Tom Matlack proved right about something

UPDATE: In light of the comment from Mr. Matlack below,  I should have said that I have zero respect for the argument that he and others have made that men as a group need to change or improve rather than attacking him personally as I did. I made a personal attack on him because he was, until today, an anonymous figure on the internet. I regret this and apologize to him for it but will not change what I have said below because I want my indiscretion to be here so everyone can see it.

I should say at the outset that I have zero respect for Tom Matlack and the Good Men Project and I would not normally bother myself with an argument that broke out between him and Hugo Schwyzer coming up on two years ago now. Matlack vs Schwyzer is the intellectual equivalent of the David Bowie vs Lou Reed fistfight; may the least pathetic man win. In this case, however, it is interesting because the least pathetic man settled on something important.

Matlack, the worst sort of whiny, self-hating pussy boy you can imagine, actually turned and snarled at the way our culture runs men down a while ago and wrote a piece called "Being a Dude is a Good Thing", which, even though it amounts to damning men with faint praise, stirred up the fruit loop section of the feminist orchestra including Hugo Schwyzer and Amanda Marcotte.

In the essay, Matlack says a lot of nonsense and one really important thing. The important this is This:

My unscientific theory is from a fundamental disconnect between men and women at the micro level. Men know women are different. They think differently, they express emotion differently, they are motivated by different things, they think about sex differently, and they use a very different vocabulary.

Why can’t women accept men for who they really are? Is a good man more like a woman or more truly masculine?

The fundamental point here is right. Men are, on average, different from women. The "on average" is important. American men, for example, are taller on average than Japanese men but that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be some seven-foot Japanese men. We are different from women and we are different in ways that are worth understanding rather than hating.

This was too much for Hugo. I don't want to go through all the details of the argument, in a large part because there wasn't one. Marcotte, for example, attacked Matlack on grounds of style not substance. What is interesting is what Schwyzer has revealed in his recent overwrought confessions.He was asked, "Was your work designed to please a certain school of feminism but never a realistic model for men?"

Well, yes. I think primarily I wrote for women. I designed my writing primarily for women. One of the things that I figured out is the best way to get attention from women was not to describe women’s own experience to them because they found that patronizing and offensive. Instead it was to appear to challenge other men, to turn other men into the kind of boyfriend material, father material, or husband material that women so desperately wanted. Most women have a lot of disappointment in men. And I very deliberately want to go to the place where that disappointment lives and present to them a counter-narrative of something possible.

Notice how he shifts ground. First of all, Schwyzer is asked if he tailored his writing to feminist perceptions and he immediately generalizes that to say he wrote for "women", as if "feminists" and "women" were identical groups. Second, notice how he takes it for granted that most women are disappointed in men and that he was simply giving them hope that better men were possible. Combine that with the fact that 62 percent of women say they aren't feminists and you can begin to see the light shining through the fog. Schwyzer is admitting that the only way to make a living as a male feminist is to tailor your writing to the fantasies of bitter feminists who are unable to successfully relate to men.

Now, let's flip this around and notice that Schwyzer is implicitly admitting that men wouldn't read this crap. Well yes! I mean if eve Pussy Boy Matlack got his back up, you can just imagine how any man with a thimble full of self respect would respond.