love and gives into to a need for him.

The conflict is between a desire to emulate and remain loyal to his mother, but at the same time express and fulfill his sexual identity which he intuitively knows very early on, makes him separate from the mother. He needs the love of the mother, but the sexual needs, and his own selfish sexual desires, draw him away from the mother. Thus, the sexual experience of men is inherently complex and conflicted.

Men either seek a reconciliation of their internal conflicts, or they give in to them. They reject the power of the mother entirely and misogyny turns into a monstrous character trait, rather than a necessary process of psychological growth.

Nancy Friday’s own opinion, though not scientific but authoritative, is that violent rage is part of the male psyche in a very necessary way. Men need to hate women as much as they love women, but they must grow through this process. They must experience this ‘healthy misogyny’ if you like, in order to come out the other a well-rounded and powerful sexual creature. The masculine, procreant urge is violent because sexuality itself is violent. Life is violent. But it needn’t be cruel and savage. When the rage and the love, the sacred and the profane are fused into a healthy and balanced male psyche what you get is creativity and passion and a form of sexual disciplined that avoids repressive tendencies. The ultimate outcome is a love of women that runs deep in the DNA of the man.

‘Men may love women, but they are in a rage with them, too.  I believe it is a triumph of the human psyche that out of this contradiction, a new form of emotion emerges, one so human it is unknown to animals even one step lower in the evolutionary scale: passion.’

The rage that Elliot Rodger felt, whether men will admit it or not, was something that all men go through to a varying degree. I would imagine too that there is a female equivalent. On this score the extreme misandrist camp are correct. It is a prevalent emotion. However, like rape fantasies and suicide ideation, and other more extreme violent dreams and internally visualised scenarios, such rage and aggression does not represent a threat. What was lacking in Elliot Rodgers was a regulatory power. The natural rage against the other, was not tempered by a healthy input of counter-narratives. This was a vulnerable man.

It is convenient for some people to further their own extremist ideology to make dangerous reductions about Rodgers, and male sexuality in general. We are an adolescent culture and we like simplistic explanations, especially when it comes to the complexities and contradictions in the masculine experience.

Instead of playing victim, we should examine the infantile way in which we allow men to develop and explore their natural urges, and the ways in which licentious cultures like ours actually deepen violent repression, rather than let men develop in a way that they can trust their own needs. Misogyny is a society-wide problem, but it is not an ideology, and nor is it a form of terrorism. To make these kinds of reductions is extremist and ultimately unhelpful. The best help we can be, as men and as a society, is to examine more deeply and more aggressively, and fearlessly, the truth about male ambivalence and the role misogyny plays in our sexual development. To do so is not to be an apologist for anyone, but to actively take responsibility for the way that masculinity, and everything that comes with it, impacts the society at large.

                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Beauty's beast: How female fantasy models destroy masculine sexuality

For men, the messaging around our sexuality comes chiefly through neglect, scorn and ridicule. The closest most men get to embracing their sexuality is through a primitive and puerile comedy, similar to toilet humour. It is rare to find male sexuality being dealt with as a good in itself, in public culture. The simple facts about masculine needs, their compulsive and creative power, are never embraced on their own terms. It is always either a joke, violent or repressed. Masculinity is rarely celebrated, and if it is, it is done in a base and materialist way, so as to implicitly represent a negative truth about being male.

Women are taught to fear masculinity, and men are as well. If fear does not work then satire and reduction to the lowest common denominator will suffice. So-called feminist sites like Jezebel are not revolutionary. In fact, what they serve to do is entrench conservative ignorance about male sexuality, and preserve cultural repressions, the very repressiveness that supports abusive expressions of male power.

Distorted: Overly-idealised feminine forms of beauty have as much of a destructive impact on the sexuality of men as they do on that women 

Anyone with so much as a fleeting acquaintance with post-Freudian psychology will know and accept that repression itself serves a moral purpose. In particular, sexual repression is the surest way of controlling populations. Once you educate whole swathes of the population that their natural urges and their needs are inherently evil, as religion and bourgeois morality does, then you create a whole set of monsters in the human subconscious that themselves act as hidden forms of agency.

In word, you can control people. And you can do so without them knowing it. The advertising industry is often criticised for its exploitation of the female body. And rightly so. Much of western culture involves a systematic crime against women in telling them that their bodies are not their own. Far from liberating women, the post feminist, or corporate-feminist culture in fact reaffirms the Christian conservative notion that a woman’s body is the property of a man, or more accurately, society as a whole.

However, as with most abuses of liberation rhetoric in our wonderfully post-ironic, smugness-addicted social mess we call contemporary culture, women’s freedom has become a Trojan horse of repression and materialist subjugation. Thinking that she has been given freedom of choice and opportunities for sexual expression, modern woman is manipulated to volunteer her own sexual slavery, all the while believing that somehow she has been liberated, and empowered.

We only need to take a glance at modern women’s magazines to see this in action. Beauty in the industrial age has taken on rather fascistic characteristics. Symmetry, blandness and most importantly, conveyor belt sameness, mean that only women with a certain kind of tabula rasa quality in their features are considered beautiful. The industry of beauty celebrates and sells itself as spear-heading the women’s liberation movement in the technological age, but its central ideology of beauty resembles the manufacturing policy of Henry Ford more than it does the politics of the Suffragettes.

But the advertising industry, and indeed much of popular culture, works in a similar way for men. In Men and Sex, by clinical psychologist Bernard Zilbergeld, the role of female fantasy figures is shown to have negative affects not just on women, but on masculine sexuality as well. Zilbergeld writes:

‘The women in fantasyland are all gorgeous and perfectly formed. A glance at the cartoons in any issue of Playboy or Penthouse makes the point succinctly: the women men desire are beautiful and flawlessly built; women who do not fit this mold are ridiculed.

‘Average looking women, those whose breasts sag or whose skin is not the model-conforming smooth, creamy, silky - such women rarely appear in the world of sexual make-believe. It is a world where no one ages and no one wrinkles and no one loses her jutting breasts....

‘Feminists and other women have long complained that men are too interested in physical appearance, paying more attention to 'tits and ass’ than to intelligence of women, and being uninterested in women who do not fit the current standard of physical perfection. ‘There is more than a bit of truth in this for men have learned that sex is something one has only with young and beautiful women. Given all the brainwashing we have been subjected to it is understandable that we should pay so much attention to physical attributes and that middle-aged men should prefer to go out with much younger women.’

Setting aside the obvious feminist issues brought up by these destructive forms of fantasy, what we often fail to focus on is the negative impact that reaffirming achievable female sexual fantasy figures has on men. By presenting men, and educating them to accept, ridiculous fantasy objects as the mainstream ideal of sexuality in general, men are cut off from their own sexual intuitions. In fact, I am sure you, dear reader, find it rather cute that a term like ‘male sexual intuition’ should be used at all. The idea is so foreign to us, not because such a thing does not exist, but because male sexuality is treated with contempt in our culture. Anything that does not conform to the standard Jock-like idiocy of Hollywood memes around masculinity is simply overlooked. At best it is treated with suspicion, and thought to be ‘typical maleness’ in disguise.

As well cutting men off from their sexual intuitions, standardised fantasy models also create more repression and erode the individuality of a man’s experience of his sexuality. If a man does not experience himself as having a unique and nuanced sexuality that is intimately related to expressions of his personality in general, then how can we expect a man to treat a woman any differently?

Standaridised, conveyor-belt fantasy models of beauty serve an economic purpose. In corporate culture, the great enemy is true individuality. Billions of pounds are spent on usurping the agency of the consumer in order to keep people buying new products. If you can control sexuality, you can control a person’s agency. Vacuous beauty not only makes for a standard ideal by which people are made to feel inadequate and therefore buy products that promise to ‘transform’ them into that very standard, it also represses people sufficiently enough that their very agency is overthrown - their natural desires are buried and become hidden forces, very often becoming rage-powered and violent.

Again to quote Zilbergeld’s book: 'The problem with the sexual fantasy model that we are discussing is that it is not just a fantasy,  one that can be turned on or off at will and has little influence on behaviour. It is rather the description of how our sexual world ‘should be’ and it effects our thinking, feeling and behaviour. Many of us are unaware that the model is indeed a fantasy, one that has little to do with what is possible or desirable for human beings. Since we take the script for the way things ought to be, we measure ourselves by it, striving to match its standards and feeling badly when we don’t. Instead of asking whether the model is physiologically feasible, personally satisfying or enhancing of ourselves and our relationships, we ask what is wrong with us for not being able to meet its standards. And that is precisely why this model is destructive.’