Every day I learn a little more about the need for a safe haven, and every day I learn something new about the ways in which men have been denied it.
I way laying on my bed only yesterday and looking up at a picture that I have always detested- this was a sentimentalised Victorian painting of a fairy.
I realised that this painting had looked down from the wall at me as I lay asleep each night since my divorce. My reason for not removing the horrible thing was inertia and the fact that I had bought the picture with my own money, and also framed it myself.
Nevertheless it was something that helped to make my home an uncomfortable place.
I leaped right off the bed and smashed it immediately! We think that the small things in our life are not important- we allow women to choose the colour scheme of our home and the furniture because we like to please them. In this way we gradually build the chains that bind us through our own labours, we create an abode that is only a home for the woman. We do this because we think it will buy us peace- but the opposite is the case. Gradually we find ourselves living in another persons home- we find ourselves unable to relax in quite the way we used to. The area of our lives that are exclusively our own is gradually eliminated. We find ourselves effectively homeless in our own homes. Our careers, our finances and even our clothing come to be managed by women, and each area we give up diminishes our safe haven- and diminishes us.
We believe that there will come a point when the woman will at last be satisfied- but this never happens. She may even insist that we carry a mobile phone to check upon our whereabouts as if we were subject to a criminal tagging scheme! If we submit to this (and very many men do) we will eventually find that we are no longer masters of our own movements.
A free man can admit his feelings honestly to himself. Every human being has the right to a safe haven and nobody should need to prove this is not a hostile act.
A man who has already been stripped of much of his safe haven will find it hard to stand fro anything in life. Along with a reduction in his physical Safe Haven comes a reduction in his sense of himself. He has become a smaller man in order to live within his reduced space. He will feel angry but lack the words to explain why. As a result he will dismiss his own feelings. I have often found that male feminists are very angry at women for this reason. When a male feminist says that all men hate all women he is really talking about himself. He lives in fear of his anger and fears he may one day explode.
I find it incredible that I built my own prison. I will now tear it down.
I have replaced the picture and will make the flat mine at last.
These little touches of identity expand my safe haven and give me peace.
