The latest from Matt Walsh was sent to me by about a dozen people, so I must blog on it. He is responding to “Rebecca” who interpreted some of his previous “man up” posts as a license to blame men for everything that followed from her own poor decisions.

Excerpt:

[…]'[M]en’ aren’t the problem, Rebecca. It’s you. You’re the one. You’re the common denominator. You’re to blame. There has been one person conspicuously involved in all of Rebecca’s romantic flops, and her name is Rebecca. Maybe you should take a look at her for a change.

Frankly, it seems that when you refer to ‘men’ you aren’t even talking about a group of actual human beings. ‘Men’ have become an abstract idea, a conceptual manifestation of everything that’s wrong with your life. If men exist at all in your world, they exist only as vehicles for your misery.

Consider that, for ritual purification, the Ancient Syrians used to cast a goat out into the wastelands. The literal scapegoat was supposed to carry the sins of the town into the nether regions, where it and its spiritual luggage would die and decay. What you’ve done with men is just a more efficient, animal-friendly version of this strategy. You’ve saddled them with your personal baggage and sent them to the desert to perish. You’ve made a scapegoat of the entire gender.

Let’s borrow a recent example from your own life.

You went on a date with a man who, you claim, had no manners. Maybe that’s true, or maybe you’re so desperate to find fault in every male on the planet that he was fated to be labeled a boorish dolt no matter what he did or said. You also mention that he ‘couldn’t look you in the eyes and have a conversation.’ Maybe. Maybe he was nervous. Maybe he has social anxieties. Maybe he tried to talk to you but he sensed your stand-offish, snobbish demeanor and it made him uncomfortable. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as you say, or maybe he actually was a big, awkward, uncouth, stammering warthog. You seem to have come to latter conclusion very early on in the evening, yet you still chose to go back to his place.

What does that say about you, Rebecca? Look in the mirror and ask yourself what it says aboutyou that you came back to this man’s house even though you were apparently disgusted by him.

That’s a choice you made. You. Not him. You.

He continued to fumble and falter well into the night, committing the unconscionable sin of revealing himself to be a fan of the X-Men film franchise. The uncultured, lethargic lout only succeeded in finding more ways to repulse and offend you as time wore on, yet you were never put off enough to decline the invitation to stay over.

Here’s the thing, Rebecca: I was always told that if I want to attract a good woman, I have to be a good man. Admittedly, I managed to attract a good woman despite being a horribly flawed and sinful man, but there is still wisdom in this idea even if it doesn’t always hold true. The point is, you have to work on improving yourself if you want to end up with a man who is equally intent on improving himself.

Not all men are desperate, drooling oafs straight out of some cliched beer commercial. There are plenty of hardworking, engaging, dependable, morally upright men out there, but they won’t come knocking on your door just because you’ve announced that you’re a ‘woman who deserves it.’

Rebecca, you’re willing to essentially typecast a man because he plays with video games and watches superhero movies, but have you ever considered that you might be the victim of similar assumptions because you sleep with dudes you just met? Of course, ‘victim’ isn’t the right word. You’ve earned the assumptions. I’m not saying that you ought to be alone for the rest of your life, but I am pointing out that you are eager to jump to profound conclusions about a man based on the most superficial of flaws, without stopping to consider what conclusions might be drawn about you based on slightly more significant character traits.

Then again, this guy was willing to sleep with you on the first date just as you were with him. He’s not innocent in the transaction, and neither are you. It sounds like, right now, you two are evenly matched. You look at him and see yourself, and you hate him for it.

We hear all of the handwringing about the decline of masculinity and the disappearance of ‘real men,’ yet very little is ever said about the corresponding deterioration of femininity. It’s strange that you purport to care about ‘manners and chivalry’ yet your email was vulgar and overly aggressive, at times coming across like dialogue out of a middle school boys’ locker room.

‘P*ssy’? Really? A 32-year-old woman using a word like that to describe men while simultaneously complaining that men aren’t courteous? I bet the ones who are courteous just get written off as ‘p*ssies’ anyway, so it’s a lose-lose. A lose-lose for you, especially, because in the end you’re the only one who has to pay for your extremely unappealing attitude.

By your account, you’ve had two broken engagements, and both were the fault of the men who were allegedly ‘full of sh*t.’ Maybe they were. But it is, from a mathematical perspective, almost impossible for one human being to have two failed engagements without being at least partially to blame. In fact, in the history of human relationships, only a very, very, very tiny fraction of them have ever soured or splintered due completely to the actions and choices of one person. It’s been my experience, both personally and as a student of history and an observer of people (as creepy as that sounds), that fractured and strained relationships can rarely be broken down into a clear Bad Person vs Good Person dichotomy. And, on the rare occasion when things are actually that simple, it’s just as likely to be Bad Woman vs Good Guy as it is to be Bad Guy vs Good Woman.

In short, Rebecca, I’m playing the odds here and assuming that you were probably not the victim of both spoiled engagements, just as you are not the victim of your other fruitless romantic endeavors. You are a participant, a catalyst, a cause.

I have, in my life, seen my share of women who, under the influence of feminism, undertake incredibly unwise and selfish courses of action and then blame the predictable consequences on bad men. In fact, it seems to be very popular. Women make poor choices with men, they complain to other women about how they are victims. You can see it with problems like abortion, cohabitation, divorce, infertility, adultery – lots of cases where women choose bad men, and then blame men when things go wrong. I guess I would recommend that men carefully read Matt’s post and then be on the lookout for women who act selfishly, don’t choose good men, neglect the needs of good men, and then try to play the victim and blame men. Don’t be the guy who ends up married to a woman like that. I don’t think it’s an accident that this woman had premarital sexual experience, either.

UPDATE: I think this post dovetails nicely with my previous post about the one factor that most causes relationships to succeed or fail.