"Hello, my name is Eric and I'm a recovering male."

I love the monologue "The Recovering Male" from Eric Bogosian's "Pounding Nails into the Floor with My Head." (Read its here.) (Get the CD.) Key line: "I'm just a man with a penis. And for that I'm sorry."

I'm reading those 3 1/2 pages this morning, because I don't have the patience to watch 8+ minutes of this. Both have the same theme, and both make me laugh, but one is brilliant, compressed writing by an artist, and the other is blather by men who are not artists and who are not trying to be funny. Also, reading that monologue does not cause a mind-rottting music soundtrack to play.

I did watch a couple minutes of that video, which I know you were talking about in the Flower Bird Café. There is a violence against women in this world that is different from the violence against men in ways that are important to address, but that video is too awful to focus us on what matters. There's way too much new-age nonsense about "energy." That's patent idiocy, and a man trying to suck up to women by blabbing about energy... needs some better suck-up lines.

But even if you extract the crap music and the new-age quasi-religion, you've got men apologizing for manliness. But they are not apologizing for their own manliness. They are purporting to apologize for other men, whom they are demonizing. Really what you've got are the insufficiently manly men, who think that by insulting other men, they will get the women.

But they will not get the women, because they are insufficiently manly. And it's a particularly pussy move to group all the manly men together for the purposes of trying to promote unmanly men. The violent, hateful, abusive men belong in a class by themselves, and to group them with all the other men who are more manly than you is self-serving and specious.

Now, take your bogus energy and get out of here.