Thursday 19 February 2009

Anglobitch Domination of the Media & the Anorexia Myth


What luck for rulers, that men do not thinkAdolf Hitler

Frankly, if we were to discuss the whole range of injustice and persecution endured by American men at the hands of Anglo feminists, ten thousand pages would not suffice. This is why we will address an issue that encapsulates the over-valuation of women and devaluation of men in the United States: anorexia.

We are ceaselessly harangued by feminist propaganda into thinking that anorexia:

• Is a mass, mainstream medical problem.
• Is a feminist, or woman’s issue
• Affects all women equally

Firstly, eating disorders are not a mass, mainstream medical problem. Nearly all sufferers are white and middle or upper class. Given that the upper classes constitute such a numerically tiny group, one would expect the actual numbers of those who die of anorexia to be insignificant. In fact, less than 100 women die every year from anorexia in the United States (Hoff-Sommers: 1995). Nearly all of these fatalities are upper middle class, with a substantial proportion attending private school. Feminists routinely exaggerate the number of victims from the sublime (200 000 for Gloria Steinem) to the ridiculous (1, 000 000 for Andrea Dworkin).

The US CDC (Nation Centre for Injury Prevention and Control) shows that 30, 622 Americans took their lives in 2001 (DCD 2004). Three quarters of these were men. If we extend the actual figures back thirty years, it is likely that somewhat less than 3000 American women have died of anorexia in that time. Simply multiplying the 2001 suicide figures by 30 gives us a hypothetical figure of 918, 660 fatalities – a little rough and ready, perhaps, but certainly a lot more than 3000. By any comparison, suicide is clearly a far more pressing health problem than anorexia in the United States. Even far more American women kill themselves than die of eating disorders. Yet feminist writings and the media in general inflate their incidence to gargantuan, hallucinatory proportions. By contrast, the largely male problem of suicide receives negligible coverage, if any.

What does this tell us about contemporary America? Above all, it proves Anglo-American feminists will obfuscate, fantasize and lie about issues and have their lies proliferated by an American media that reflexively devalues males while setting women on pedestals. Secondly, it confirms that feminism is an elitist movement that focuses on the obscure experiences of middle class females while remaining indifferent to issues pertinent to ‘ordinary’ women – not least, the suicides of fathers, sons and partners. Thirdly, the sufferings of men are largely ignored compared to (in this case, imaginary) female travails, even when the former massively outweigh the latter in significance and scope.

Eating disorders are, like intercourse, not a feminist issue at all. They are clearly a class issue. Anglo-American feminists love to address the topic with hefty gobbets of existential claptrap about fat, sexuality and control issues. However, the blunt fact that virtually everyone who dies from the condition hails from a tiny sliver of the population, namely the high-achieving, highly-educated upper-middle class, wrests the whole issue from the clammy paws of doctrinaire feminism. It would seem to any impartial observer that Anglo-American feminism, with its Calvinist values and offhand elitism might well be the true cause of eating disorders rather than the senescent, catch-all ogre of ‘patriarchy’ (whatever that is). Anorexia has burgeoned alongside feminism with lock-step precision. As an intrinsically bourgeois, elitist movement dominated by the upper-middle class, Anglo-American feminism has infiltrated all media aimed at females with images of bone-thin patrician women in attitudes of invulnerable competence.

Given that the vast majority of women are emphatically not patrician or invulnerable, nor are ever likely to be, this Stalinist smorgasbord of Calvinist imagery is bound to cause them enormous damage. But patriarchy does not manufacture these impossible imagos – they are the handiwork of elite Anglo-American feminists. Prior to the unleashing of feminism, the average woman never compared herself to elite females. Anglo feminism has forced ordinary women to compare themselves against impossible standards, with predictably damaging results. In a novel study of Anorexia, Bordo and Heywood (2004) argue that Western (read Anglo-Saxon) culture harbours fantastical conceptions of the body as an immortal entity resistant to decay and death, alongside a schizoid hatred of the body’s autonomous processes (ageing, desire and so forth). This seems a much more fecund foundation for any discussion of anorexia than patriarchy, as it incorporates the all-important factor of culture.

Anorexia is never described as a cultural issue, though it should be. Anglo-Saxon culture tacitly views physical pleasures (including sex and food) as sinful. This is not a universal phenomenon: in many cultures food is associated with celebration and excess physical weight with maternal competence. One reason why almost all sufferers are from the upper middle class is that the Anglo-Saxon elite best represent Anglo-American values – namely repression of bodily drives. Working class women seldom exhibit anorexic symptoms as they are too remote from the ‘received’ Anglo-Saxon culture to practise its core themes: repression and self-mortification. The enormous quantities of ink expended on anorexia relate directly to its status as an elite, female illness. Suicide receives very little treatment by comparison, though there are far, far more suicides than anorexics. This relates directly to the fact that suicide mostly involves poor males: and Anglo-Saxon culture views young, poor males as far more expendable than young elite females.

Monday 2 February 2009

Rambo: Pan-Anglosphere Archetype of Male Alienation

In Rambo: First Blood - the first, definitive Rambo movie - we see how Anglo-American society relates to men – especially white, working class men. In the first first scenes, Vietnam veteran John Rambo is seen approaching a small town.

From the first, Rambo is made to feel unwelcome by the town’s Police Chief. Soon, he is imprisoned and savagely beaten for virtually no reason and, after a daring escape, hunted down by the authorities like an animal.


If these themes were mere fantasy, they would not have stroked the deep chord they obviously did. Throughout the Anglo-American world, John Rambo became an instant, sympathetic archetype for working class, disenfranchised males. Though expressing a distinctly American experience, Rambo's impact was universal.


Rambo immediately became a mythopoietic icon of Anglo-American culture because he summates post-feminist male experience. His utter rejection by society expresses the offhand vilification of the Anglo-American male. Rambo is a fallen war hero: someone who is ‘pulled out of the hat’ when his martial valour is needed, then vilified when his immediate utility is exhausted. This ‘redundant workhorse’ syndrome characterises Anglo-American attitudes to men in general. Unwelcome in the normal course of things, men are tolerated only as a necessary evil occasionally needed as expendable cannon fodder. Moreover, the offhand contempt and even hatred aimed at Rambo by the institutions of social authority (Courts, the Police and politicians) perfectly illustrates Anglo-American attitudes to men.


The events in Rambo coincided with the Hungerford massacre in the UK, wherein a sexually, economically and socially disenfranchised male called Michael Ryan stalked the streets of an idyllic English village, shooting sixteen people down with a variety of firearms before blowing his own head off in the secondary school he had attended as a boy.

Predictably, media hacks and apologetic psychologists argued that Rambo had directly inspired the massacre. However, it is far more plausible that the movie provided an imago of identification for festering resentments that already existed in Ryan’s psyche, legitimating his grievances and easing any last inhibition to their violent expiation. Most discussion focussed narrowly on the space between Ryan’s ears, omitting the all-important post-feminist factors that might lead an Anglo-American working class male to such behaviour: sexual disenfranchisement; economic exclusion; constant vilification in the media; discrimination before the law. All of these themes are addressed in Rambo, which explains the character’s iconic power and resonance.


It is fallacious to consider myth as a dead, ossified cultural construct. Mythic narratives emerge continually from the cultural nexus. Indeed, the contemporary era must be considered especially rich in myth, since the electronic media and the Internet are ubiquitous conceptual oceans across which symbols and narratives collide with unprecedented fecundity. We live in a culture abounding with legendary riches. And John Rambo is one of the most resonant archetypal characters to have emerged in recent years: his plight highlights the ‘male crisis’ currently afflicting men across the Anglosphere.