Why men are giving up on women, pt 1

Casual anti-male sadism in modern culture

Looks sweet, but isn’t

I must own, at the outset, that I am unsure how to proceed in covering this particular subject matter.

I find, in fact, that abundant snares await me at every turn.

I am setting out to write a serious piece, about what strikes me as an exceedingly grim set of circumstances. The subject, to be clear, is the state of Western womanhood today, as seen from the point of view of a man who has been prompted, against his will, to draw several unpalatable conclusions.

This is naturally a ticklish subject, and not just for the obvious reasons. Naturally, there is the issue of being accused of “misogyny.” I don’t much care if woke nitwits or otherwise disingenuous people fling this oft-heard descriptor my way; their “critique,” such as it is, being merely reactive and in no way substantial, has no value whatsoever.

However, I also know that readers of good will, especially female readers, but also male readers who love and respect women (and I dare to call myself one such man, being the father of a daughter as well as a Catholic with a special devotion to the BVM), will perhaps feel put off by the reflections I am about to share. With that in mind, I would like to emphasize that I do not record these thoughts in a spirit of flippancy (after the fashion of a stand-up comedian who tells jokes about women), or to be willfully incendiary (in the style of a disgruntled social media rabble rouser), or even as a “call to arms” (in the manner of an MRA or MGTOW manifesto) to advocate for the best interests of men.

Though my observations will likely be dismissed by some as the embittered aging “incel” (never mind the fact that I have been married for most of my life and have two grown children), but— again— I do not concern myself with petty, partisan-spirited insults. What I wish to do is to speak the truth as I have grasped it, without candy-coating any discomfiting truths, while also abstaining from needless rancor.

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Carlyon (right) mocks and insults Kent (left) in Angel Studio’s “Surprised by Oxford”

In the middle of penning this multi-voluminous missive, I decided to watch Surprised By Oxford, a recent film produced by the Christian-affiliated company Angel Studios. In it, Carolyn Weber, an angry American atheist, meets a handsome and charming young Christian man named Kent while both are enrolled at the graduate program at Oxford University in England, where CS Lewis worked as a professor long ago (hence the title's echo of Lewis's autobiography, Surprised By Joy).

The film is a fairly standard romantic comedy/drama, following that genre's various conventions, from the “meet cute” moment between the two leads, to the intermediate scenes where “sparks fly while opinions clash,” to the finale, where the two lovers finally fall into one another's arms, surrendering at last to their long-denied mutual affection.

The movie is based on a true story, but after seeing it, I find myself earnestly hoping that details were changed, because so much of the behavior of the heroine is thoroughly abominable on numerous occasions. When with Kent, Carolyn is relentlessly rude, condescending, and insulting. On one occasion, after nosily picking up his phone and reading a crude text from a friend, she becomes so annoyed that she leaves his apartment, and she snubs him because she disapproves of what the other person has written (something that Kent obviously had no control over). On this occasion, and on many others, Kent chases after Carolyn in an effort to mollify her. (Not a good look, very “beta”!)

In other scenes, she makes sport of him for being religious, for having principles concerning chastity, for being a sexless loser, for having a retrograde theology, etc. I suppose that it it is meant to be cutesy “banter,” like Benedick and Beatrice feuding flirtatiously in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, but Kent mostly takes a beating and generally pulls his punches. Unlike Benedick, who gave as good as got, Kent comes across as supremely weak.

That even a “culturally conservative” movie, geared towards a Christian audience, would neuter their romantic hero to such a degree speaks volumes about the rampant misandry saturating all sectors of contemporary culture. Contrast a milksop like Kent to Jane Austen’s Mr. Knightley, who wasn’t afraid to give Emma a tongue-lashing when her poor behavior warranted reproof.

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Let us now consider an entirely different movie-- namely, the big-budget action rom-com “The Fall Guy,” starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.

In this film, Gosling's character is a stuntman who gets very badly injured in the opening scene. Following his nearly life-ending mishap, he goes into a deep funk, disappearing from showbiz and from the life of the woman he'd been dating (Blunt). About a year later, he gets summoned to the set of a CGI sci-fi epic that Blunt is directing. He duly shows up, hoping for a chance to rekindle their interrupted relationship.

Emily Blunt sadistically tortures Ryan Gosling in “The Fall Guy”

However, when Blunt sees Gosling on the set, she immediately becomes enraged that he “ghosted her.” (One would have thought that knowing that he'd almost getting killed in a terrifying stunt-gone-wrong, and that his body and mind had been wrecked for months afterwards, might have caused her to be a bit more circumspect about taking his retreat from the world so personally, but apparently not…) In the bizarre and deeply disconcerting sequence which follows, Blunt repeatedly commands that Gosling get subjected to the same dangerous stunt, over and over again, in which he encounters an explosion at close range and gets flung headlong into a rock.

In between takes, she publicly humiliates Gosling by bragging that she has slept with tons of men since they separated (while her female colleagues on the set root her on: “you GO, girl!”, etc.). Throughout this interval of alternating physical and psychological torment (played for laughs, but of course), Gosling's character never grows exasperated, or announces that he's had enough, or stands up for himself in any way. In fact, he continues to pine for Blunt's character, in spite of the vindictive ill-treatment and patent sadism she displays.

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Were the (scarcely concealed) misandrist subtexts of Surprised By Oxford and The Fall Guy anomalous, they would be a matter of little import. Alas, these sordid depictions of women abusing men with impunity are depressingly representative of much in our culture today. What IS remarkable is that their manifest egregiousness is so little remarked upon, that they are widely seen as harmless or even “cute.”

(to be continued)

Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, Muze, and Love and Hidden Agendas, as well as the just-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.