...that the gnattering gnabobs had felt a certain vacuum in their lives while I was away on personal bizziness.

As far as I know the story of my mother and HER father's behavior was true. He was a hopeless drunk. Incest ran rampant on that side of the family, as did the alcoholism. Male and female alike.

I did spend the better portion of my life in complete and total empathy with women and women's issues. But a number of memories changed my perception of the situation, culminating in a six month commitment to learning how to build a community where men can heal their pain and their shame about being...male in a warrior, homophobic culture.

Then there were those five years of trauma resolution therapy that I thought completed my journey. Geezus Christ I suffered through that...the ego showed all its hegemonious resolve at a preconscious level there. Amazing how self-defeating the human desire to make amends can be. The epitome of thankless job. Society actually WANTS men to suffer and keep their anger at a simmer at all times. It's part of the whole warrior schtick.

So maybe I'm not done with all this yick. I can still get really annoyed at a particular class of sleeping female who always seem to end up with abusive men -- or bitching about them. They INSIST that their men stuff their feelings and keep everything well below the surface where the toxicity has more lethal effects. Then, if these women feel themselves losing control of the relationship or its direction, they pop that bubble of stress, incite a blow-up, and then point at the male like he's the crazy one, the one who should be ashamed of himself. All by himself. He's the only freak anyone need be concerned with.

Bullshit.

This game is played and replayed countless times every day in America with sometimes fatal results. And it's ALWAYS the man's fault...the women bear no responsibility in any of this...neither the deliberate manufacture of this personality structure, nor its perpetuation, nor the deliberate manipulation of it. As if men were just glorified dildos for the pleasure of women, or were made to paint women's houses and take out their trash.

My personal feeling is that we should pay women equally for the work they do in the workplace, and then we need to start calling them on all of this manipulation that they do with men and with each other. Because once women are, in fact, treated equally in all facets of social and economic life, there will be NO EXCUSE for any of this covertly damaging behavior.

I'll bet ES didn't spend 15 minutes typing those profiles up. Yeah, he's got some disturbing stuff operating just under the surface, but so do alot of men. ALOT of them. And the only way that men are EVER going to get well is if people stop condemning them for being honest about their brokenness.

I'm not advocating turning the entire social discourse into one big encounter group, but I think we should all know when to put a sock in it and listen. Don't mock people who are taking steps to heal. Feel that urge to mock others and accept that it's YOUR OWN feelings of guilt that are coming up and getting repressed that cause all of this conflict.

And, at this stage of the process, don't waste time mocking ES. No, he's not exemplary of what is possible, but he IS making the world a safer place to live in. Feelings of misogyny and violence, once publically expressed, are almost never acted on.

Men and women BOTH need to lay their cards on the proverbial table and start realizing that it's not a battle of the sexes...it's about the rich people, one more time, finding an area of culture that they can exploit to keep us busy beating up on each other instead of on THEM.