Oppression

an email i wrote to a friend, and some notes on my ideas.

since i've started a family, i'm all the more convinced that the nuclear family is a unit of discipline. yet my attempts to get away from it resulted in greater misery. i've been turning over this book idea in my mind, "how to be a man in the 21st century", and the idea is that a morally rigorous life is more compelling than a sloppy one. but i don't want to write a book about morals. i want to write a book about how the "post" feminist world is in some ways oppressing and screwing women even more than they were before, and that men have to evolve to create a better world. and some alchemy of buddhist thought and moral rigor, along with the emotional growth of embracing adulthood and accepting the devilishness of the world, are kind of the key ingredients to making the world better (starting at home). i know you must have been thinking similar thoughts. it feels like the world is ready for this book, the world needs this book. should we write it? it needs to be like Justice, by michael j sandal, in that it takes difficult concepts and rigorously but pleasantly presents them to a lay audience.

i'm sending you this email because this thread goes through my head all the time and the project of turning it into an outline for the book is going to be long. i also know that you must have been thinking about some of the same problems, if not in the same way. i'm curious what you think. the rule of the game is that if you want to talk about it, you don't have to write out anything long or particularly well thought out, the goal instead is to just get a dialog going that is longer than 140 characters but short enough that it can be tapped out quickly in the brief 5 minutes of solitude you may get in your day. i'll probably use a blog to capture my mind barfs to somewhere more permanent than email.

Notes on my book, How to be a Man in the 21st century West.

• Women have all the responsibility of men, plus they are responsible for child-raising. It's become more acceptable for successful, educated women to opt to be house wives for extended periods, but it is still bullshit. Our world and economy has made it harder than ever for families to succeed, especially families where a reasonable standard of living is sought after. 
• The family is a productive unit, a node of bio-power to coerce disciplined, productive work units out of the bourgeoise. The bourgeoise is convinced that they enjoy freedom because they are not in jail, despite the fact that their lives are structured in the exact same way as a jail. Jail exists to convince the working people that they are not in one.  
• Actually raising a family requires more labor than 2 people can provide. Certainly non-North American and probably non-Western families are closer-knit geographically and emotionally and raise children together. Ok ok I'm not saying we all need to live in primitive villages, but the point is that the nuclear family is a post-war invention designed to isolate and discipline and it doesn't work.
• I'm tired of conservatives owning the narrative of family and child-raising, which can be summarized as fear and loathing. 
• I'm equally tired of the liberal bourgeoise narrative of fear and achievement, as it really is just a nicer version of the conservative narrative of fear and punishment. 
• Men are increasingly immersed in a mindless world of juvenilia as the balance of desirable men and women grows increasingly out of whack. 
• Taking on lives of moral conduct is viewed as succumbing to "oppression", while those who do embrace some moral life often do so with the express intent of oppressing others
• The narrative of hyper-sexualized hedonism compels people to search for ever-higher levels of chemical stimulation, whether from orgasm or pharmaceutical drugs to squash the pain of disappointment and loss.
• Moral conduct itself is viewed as old fashioned, the narrative of self-directed lives free from contraints is a fantasy peddled by the baby boomers, and we see how that is working out for them. People need boundaries and constraints and communities to function properly. They also need rituals and release. We've dismantled all these things (or they've hyper-ossified).