Uneducated Straight White Male

By Ralph Calabrese

What will be presented:

Control vs Power

Emotions vs Feelings

Feminine vs Masculine

Happiness vs Meaning

Negative vs Positive

Liberal vs Conservative

Love vs Faith

Collective vs Individual

Acceptance vs Accomplishment

Communism vs Capitalism

LeBron James vs Michael Jor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clear Our Conscience
• Release date: Aug 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737564959

Ralph Calabrese

His tale of the tape goes a little like this: Youngest of eight kids, Dad died at 2, Moved out at 13, Arrested twice at 14, Sent to children's home 14 to 15, Took mother to court at 15, Lived on his own through high school, Worked 2nd shift in factory and still graduated, Grew up in rural Indiana, Joined Army at 20, Non-combat injured 22, Married at 26, Factory worker until 30, Father at 33 and 34, Stay at home dad - 12 years, Relationship with wife - 23 years, Surgeries - 6 spinal, 6 knee, 3 nose, 1 ankle, 1 thumb, Hernia and countless other procedures and other medical conditions

Book preview

Prologue

In chapter five is a picture I drew. Since I’m not an artist, I thought about giving it to someone who was and having them make suggestions on improving it. Or possibly just paying a professional to make the changes for me. But having someone else do my work and then trying to pass it off as my own didn’t sit well with my conscience.

Could you imagine finding out that Leonardo da Vinci didn’t paint the Mona Lisa? Instead, he just sketched out an outline and then had someone else finish it for him. Man, that would be some Milli Vanilli sh*t right there!

Thinking about this brought me back to grade school and all the threats surrounding plagiarism. Teachers acted like you should be incarcerated over that. However, I agree with the importance of presenting one’s original ideas to the world. As a result, it didn’t make sense to hire an editor.

Did you happen to catch that? Writing is an artform yet, it’s acceptable for one to turn their work over to someone else, have it altered, then pretend it’s original. We would not accept this in any other creative pursuit, so why is it standard practice for publishing a book?

I bring this up for two reasons. First, to introduce you to how my mind works and prepare you for the onslaught of Cognitive Dissonance you’re about to face. Second, to preemptively disable critiques on grammar, spelling, etc. Going forward, if you’re going to come at me, you have no choice but to challenge the concepts I’ve created.

I’m offering myself and my work in its raw form. To say my approach and ideas are unorthodox, would be a gross understatement. It might help to imagine me as a Will Hunting of psychology. I see no need for semicolons or coffee when commas and caramels will suffice.

Also, I didn’t mention anything about those who won’t have issues with this material. That’s because at some point, syntax aside, EVERYONE is going to struggle with the content. Unlike Will, I didn’t gain knowledge through the works of others, mine came from experience. So, there is no underlying framework to be drawn from. But these ideas are useless if they remain scribbles on scrap paper and post-it notes. They must be shared!

Knowledge without application is like a lightbulb without electricity, neither one will make the world any brighter.

—Me

Part I

EMOTIONS vs FEELINGS

Chapter 1

No More Prince Charming

For over ten years now, I have been a stay-at-home dad to two awesome daughters. This amazing opportunity presented itself after years of lingering military injuries (non-combat) left me unable to work. So, between surgeries and physical therapy, I have the best job I’ve ever had in my life!

Aside from all the essential responsibilities, there is always time for playing and movies. We’ve watched an assortment of everything from martial arts, superheroes, to mostly all the princess movies. And yes, I’m right there with popcorn and snacks in hand.

I find it interesting, given the current Female empowerment and rise in Feminism, the way the older versions of the classic princess fairy tales are viewed. There seems to be a great deal of animosity towards the idea that a woman needs saving. Or to be more precise, that she needs to be saved by a MAN.

I have heard or read many different opinions about the negative impacts these storylines have and what they’re really saying with these movies. For instance, it could be taken they send the message that a woman is helpless without a man. Then there is the struggle between social classes and how the poor are dependent on the decisions of those who are wealthy.

But it’s the idea of Prince Charming somehow being a problem that I find to be very curious. That’s because with just the slightest reflection of these movies or stories, I realized the antagonist in mostly all of them is a FEMALE.

The bizarre fact is, many of these stories are hundreds of years old and are centered around a disabling or destructive Female character. Yet, the present-day feminist types want to somehow make it a terrible thing that a man would want to save a young lady from suffering at the hands of an awful woman.

The mental gymnastics it takes to vilify a Prince Charming, when in each story the villain is clearly a terrible older woman, doing everything to disable or destroy the younger girl, is astounding.

I tried to connect some dots to get a better understanding of all the female villains in these stories.

Was there some sort of positive underlying message I was missing? Could there be an aspect of those characters that deserved some sympathy? I kept thinking and looking at other movies and just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

I had already developed my own term to use when describing women like this. In fact, it was something I had discovered in real life. So, it was interesting to see how it played out in these movies.

During my time in the Army and as a factory worker I noticed how people just a few years younger than me had a very lackadaisical approach to work. It was extremely frustrating and not something that I could relate to. However, both sergeants and supervisors said the same things to me when I would complain about their lack of work ethic: Their damn parents are enablers.

I didn’t really understand what that meant. I mean, they went on to say how these kids weren’t pushed to do hard things, or they were all given participation trophies and the typical things that most everyone has heard. But that didn’t really provide the depth of an answer I was satisfied with. So, I would have to dig deeper.

Everything I read about the term enabler didn’t make sense to me. It seemed like children of parents who were this way, were almost always left lacking something. When I think of ENABLING someone, it means allowing them to do something. But if the behavior these parents/ mothers were exhibiting allowed these children to do NOTHING, then how could that be enabling? It only made sense for me to change the terminology to DISABLING.

If what I’m doing to someone renders them less capable of anything, that’s disabling. After coming across another term, Devouring Mother, where a mother selfishly loves her child so much that she overprotects them, I felt the same way. There seems to be a theme. If women are involved, especially mothers, we must use wordplay or twist reality to not seem negative. There is no such thing as loving your child so much, that you destroy them.

Now, back to some of these centuries’ old stories. We can clearly see the plots aren’t centered around the male characters. It’s the female, devouring mother figure, the enabler, the controller, ultimately the DISABLER.

As a genuine question, I would like you to read the following list of characters from some of the movies we’ve watched as a family, and ask yourself, if removing the male or female character would improve the outcome of the movie for the female lead?

Snow White - Evil Queen/The Prince

Cinderella - Stepmother/Prince Charming

Sleeping Beauty - Maleficent/Prince Phillip

Tangled - Mother Gothel/Flynn Ryder

Little Mermaid - Ursula/Prince Eric

This might be one of those times where your wall is starting to go up. You might be thinking, why does she have to be saved by anyone at all? Why can’t she just save herself? Well, if we’re going to take the time to ask questions about these stories, wouldn’t it make sense to go a little farther and ask, why does there have to be a destructive mother figure who is hell bent on destroying young girls?

Well, without the Evil Queen or Mother Gothel, there wouldn’t even be a story. What a world that would be!

Are Evil Queens Real

Are Evil Queens real? Where did this idea even come from? Does she exist? Well, some think a story is just a made-up story, so nothing else to see here. I’ve heard it put by others that the Evil Queen is a representation of Mother Nature. As a way of describing our fears of the threats that nature poses over us.

Well, are Evil Queens real? Absolutely! In their disguised and present-day form, I would say they fit the definition of someone with Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (FDIA).

According to the Cleveland Clinic, FDIA mostly occurs in mothers and is a mental illness where the parent/perpetrator seeks attention for themselves by presenting their child as being physically or mentally ill or injured, when issues do not really exist, or where a condition does exist but will be exaggerated. In extreme cases the adult could tamper with test results, induce symptoms physically through poisoning, suffocating, starving, and causing infection.

This is the point where I remind you about getting blasted with Cognitive Dissonance. Also, to inform you that it’s only going to increase from here on. No child should be led to believe that they are helpless. Whether it is an actual child or an adult’s inner child, the quest to have our own life and be our own person is inherent to our being. No one should have such an influence over us that we no longer function in accordance with nature.

That is why I think humans have wishfully assigned the term Mother to Nature. To provide a sense of comfort to themselves. The idea that Nature provides everything we need to sustain life, and this is what a mother should be.

It is for this reason why I don’t think the Evil Queen represents Nature or Mother Nature. She simply represents the Mother, the Disabling Mother. It’s silly that it seems like blasphemy to say that.

Let’s present the Disabling Mother with FDIA who just completely obliterates her child/children. Ok, so that’s obviously at the extreme. Now, if we gradually step that back in increments, what would that look like? How would that behavior look when lessened step by step? How would that mother treat their child at each new stop?

We Love You Just The Way You Are

If we start on the extremes of this behavior, then do a process of elimination and work our way to some kind of center, we can identify those steps.

With my wife’s permission, her name is Tennille, I’m going to use some extremely serious and real examples of how what I’m talking about could play out in real life.

For years, she had struggled with bouts of seasonal depression and extreme mood swings. We somehow managed to get by for ten years dealing with my surgeries and physical health issues and her mental health issues.

But, after being together ten years, we decided to start a family. We always wanted two kids, and we had our two daughters just thirteen months apart. With that came Post-Partum Depression for Tennille, on top of her existing conditions.

I’m going to leave the details out, as I feel it’s more appropriate for Tennille to present them to the world in her own book someday. For me, it’s more the issue of people’s reactions.

She and I spent eight years going to therapy together trying to get to the bottom of her issues. We easily saw over a dozen different therapists together, and she herself saw more. I always found it so strange, that no matter what we started each session about, it somehow would end with how I was supposed to change my approach and be more accepting about things with Tennille.

Without giving away too much, let’s just say that she had been hospitalized at least half a dozen times, wasn’t emotionally present for our daughters, and was becoming physically and emotionally broken. She was suffering! We all were suffering!

But therapist after therapist, social worker after social worker, friend after friend, and family member after family member took the approach of, Tennille is simply fine the way she is. It was me who was the problem. I should be more accepting or do this or that.

After a group of