Anna Quindlen and hungry men
In a recent essay for Newsweek, Anna Quindlen wrote a laudatory article about a church that feeds the hungry. She noted that most of the recipients of this charity are “single men.” However, Quindlen, a liberal feminist, did not speculate on what it means about the bi-sexist nature of our society that this should be so.
Why would men be more apt to be hungry than women? Perhaps for some of the same reasons that men are more apt than women to sink to the bottom in other respects: to be the majority of the homeless, the incarcerated, the alcoholic, and the addicted. Men simply have fewer life options than women. They cannot, for the most part, choose to leave the labor market for fulltime homemaking. Most men do not have the option of making a living in the sex industry. Since they are not the ones who get pregnant and usually not the ones raising young children, they do not usually benefit from services designed to assist children that inevitably also assist women.
They may even end up on the streets or without adequate food in part because of society’s attempts to aid children. Extremely poor men may have to choose between feeding themselves or paying the child support that will (hopefully) feed their children.
Men are more likely to be victims of violence both in civilian life and in war. This means that they may be more apt to suffer the sort of damage that makes it impossible for someone to eke out even a minimal living.
Traditional sex roles advocate George Gilder calls single men “naked nomads.” They may also be hungry nomads.
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November 25th, 2007 at 8:03 am
There are a whole lot of instances I know of where unemployed, or underemployed fathers leave their houses so their wives and children can get government aid.
Because, yanno, if you bother to have an intact family, the anti-family liberals have no interest in assisting you. You chose … politically incorrectly. Suffer the consequence, then, you fascist xtian conservative.
November 25th, 2007 at 8:07 am
Presumably Quindlen didn’t ask what ’single’ meant either. “Perhaps for some of the same reasons that men are more apt than women to sink to the bottom in other respects: to be the majority of the homeless, the incarcerated, the alcoholic, and the addicted.”
But you missed the big one too, Denise. The incarcerated, the alcoholic and the addicted make up a very small %age of men. But 50% of marriages fail with divorce initiated 80% of the time by women who take them to the cleaners. There are vastly more ex-married homeless than always-single ones. And there are a huge number of ex-married men verging on the cusp of homelessness, living in one roomed apartments or in their offices. I know of one chap who lives in his office. In his office block there are three others to keep him company.
November 25th, 2007 at 9:33 am
…It seems America has put morality into the hands of women, and If Esther Vilar in her book “The manipulated male” is anywhere near correct. Our society with the new moral compass firmly in the hands of women, will become increasingly callous and even barbaric towards males!!
..Men can take quite a bit…But were also the other half of the familly/reproductive equation…So removeing the father..physically/psychologically has the unintended consequence of having a chair missing a leg,
and is falling into chaos/ crime and barbarianism!!
November 25th, 2007 at 10:28 am
honestly, sometimes i can’t figure out where men even work anymore. any medical facility will typically have 15-20 females working to 1 male and that includes the docs. dentist offices, mri. optical you name it. same goes for banks and credit unions. next time you are in one of those, check it out for yourselves. been in a taco bell or “any” fast food lately? all the managers and 3/4th of the staff are women. about the only guys you see are the ones loading/unloading or cleaning the toilets. home depot/lowes? thats a joke. 6 to 1 easily and the ones “doing” anything are the guys. the chicks just stand around and gabfest. grocery stores the same thing. i work in realestate. 20 to 1 without question. related field of title work is even more unbalanced. last time i went to a movie (about 6 months ago), every single employee in the 12 plex theater that we saw was a female (perhaps 18 workers). even my date remarked on it and she could care less about men as a group of individuals. argh!
of course, don’t bring this up at a holiday dinner with the women of your families and friends. its a mess of a country we live in, i tell ya.
i didn’t even touch on the schools for goodness sakes. and then we have the gov’met jobs. hello!! went into a dollar store yesterday. 7 hard working gals. not 1…not even 1 guy visible. my mail is delivered by a women. same at the office. even the substitutes are women. i need to stop now.
my broker is a women. all staff are women. all assistants are women. i know perhaps 20 lenders. 18 are women. the other 2 have females in charge who do all of the decision making. it never stops if you are able to think without your brains exploding.
November 25th, 2007 at 11:06 am
The Gonzman said,
There are a whole lot of instances I know of where unemployed, or underemployed fathers leave their houses so their wives and children can get government aid.
(Denise) This is a good point, Gonzman. If the man is not able to make enough to support the family — or if he is unable to make enough to make a substantial contribution to the family’s support — he may leave not because he is irresponsible but because he is actually trying to do best by them and some programs seem to assume that an intact family should not receive government support. This is a very false assumption and one that badly needs to be changed. The truth is that some men cannot even support themselves much less anyone else. Does Dad have a place in the family if he cannot contribute financially? I think Dad ought to be looked upon as much more than a wallet and laws should be changed to reflect this.
November 25th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Much more relevant, Denise.
That “Quindlen, a liberal feminist, did not speculate on what it means about the bi-sexist nature of our society that this should be so” should not be surprising since like most feminists Quindlen will go to great pains to avoid pointing out or even noticing herself how destruction that they themselves have wrought on American society, how much pain that they have caused for men and children in their quest for female supremacy.
And the Gonzman is spot-on, rather unsurprisingly in his remark that aid for FAMILIES is rather sparse, compared with aid for women and children from destroyed families.
Men are EXPECTED to work.
Men can expect in return, little or no help when they cannot or will not work for a living.
And men are at a disadvantage in seeking work since women have been declared a protected, entitled “minority” by the federal government.
Amfortas points out a critical issue – many homeless, destitute men are suffering because they were divorced and MADE destitute by their ex-wives, through the power of the state “family courts” and law enforcement.
And Anna Quindlen would undoubtedly rather gnaw off one of her breasts than admit as much.
Much better than your blog about the homosexual in denial, Denise……..
November 25th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Where are the jobs for guys?
Easy, they’re in Iraq, Afganistan and at a new theater coming to Iran. Ever notice how every single politician states “…the men and women serving our country”, but when I watch the news, aside from a very few females near the front lines the footage is all guys. And the pictures of the dead servicemen in the newspapers contain very few women why?
Recall ole Jessica whatshername, she was captured by Iraqui forces and the report that came in indicated she went down shoting an M-16 in each hand and a Rambo knofe in her teeth. After the hupe it was discovered she was in a supply convoy that got lost and the other female, the driver slammed into a light pole. The single hero in the entire engagement was some Spec-4 (male) who was running around the jeep shooting the bad guys.
His name is? My point exactly. She has since AFTER being rescued by MALE special forces written a book.
SO, that’s wehere the jobs for guys are.
November 25th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
While many men have experienced Anna Quindlen’s feminist stance from her Newsweek (feminist rag) column, one of the last bits of her that I read, years ago, gave her account of how “tired” she was of driving her boys around to sports practice as well as other afterschool arrangements.
She pointedly complained about smelling the”hormone-laden smell of boys passing through puberty” in the enclosed space of her automobile, as I recall.
All of which led me to wonder, with a fair degree of disgust whether she realizes that her boys were the result of her own lifestyle choice to become a parent.
Nobody forced her to reproduce, nobody prevented her from using one of those eleven or twelve forms of birth control available for women, yet she somehow felt obliged to procreate, then complain about how tiring it was to be a soccer mom.
Perhaps to her feminist-trained nose, girls going through puberty emitted far less objectionable scents than boys did………..
She’s one of the entitlement princesses, wrapping herself in victimhood, yet careful to not investigate those hungry men she noticed too closely, for fear of seeing a reflection of her feminist goals and objectives.
November 25th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Denise, credit where credit is due: This blog is one of your best, at least one of the best that I have had the pleasure to read.
I have been critical of you, even harshly so, when you wrote what I called “fluff” pieces.
Not this time, though…… Your choice of topic was relevant and your position was, from the perspective of men’s rights, commendable, in my opinion.
In your reply to Gonzman, you wrote “I think Dad ought to be looked upon as much more than a wallet and laws should be changed to reflect this.”
I couldn’t agree more with your opinion, of course, but do you realize that you and I had a bit of a disagreement on this point precisely vis-a-vis the topic of mandatory child support laws some weeks ago?
Are you going to write more blogs that I would consider “relevant” to men’s rights and issues? Go ahead…. surprise me!
(sigh)…… and now it seems that I must defend you against that brute Amfortas!……..;-)
November 25th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
There is no doubt that most homeless are men. I have an office “downtown.” I see homeless on a daily basis — they are nearly all men. It is very, very, very rare to see a woman. When I do see a woman, she is usually cuddled up next to a man, sleeping on the concrete. If she wasn’t with a man, she most likely wouldn’t be homeless. I am assuming that she stays with the man (who can’t get help) whereas if she left the man there would be help available to her.
I was “homeless” in the sense that I slept on the floor of my office for six years after the divorce. Funny thing is that I continued to sleep in my office even after I got my house back. Seems I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in my empty house. Even now just got up from sleeping on the floor even though I have a perfectly good bed in the room next door. I can’t really explain it.
In any event, I find this article most interesting because she is observing the truth. Although she is not acknwledging the causes, she is at least observing the truth. This perhaps is a step forward or perhaps the truth is just too obvious to ignore.
November 26th, 2007 at 7:11 am
What a bunch of whining wimps.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Ah, the shame game. How very predictable and very droll.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Denise wrote at the end of article:
“Traditional sex roles advocate George Gilder calls single men “naked nomads.” They may also be hungry nomads.”
When I was young and naive and stupid, I bought into so-called egalitarianism and even marxism in the hopes that it would make life easier for men.
Traditional sex roles make men into naked nomads. “Non-Traditional” sex roles make men into criminals and slaves. A few men became househusbands but these are token red herrings to obfuscate and direct attention away from the vast numbers of men who wound up homeless, divorced, or at best working longer hours to compete with women in the workplace and paying more in taxes for programs that benefit mostly women.
Quindlen’s motives are suspect: She wants a big socialist commie state which will CLAIM to try to help such men, but in reality it would just provide more jobs for mostly women bureaucrats. Denise is in denial about the effects of feminist goodie entitlements that wind up hurting men and even women in the long run. She has suggested (tell me if I’m wrong Denise) to expand the welfare state even further to basically make men into women simply to maintain equality between the sexes at all costs. The Swedish model.
The problem with this is that it won’t work because we have far more poor people than Sweden and rather than helping the poor, it would at best make a huge underclass similar to the former Soviet Union. To maintain the illusion of equality, Denise would risk sending us down that road.
Most women don’t want or can handle equality. It’s a sick joke.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:18 am
PolishKnight said: Denise is in denial about the effects of feminist goodie entitlements that wind up hurting men and even women in the long run. She has suggested (tell me if I’m wrong Denise) to expand the welfare state even further to basically make men into women simply to maintain equality between the sexes at all costs. The Swedish model.
(Denise) My ideal for the United States would be a laissez-faire capitalist system with a secure social safety net under everyone. That social safety net would probably be a guaranteed annual income (delivered either in cash or “in kind,” ie. benefits) similar to what I have in alimony. Men would benefit disproportionately from a more secure safety net since they are the ones most apt to slide to the very bottom. Historically, this has always been so which is why words like “bum,” “wino,” and “hobo” conjure up images of men rather than women and always have.
PolishKnight: The problem with this is that it won’t work because we have far more poor people than Sweden and rather than helping the poor, it would at best make a huge underclass similar to the former Soviet Union. To maintain the illusion of equality, Denise would risk sending us down that road.
(Denise) Again, I think you’re over-emphasizing the role of feminism. The fact that men tend to be at the very bottom pre-dates feminism and feminism is neither cause nor solution but distraction when addressing the problems of homeless and hungry men.
Part of the problem is genetic. Men tend to be more variable than women which is why men are the majority of the geniuses and idiots as well as the majority of those at the top and at the bottom. We may not be able to completely offset this tendency but we can make the bottom a place of decency rather than homelessness and humiliation. Another problem, as I’ve pointed out, is that women are attached to children at the biological level through pregnancy more than men are and tend to be attached to them after birth so that women benefit from measures designed to help children. Even before there were any government-funded programs, church and other private charities tended to direct funds toward children and to keep their mothers off of the streets as well. Finally, in very desperate situations, women can often avoid hunger and homelessness through selling sexual services which men rarely can.
It is also true that men have traditionally tended to drink more heavily than women and this is often a contributing factor toward homelessness.
I have seen some women on the streets and they tend to be disabled women, particularly psychiatrically disabled women.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Denise: “Again, I think you’re over-emphasizing the role of feminism. The fact that men tend to be at the very bottom pre-dates feminism and feminism is neither cause nor solution but distraction when addressing the problems of homeless and hungry men.”
fourthwire: I disagree. Feminism codifies and mandates (through the misandry they have institutionalized in terms of legislative and judicial activism) that men are guaranteed to be “at the bottom”.
Furthermore, their war against men ensures that ever-increasing numbers of men are DRIVEN to the bottom.
It’s YOU who UNDERESTIMATE the feminazis, Denise. And you’ve been underestimating them for quite some time now, if I’m any judge.
For example, it’s the feminazis who ensured that men are broken away from families, leaving women to benefit from measures directed towards supporting children.
If men were not driven away from their families, more of them could benefit from the measures aimed at aiding children, but which almost always amount to aiding the mother as well.
Don’t kid yourself, please. While men have had a difficult lot before the war on them began, the feminazis do their dead-level best to see that men are treated like fourth-class citizens……
November 26th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
And let’s not leave out the Big Lie that women are “the oppressed sex”. Women expect to be taken care of, put up with and provided for. Men, on the other hand, are expected to take care of themselves. Just look at those nauseating Christmas commercials where the guy is supposed to give the woman in his life a Christmas rock “for choosing him”.
As if women just sit around evaluating marriage proposals.
They are going to get to be fewer and fewer thanks to the social climate and the judicial arrangements that the feminists have arranged.
As an example of female greed and faux entitlement, take the case of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, his second wife. McCartney is offering her $50,000,000. In case anybody can’t read numbers, that fifty million dollars which, even after taxes, is a lot of money. Not for Heather though. She says that rich people are stingy and snobbish and that she needs $100,000,000 so she can do good for the world.
Heather would be starting of with $50,000,000 more than Mother Teresa who started with a bottle of aspirin and a roll of bandage.
And did a hell of a lot more good than Heather would ever do no matter how much money she had.
November 26th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Hello Denise,
Denise: My ideal for the United States would be a laissez-faire capitalist system with a secure social safety net under everyone.
This sounds a lot like the welfare state including a minimum wage as practiced in the US in the early 1970’s. It would, granted, be somewhat more fair to men than the current system but would it be “ideal?” This was a total failure since millions of working people decided they would be better off just living under welfare (guaranteed income) rather than working at menial jobs for about the same rate.
Even if the kinks could be worked out, at best it would look like the Swedish model where men would become secondary due to what you mention above. Entitlements tied to children would remain with the women. And this is the best form of “equality” that you’ve offered so far.
Denise: Even before there were any government-funded programs, church and other private charities tended to direct funds toward children and to keep their mothers off of the streets as well.
The difference being that these were _PRIVATE_ funds that were limited in scope and required women to live under the rules of the religious charity and in a culture where men had far greater domination of the workplace. It wasn’t an ENTITLEMENT. Consequently, men dominated society because the CHARITIES were unable to compensate for women’s natural, GENETIC vulnerabilities.
I don’t buy into the claim that men’s greater range of abilities due to genetics is why there are more men on the streets than women. Women’s “abilities” of the past were to simply raise a family which, pardon me for saying it this way, was within the abilities of those above idiot level.
So instead of asking women to prove their mettle and “equality” with men, you instead wish to drag men down with them (well, just slightly below them as compared to now). Yet, how is that really helping women as as individuals to achieve their very best? As I say about this situation: one step forward, two steps back.
Genetically, men will always outperform women in the workplace simply because men aren’t burdened with children. Only when children become tools for an entitlement is it some kind of “ability” and the welfare state is unsustainable and also unfair to men.
The problem with women’s equality is that it can only survive when women are given ultra special protection. Other than that, it’s obviously true.