Saturday 14th of April, 2001
I spent almost all day (did go and do the gym thing, so I'm a quite-good boy) on the Internet. In the morning, a chance link led me to http://www.askmen.com/ , a "men's magazine" site. You can learn a lot there, most of it misogynistic and the rest of it, somehow, missing the point of life. Curiously, they have a double agenda - on the one hand, there is Doc Love forever selling his System (surely the model for Frank "T.J." Mackey in Magnolia - ironically, Cruise seems to be their ideal man, although I've a feeling that they, like Baldrick, file "Irony" with "Woody" and "Tinny"), and his contention that in order to be successful with women you have to have the utmost contempt for them. It's an interesting theory.
On the other hand, they seem to be saying "we will tell you what women want, so that you can give them what they want and spend more time with more women, whilst at the same time maintaining your hatred of them". Which is an unusual way to go about it. They're very keen on after-shave, as far as I can tell.
In many ways they are the precise mirror-image of women's magazines, which also combine a dislike of the opposite sex (although they tend to be patronising and dismissive rather than contemptuous and hate-filled) with a fascination with them ("How to get your man and how to keep him!"). I'd say they were made for each other.
In the afternoon, a chance Robert Fripp link led me to The Martian Bachelor Science Page, a different kettle of a similar fish, combining observation, men's-rights, anti-feminism, pro-men and out and out misogyny in one package (not all at the same time). There's an awful lot there, some of it makes sense, some of it makes less sense, some of it is there simply for the sake of the rant. I spend a long time looking at the pages and other pages that are linked from it.
Well, the rest of the day, actually.