This is a guest post from Moiret Allegiere.  He has a great deal to say about our plight as men in today’s insane misandrist world. You can find his blog here.

There is nothing better, in the humble opinion of this sleepless cripple, than the satisfaction of finishing some project or other. This goes for most everyone, I would assume. And it applies to any project one could imagine, from the artistic to the mundane, from the impractical to the practical.

I will focus on the mundane and the practical in this ramble, I think, following on a bit from my piece on hobbies. That is to say, I will try to the best of my abilities, seeing as my current struggle with insomnia leaves me a bit unfocused and weirdly scatterbrained.

I was fairly pleased with the piece I did on hobbies. That I was pleased with it tend to mean that very few enjoyed it. One of those strange quirks of the realm of artistic illusion, I suppose. In this realm, the pleasure of the artist does not necessarily translate to the pleasure of the beholder. The opposite also hold true; when I find myself severely displeased with some artistic project, people tend to enjoy it. It is really strange. Not that it matters all that much.

In some way or other, it evens out. I think it is a fairly funny observation, though.

In the dark days, in the long-ago time, when I still inhabited Facebook I posted a picture of some wooden planters I had built from the leftovers of another project I had been building. My caption for these photos were something like: “I built this using primarily my beard.”

I very much enjoy working with plants, tending to them, watching them grow from seed to fruit and everything involved in this process. I also very much enjoy working with wood, and would do so much more than I currently am doing had I only the room. The picture of these wooden planters were very well received. Particularly by women on my friend-list. This is something I found to be very interesting. Especially so since a few of these women, one who commented in particular, presented themselves as ardent feminists. The feminist in question who happened to comment, commented something along the lines of “Your wife must love your handyman projects!” There is absolutely nothing wrong with this comment, of course.

Quite the contrary.

I found it incredibly interesting, however, that it came from the hands of a feminist, seeing as it is very much gendered stereotyping, is it not? Wife enjoys her husband fixing and building things around the home, while the husband enjoys the wife doing whatever it is a wife traditionally does.

I am given to believe that a lot of the differences in the choices men and women make, as well as the interests of men and women, are driven in no small way by us being differently wired biologically.

There is nothing wrong with this either, of course. Were we only able to accept this tender little factoid instead of assuming some manner of discrimination every single time these different choices and priorities, strengths and weaknesses present themselves as differences of outcome. That is to say: were we only to accept, cherish and nurture these differences for what they are instead of fighting against them at every turn.

This is not to say that one should accept every difference as a rule, nor is it to say that you either have to do this or you have to do that, are you a man or a woman. I am not a fan of rigidly enforced social rules, norms and regulations as a general rule. With exceptions, of course.

What I mean to say is that people should be free to do with their lives as they wish to do with their lives, be they male or female. That, whether people chose a traditional path or not, it should be accepted as the choice of that person and that person alone. Of course, in regards to relationships, it should be accepted as the choice of that couple or that family. It is not the place of anyone else to force someone to do something they do not wish to do. And it does not reflect well on any movement when a movement attempts to tell someone that their choices are the wrong choices. As feminism is known to do, should a woman chose something particularly traditional – or something that she wishes to do that falls outside the very narrow realm of accepted professions for a woman as feminism sees it.

Which brings me to my point in regards to the comment left by the feminist – whom I know to be a feminist, because she stated as much quite a few times. As feminists are also known to do. That point being: at the moment I showed some manner of practical ability, some manner of doing and making, the distaste feminism usually shows in regards to the traditionally masculine and the traditionally feminine – man provides and protects, woman receives and is protected (in excruciatingly simple terms – I am aware that this dynamic is far more complex than this) – evaporated and gave room for what I would dare say is some manner of admiration. And that is admiration for traditionally masculine traits, in essence: protect and provide. There is nothing wrong with this admiration. Nor is there anything wrong that men lean towards this, or take pride and enjoyment in the admiration gained from doing things of this nature. Or take pride in these kinds of projects as they are, for that matter.

This sort of behaviour from the feminist, this small and – on the surface – insignificant thing did actually significantly alter my way of thinking where gender and feminism is concerned. It fixed, cemented and set in stone my conviction that people refer to themselves as feminists by default because they have been spoon-fed this hideous lie that it is the only force working towards equality between the sexes, and that is all that it is. So why not label oneself a feminist? It’s only muh equality, ya know.

But, yeah, my scatterbrain scattered its seeds and took me in a different direction yet again. I’ll do my best to get back on track. It was the pleasures of doing things yourself I wanted to ramble about a bit, and that strange sensation of fulfilment and pride that comes from being able to take care of oneself and whatever family one may have through doing so. From small projects to big projects, it does not really matter – the satisfaction remains the same. It does, in no small way, make one feel a bit manly, a bit masculine. And this is a good thing. That feel-good testosterone fuelling that toxic and fragile masculinity; that horrible urge to protect and to provide and to be able to do things on ones own. Terrible. Just terrible.

I am of the humble opinion that doing things yourself is the best course of action to take for most things – provided one has the know-how to do so. Or the ability to learn how to do so. And most things, I believe, one can learn for oneself.

Granted, this DIY-ethos of mine may very well have trickled down from the first time punk-rock filled my soul and body with all its wondrous tricks and trance-inducing rage and riot against the establishment.

What better way to tell the establishment to fuck off than participate as little as possible in the well-trodden paths; that is to say: do as much as possible yourself and be self-reliant, self-sufficient and self-fulfilled, needing little help from the established powers-that-be and any authority left therein? Which, in the end, may very well be a naturally well-established path for men to take. Interesting, is it not?

For full disclosure – I am receiving disability from the government for my severe chronic illness.

So I am not self-reliant in any financial way.

Which is a bother and a burden to me and to my toxic and fragile masculine pride (trademarked). My main wish, or hope, or goal, if you will, is to somehow manage to make enough money on my art and writings to be able to make a living off it. I am absolutely certain that it will never be enough to live some high-and-mighty life of overabundance. But a modest living is within the realms of possibility. Through hard work and sacrifice. And, rest assured, this art and writing I do requires a lot of hard work and even more sacrifice. I have lost friends and family due to the topics I have chosen to write about, and this is no fun.

No fun at all.

No matter how much it hurts, it will be worth it in the long run, as the topics I chose to write about are incredibly important to write about, talk about and learn about. And speaking honestly is good for the self. My choices were to write honestly on these topics, or succumb to clinical insanity from bottling all these thoughts, speculations and knowledge within.

No good fight is fought or won without sacrifice. And the sacrifice is most often severe and most definitely personal.

And were I not entangled and entwined in all this god-damned gender-stuff, all this strange and peculiar culture-war-stuff, I would be writing far more on various DIY-projects. With home-brewing and plants being my main focus, as those two are what gives me the most pleasure and consumes most of my time where DIY-stuff is concerned. With woodworking and carpentry most likely being a close second, the moment I get enough space to really start going to town on projects of that nature. In a couple of years, we will be buying a small farmstead. There will be room enough then. Room to breathe, to move around. Not infected by the inevitable stress and insufferable horror of city-living.

Raising a plant from seed to fruit and then using this fruit in various home-brewed concoctions that will be stored and matured for a year, in order that it is ready to be enjoyed when next years batch is being made is one of the greatest of small pleasures in my life. Of course; foraging plays a part in this, and picking plants in the wild for use in home-brewing or in teas or for food or whatever is a fantastic endeavour to embark upon. There is so much growing out there in the wild ready to pick and use in whichever way one would like that it boggles the mind that so few actually do things of that nature. In nature. And it is done by oneself. By hand. Bit by bit and piece by piece; projects that require patience and knowledge.

Patience being one of those things that seem to be dwindling alongside our attention-spans as our civilization descends ever more into the void of immediate gratification, into the nether realms of instantaneous satisfaction in place of delayed gratification. Fuelled, of course, in no small way by the dopamine-addictions shot into the central nervous system by social media, the tyranny of the stopwatch and various similar maladies of the modern era.

Long-term projects, projects that are determined by, and reliant on, the seasons is a great way to train patience, to cultivate patience as a virtue, to teach oneself to delay gratification and push away the press and desire for immediate satisfaction. Which of course, in itself, is a long term project. For if one has first fallen into the trap and succumbed to the allure of social media likes, clicks, shares and various harbingers of immediate joy and happiness-boosts, the path away from it is long and easy to stray from.

Patience is absolutely one of those virtues which I find to be the most important and the most lacking in society as it stands today, both on an individual level and on a societal level with the immediate and the instantaneous taking precedence, becoming more important than long-term plans and goals.

And here I speak from experience.

For some years back, in the throes of medicinally induced psychosis, I fell into the claptrap of social media addiction myself – completely and utterly sleepless and with faulty wiring in my brain making me erratic, I sough solace in the immediate and ultimately hollow boost of happiness and comfort earned from virtual clicks and likes gathered from social media nonsense. It brought nothing but further despair, making me dig the grave for my shattered glass-sanity ever deeper and, more like than not, prolonged the psychosis and made the path toward stability and sanity, healing and functionality a longer and more winding path. There is neither rest nor solace to be found in social media. The technology itself is neither good nor bad, of course. It is as technology is – completely neutral and dependent upon those that wield the tools and how they act and behave. It is a damned shame, then, that people tend to not know how to use their tools. Or their brains. Because the brain is most definitely a tool that can be sharpened and put to good use, were people only able to let go of the external world and the perceived happiness it brings for a little while to seek solace and happiness within, through meditation and deep introspection. And solitude. People, by and large, tend to gather their happiness from the input of other people. And only that, social pack-animals that we are. We are scared of solitude. This neglects the other, far more permanent and important happiness, which is finding solace and comfort in oneself, being safe and secure in who one is and – hacky as it well may sound – knowing oneself completely.

This also includes knowing ones abilities and what one is able to do. Or not able to do. Which of course translates into various DIY-projects. Having the strength, the belief in oneself that one will be able to complete the task at hand is not necessarily something that comes easily and fluently. In particular in these days, where mockery is thrown about at all things traditionally considered masculine.

I don’t think it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine that traditionally masculine tasks, tools, abilities and so forth and so on is not something young men subjected to the ridicule of all things masculine on a daily basis cultivate all that easily. It is far easier to throw the traditionally masculine aside, to neglect and forget it as some shameful relic of the past than it is to cultivate it. That is to say – far easier to do on a superficial level. On a deeper level of consciousness, however, I fear that it is not all that easy. For the urges, the drive, the longing for the – for lack of a more fitting word – divine will still be there, festering in the subconscious, gnawing and biting and burning for wanting to come out and play, to be unfolded as the natural part of himself that it truly is. And all this and all that and all of the other which he has been told and taught as the gospel according to the feminist hive-mind is wrong and is bad and is poor within him lies neglected and dying for lack of nurture and sustenance, for shame and ridicule and all the clucking of the hive-mind, the buzz and the drone.

This becomes, of course, particularly confusing when he is told one thing and then shown the other. That is: the traditional expectations is still very much alive and well where men are concerned, enforced and rigidly expected by women he may wish to date and the society which surround him. Chivalry is expected. He shall still provide and he shall still protect, even as he is shamed for doing just that. He shall not, however, expect anything in return where the traditional gender-roles are concerned. He shall be enslaved to the role which he is shamed for wanting to fulfil. And she shall be free to do whatever, lest he be labelled a foul misogynist and abuser of his partner or prospective mate.

Should you be interested in some elaboration on these ideas, I delve into it in some rambling depth in my piece: ”What makes a man suicide? Rambling on traditional expectations and Suicide.”, which you can find on my blog or on YouTube or – preferably—BitChute.

I am aware that it may seem like a bit of a stretch, going from DIY to traditional expectations and shaming of all things masculine. The way I see it, it is interconnected and intertwined, which I think the comment on Facebook which I mentioned above points to directly. For feminism claims the eradication of traditional gender-what-cha-ma-call-its whilst expecting, and in no small way celebrating, the traditionally masculine… when it benefits women, and only then. Which, of course, protect and provide does. Now, obviously, a small planter built and small plants grown is not the biggest example of protect and provide. It still is an example, though, as I showcased my ability to build something that would hold something that would provide my family with food, even if it was not much food. And even if it was used for home-brewing. Home-brewing is, at the heart of it, only a week or two of fermentation removed from a reliable source of food.

And there is the thing of it, in my mind – men are drawn to these kinds of practical projects, in no small way due to their biological drive and innate desire to protect and to provide. This is not to say that men don’t do these things solely for themselves or merely for the pure enjoyment of it. That is not at all what I am speculating.

What I am speculating is that this drive to do things for oneself is a desire firmly rooted and embedded in the biology of men, a way to show and to prove that they are prime examples of their species, much like the Bowerbird and the nests he builds to impress and attract a mate. (Which is something of the most astonishing beauty; more amazing than I believe I have ever seen before.) We are really not as far separated from animals and from nature as we believe ourselves to be. Evidently so, if one but opens ones eyes and watches the behaviour of most animals and compare that with the behaviour of humanity at large. Particularly when attracting a mate. This goes for both men and women. We showcase our strengths based on what we know, deep down on a biological, reptilian-brain level, that any potential mate would desire. And we hide our flaws and weaknesses based on the same. We accentuate strength, beauty, youth, fertility, self-reliance, etc. etc. etc. in the most primitive, the most primal manner. Whilst subduing and hiding weaknesses, various faults and flaws, etc. etc. etc.

Simply put; some of the few things that separate us from the rest of the animal-kingdom is our intellect – which, more often than not, creates three new problems for every solution – and our nebulous, vapourwave-like civilizations and societies that are, as these things go, here in a flash and gone in an instant. It is built and it falls to ruin. And we believe that we have learned something the next time we rebuild. Then the process repeats.

All the while we believe ourselves separated from and, ultimately, superior to animals and to nature, never realizing that we are of the same thing.

All the while, we take things so incredibly serious, so absurdly seriously in fact that we feel some strange and peculiar need to categorize everything, to fit everything within neatly labelled boxes of this or of that. And we have the gall, the absurd arrogance to believe that smaller and smaller subcategories will fix all our problems when it, in reality, only creates more problems. For every category, every simple label and neat little box need its own sub-categories, need its own neat little labels that need their own and need their own, and so forth and so on. And every label, every category, every nefarious little box artificially creates and inflates a problem that must be solved through more labels and subcategories within subcategories.

So men doing what men tend to do, and women doing what women tend to do in general need their own labels, their own categories. And these need their own, and those need their own. On and on and on. And that must be fixed and mended in some way, because we are just as opposed to labels and categories for the simplicity that they bring as we are drawn towards them for the simplicity that they bring.

And all this instead of accepting and cherishing things the way that they are; instead of going with the flow of nature, the stream of time, the way of things as things are. Instead of accepting and celebrating, we slice, split and divide to infinity and beyond. We overcomplicate where we should just accept. Then we fight what we have made overly complicated, then we complain that things are so complicated, failing to realize that the only reason things are so complicated is because we made them so complicated in the first place.

And the solution is simple. Let people do as people do. Let people live as people wish to live. Go with what is natural. Don’t shame masculine behaviour in men. Don’t shame feminine behaviour in women. For that is the natural flow-and-glow of things; that is the river, the wind, the Tao, if you wish. Conversely – do not shame feminine behaviour in men or masculine behaviour in women. A real man does exactly what the fuck he wants. And so does a real woman. If that is traditional or not, who the fuck has any right to meddle? Or to care? Life is far too short for these small petty grievances, far too short to let it be bogged down by fighting things that come natural, by splitting, dividing, sub-dividing and so forth and so on. For, in the end, it does nothing but create more complication, more conflict, more ridiculously unnecessary time wasted that could be spent more wisely on something more constructive than fighting what is, in essence, biology and nature.

We tend to do as we tend to do, which is to say that we tend to do what we are wired to do. The differences between the sexes are evident in all animals. And humanity is no exception. We have just grown so smart that we have allowed ourselves to become arrogant in our proclaimed cleverness to the point of complete and utter stupidity.

This is not to say that one should accept everything from everyone based solely on the argument that “it is my nature that drives me to this destructive behaviour”. Of course not. That would be absolutely ridiculous. We are responsible for our own behaviours, in the end. And that includes how we treat others – man, woman and animal alike. We have grown clever enough to not run on pure instinct. This does not, however, mean that the instincts are not there. Ultimately, the main purpose of any biological organism is to reproduce before they die. Which means that, on a deeply subconscious level, most of what we do is done to attract a mate of the opposite sex.

And needlessly complicating matters does nothing but complicate matters needlessly. If there is one thing that you can count on humanity to do, it is to complicate matters to the point of absolute ridiculousness.

Just as I have done in this ramble.

God damn it.

Moiret’s Book, Howling at a Slutwalk Moon:

Vol 1 Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/107571074X
Vol 1 Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TZTPDPR
Vol 2 Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1075714184
Vol 2 Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TZR25NL
Vol 1 Illustrated Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1075717094
Vol 2 Illustrated Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1075723078