Book Review: The Manipulated Man

Esther Vilar, the author of The Manipulated Man, once called herself a feminine feminist. This put her in opposition to the bulk of the mainstream feminist movement, which she calls masculine feminism. Reading her book The Manipulated Man will make one question why she even calls herself feminist at all, unless one's mind has broken free of the ideological restraints imposed by modern political correctness.

It's core message is that, contrary to feminism's assertions that men oppress women, the opposite is true, except that men are happy to be slaves to women - to work for them sacrificially as husbands who spend their money, labor and time on their wives, despite being themselves more intelligent, stronger, etc. Women sustain their power through a variety of manipulation tools including judicious issuance of praise, controlled supply of sex, and other society level mind games including upbringing and socialization that most men lack the self awareness to spot. She says the living standards of a wife are always better than her husband's within the same marriage.

This book will annoy almost all women who read any of it. It shines an unwelcome spotlight on the inner workings of a woman's mind pertaining to man, stripping away any veneer of justification or benefit of doubt in the process. So merciless is Esther Vilar in depicting the woman as shallow, deceptive, frivolous, bland, unintelligent, and yet cold and calculating, that one wonders how she, a woman, could have written so vitriolic a work.  Indeed she does not exempt herself from the things she says.

A few faults come to light when one considers the book was written in 1970 and therefore social dynamics have shifted: more women work today than then therefore the housewife character is rarer. Also the logical stream towards the end of the book throws one off severally, or perhaps I was getting sleepy.

However vast swathes of the text ring true and read uncomfortably for victims and perpetrators alike. Read this book for a nonconformist's inner view of what really happens in most relationships.

Rumor has it a bunch of women beat Esther Vilar up for writing it, and she receives death threats to this day. It didn't stop her from writing a sequel, The Polygamous Sex (she's unflappable!), which I plan to review someday. Watch this space.

Inflation

Someone explain why the bidding for low value women starts at a premium.

There is a manifest oversupply of gold-digging whores. They should be dirt cheap, at least before they find the gold. However the trend within that demographic is to fake it till you make it, perpetuating an incurable epidemic of inauthenticity.

They all look, act and talk the same after a while: shallow, vacuous, fake.

High value women are rare, precious, yet they appear more circumspect in their self-valuation; they appreciate other measures of value besides cash and prizes, they will strive to earn their rewards. Last to proclaim their percieved value openly, they recognize the utility of "feminine mystique" - silence is golden. Let him do what he must to figure her out for himself. Give him space to act the gentleman.

But entitlement is a paradox; the more of it there is in a woman, the less it's worth, and then you will never hear the end of it though pigs should fly.

Ghosts of Tenors Past

I've been singing in choirs since childhood, when the kids of our church recorded an audio cassette (remember those things?). Our humble family car's player did not hear the last of that tape until we were packed off to boarding school.

A two year hiatus intervened before my next involvement in a choir: high school. There the world of music unveiled its wonders to me amidst the high octane high stakes competitive music festivals.  A few members of the sister school choir we alternately had over or visited for practices occasioned irregular heart palpitations frequently. We would practice until we got fed up of it, only to get up the next day to do it all over again.

Coordinated harmonious singing is a drug, exciting and addictive, the pursuit of it via throat contortions to hit high notes and breath control to sustain long notes is as challenging as rock climbing, and the reward gratifies both the singer and their audience, in which respect singing surpasses rock climbing. To say nothing of the team spirit it both requires and strengthens. Singers form firmer alliances than footballers for this very reason and I should know as I have been both. There is no bonding ritual more permanent than  jointly fetching your last reserves of oxygen from the bottoms of your lungs to sing the exact same notes, or harmonious related notes, over the duration of a song.

I particularly remember singing our Zilizopendwa arrangement for the national music festival final. I was in one of the highest pitched voice groups, the tenor-ones, and we were on "guitar duty". That means we had to sing variations of "tunde-te-te tunde-tiri-tiri" using our vocal chords, repeatedly, to emulate guitars. Well the first day of practice it felt like straight foolishness to be singing non-actual-words, but constant repetition and daily practice knocks selfconsciousness clean out - at least until you've gotta do it in front of girls you've been spending time and pocket money and ink and postage stamps on convincing how cool you are, then the feeling of foolishness sneaks back when you go "tunde-te-te-tiritiri" in front of the whole mass of their congregated pokerfaces. But there's nothing for it, you're on stage, it's too late to weasel out now, might as well rip it up, so you locate your spine.

By the time of the final each of us tenor ones believed by sheer force of repitition that were THE lead guitar, thus we belted the gibberish out with conviction for our accompanying human instruments to garnish with makeshift bass guitars and actual lyrics. Our passion swelled exceedingly, the melody sent the whole packed hall soaring into the stratosphere and we could tell because we were the pilots. Quite soon the song became bigger than us and veered out of orbit, we had to set it free. The big tough bearded guys in bass looked like they nearly wept in ecstasy if it were not for the necessity of finishing the song....

It brought an entire KICC Conference Hall crashing down upon us because of the applause that exploded from the audience and from ourselves at the end of the song. Unforgettable.

We won that category of course.

After high school on it was a downward spiral, for though I sang here and there and in the shower occasionally it was not organized, at least not until I joined the church choir and the youth choir where we put in a respectable musical effort, but nothing I have ever participated in before or since that earthquake-inducing guitar rendition even comes close.

Demerits of Ramming the Gates

The allure of a virgin is her native purity. Having no carnal experience, knowing nothing, she is timid, self conscious and able to be taught. This necessitates in her a submissive, receptive disposition towards authority. The overall effect of such innocence is sublime, subtle, difficult to be measured or described, pleasant.

A whore on the other hand is jaded in her soul yet outwardly overconfident. The sexual experience which gives her that misplaced royal air is paradoxically the same reason she is disillusioned from having seen it all. Such incongruity ought to be fatal to logic, and is a precursor to madness, but she rationalizes at some level that the men she steers by the bridles of their own lust are bigger fools than herself - they tirelessly arm her with the weapon with which she overthrows their minds; therefore in her own eyes she is a genius. Often overplaying her hand in unguarded moments, she first discreetly then openly rebels, seeking to dictate and dominate.

In this narrow respect virginity is not, as the feminists like to declare, a social construct of the patriarchy. Leaving the physiological or anatomical aspects quite aside, virginity is an observable psychosocial phenomenon that affects the behavior of women, which can thus be determined even outside explicitly sexual contexts,  (barring the "observer effect" - a woman's knowledge that her behavior is being appraised WILL distort the researcher's findings either towards conformity with what she thinks are his expectations, or  towards absurdity.)

All that being said, DISCLAIMERS follow.

1. Before branding a lady a virgin or a whore or any ratio of the two, it is best to first analyze behavioral trends/patterns over time rather than isolated incidents. (The plural of data is NOT anecdote.)

2. Confidence does not necessarily constitute a whore nor does timidity automatically signify a virgin. Research further.

3. For purposes of this theory, the virgin-whore scale is not a binary dichotomy but more like a continuum, with complementary proportions of both aspects in any one woman. (Like the pH scale of acids and bases with perfect neutrality smack in the middle.)

4a. The psychosocial aspect of virginity can long outlive the loss of physical virginity.

4b. Physical virginity in itself is nothing to be prized if it's psychosocial benefits are nonexistent. (In plain English, true virginity begins in the mind.) Physical virginity symbolizes something much more valuable - a pristine mind.

A RIDER to the foregoing DISCLAIMER:
Many virgins there are who are "that way" merely for lack of opportunity. To rephrase, virginity as a default state is no achievement - its preservation against marauding vandals is however a worthy undertaking and a high honor.

Lastly, to each his own. Feel free to opine contrarily.

It Takes Two

Emotional vampires exist out here. They have no independent sense of absolute happiness, rather, they are only happy when others are not as happy as they are. This can be a problem when they are miserable people to start with, as is often the case. As soon as an intrinsically happy person enters their orbit, they latch onto them and suck out their joy, methodically, parasitically, ruthlessly.

On the other hand are people with savior complexes. These simple idealists seek validation in praise for their good deeds and place great faith in the strength of their virtue and the purity of their intentions. They think they add value to others' lives by simply being there. They know they are walking good luck charms. They deserve the best, and if they settle for less, they are doing someone a favor.

These two, the vampire and the saint, gravitate towards one another to their mutual misery. One gives and gives and is never satisfied with returns on investment, and the other takes and takes and is never satisfied. Their only way out of the pit is more digging. A whole pile of dysfunctional psychological schema accumulates around this basic pathology of misery, a toxic environmental eyesore, but the fear of separation dissuades both from ending the relationship, which often gets stuck in a vicious cycle of revenge, comeuppance, power play, neglect, resentment, frustration, infidelity.

And for what?