18 March 2008

"Self-hating Jew" revisited

This, generally stupid term got an expanded meaning with a revolutionary new groundwork laid by no other than the well-known marriage expert Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in his JP article Self-hating Spitzer. The article starts with an admonition:

Dr. Laura Schlesinger has a penchant for inane and knee-jerk moralizing.
I really don't know who the esteemed Dr. Laura Schlesinger is, but she has obviously pissed off our learned rabbi. And the rest of the article is - yes, you guessed correctly - lots of vacuous moralizing and grandstanding on the subject so close to good rabbi's heart - the self-destruction of something he calls "American Male". Read this (aloud?) and try to understand:
Men today are cheating not because their wives do not love them, but because they do not love themselves; not because their wives are not caring, but because their perforated sense of self is immune to affection. Were their wives to shower them with all the love in the world, it would simply seep through the shards of their shattered egos.
Oh boy, and it is not the worst yet, worse is yet to come:
Propelled to succeed by an all-encompassing fear of failure* and thrown into a rat race without limit, the broken American male never feels like he is ever good enough and chooses destructive escapes to compensate.
That tortured "American male" (probably the last of its species, the singularly monstrous figure that encompassed the worst in the species since - but including - Cain) is so self-loathing and self-revolting that his end is nigh:
Even if they [males] overcome the porn**, they usually end up sports and TV addicts, who spend, on average, three hours per day in front of the tube. And that's three hours where they are not helping with the dishes, putting the kids to sleep, or being with their wives.
And he didn't even mention blogging...

One of rabbi's lightning bolts, though, was addressed at me personally:
Millions of teenage boys are pushing girls to have sex well before their bodies are ready, and without any kind of protection.
Yes, Rabbi, I did at the time. I 'fess up freely and willingly: guilty as charged. I pushed, I cajoled, I begged. But my body was ready, I swear!!!

Anyway, what was this all about? Do you still follow the rabbi's thread of thought? No? I suspected that much. What about my thread of thought? The same? Don't blame me...

Don't you just hate them generalizations?

(*) The rabbi knows quite a lot about all-encompassing drive to success, doesn't he?
(**) And he is quite an expert on porn sex too, I hear.

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