Omega Males and the Women Who Hate Them

Submitted by fibtastic on Mon, 2010-03-29 06:31

Article here. Excerpt:

'In the Noah Baumbach movie Greenberg, out in limited release this Friday, the eponymous main character is having trouble being a man. The 41-year-old Greenberg, played by Ben Stiller, tells his 25-year-old love interest that when he was a kid he dreamed of being an astronaut. Now he can't even drive, much less pilot a shuttle. He sabotaged his career as a musician, so he's trying the old-fashioned, manly pursuit of carpentry. He pretends not to care about his new line of work—he tells his friends he's doing "nothing for a while"—yet Greenberg is seriously wounded when an ex-girlfriend tells him she doesn't remember the bed he built for her. All she recalls are his anxiety attacks.

Greenberg is pretty much the fictional representation of the masculinity crisis that Susan Faludi outlined in her 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. Men like Greenberg, Faludi argued, were led to believe as boys that they were "going to be the master of the universe and all that was in it," that they'd be astronauts conquering the final space frontier or, at the very least, that they would master a lifelong stable job and a healthy family. But by the '90s, Greenberg types found themselves "masters of nothing." The latest recession is only making it more so, as job security becomes a fantasy for many, and marriage rates plummet.'

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A small percentage of the people born into the world have the capacity if not the destiny to make of themselves what they want. I won't speculate how or why. It is clear that two people with the fundamentally same upbringings can become, with fundamentally the same opportunities, in one case very successful and happy (as he or she defines it, or as society does so) and the other, a dismal failure and miserable (likewise).

Nonetheless the vast majority of the rest of us become what we are trained to become. As I recall reading from an old WWII Navy vintage training manual entitled "The Bluejackets' Manual" that I found in a musty old bookstore when I was a teenager, it said something like this: Every once in a great while, a man is born a leader. But in all the rest of the cases, a man must be trained to lead. In order to be so trained he must be willing to take on that challenge. The Navy can train you to be a leader but only you can take the opportunity seriously and rise to the occasion. We can't do that for you.

Or words to that effect. (Of course you would never find the masculine-pronoun wording in any such manual today.)

So should it be any surprise when a concerted effort to exclude the training of men from even becoming leaders in their own lives is made and an even greater effort is made to make women leaders not just of themselves but of other things, the net result is a large number of men who are not just clueless about what they want from life and themselves but don't even know where to begin in terms of making life better for themselves?

No surprise here.

But I do have to ask myself: why do women hate omega males? Why hate someone who fundamentally does not even cross your radar in terms of him being within the realm of possibilities for dating?

I guess it's the same kind of hate people have when they look at a parking lot after a nice cluster of trees had been there. Only then, people hate those who chopped down the trees and replaced them with a parking lot. But in this case, it's like the people are hating the trees for having been chopped down. As I have said before, there's no winning for losing when playing the game of trying to please others.

If I had advice to give to omega males (or anyone else for that matter), it'd be this: to hell with what anyone else says about you. Live your life as you *want* to and shun anyone who nags or ridicules you for it. Your life is your own to make of it as you will and to be as you wish. Those who cannot or refuse to accept your decisions to be as you want to be, live as you want to live, really don't care about you. They just want you to be useful to them in some way. You don't need that grief.

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Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2010-03-29 16:50