124 - Men As Oil

This past weekend I went to the Men's Issues Conference in Detroit put on by A Voice For Men. I left conference early on Saturday night and rushed back home over the Canadian border to visit a place that by some accounts needs to be classified as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The conference was held near Detroit the place where the mighty American automobile built mostly by men took the twentieth century by storm. Mass motoring culture revolutionized the way people live and also changed the way that men and women relate to one another. But before you had the automobile you needed gasoline. Half the energy a car will ever consume is used to manufacture an internal combustion vehicle and the other half is used to drive it around over its lifetime. As I left the men's conference I bolted across the border to a little know place called Oil Springs, Ontario before the daylight ran out. This is the first place in the entire world that had developed the commercial petroleum business. In 1858 James Miller Williams began excavating a water well and instead found oil. As a result four thousand men showed up in the area in the next few years looking for oil. It was the World's first oil boom and it would revolutionize the way people heated their homes, used lighting as well as transportation. The oil age was just as revolutionary as the coal powered steam engines, electricity

and more recently the internet. It was men that brought about this revolution. A revolution that would ultimately devalue male labor and muscle. Before the age of fossil fuels men chopped down most of the wood required to heat homes. And it was men that plowed the fields and produced the cash crops that were used to feed the horses which provided transportation. And it was men that worked in the coal mines. While some women are capable of digging underground as coal miners most were not. Before fossil fuels over ninety-five percent of the male population had to work at producing energy by farming the land and collecting calories in food which were converted over from the sun. We were living on a solar allowance and it was men that were predominantly collecting that solar allowance. Men were literally putting their backs into it and handing over much of the surplus to the women and children that they loved. That's why Oil Springs Ontario and Titusville, Pennsylvania the place that started the commercial oil business in the United States were so important. From places like these men became increasingly free from the drudgery of spending their lives collecting solar energy using plant and animal matter. As a result the value of masculinity began to change. Men went from being farmers to working in construction and manufacturing and the true value of masculinity began to decline. Throughout much of history men have been valued for their muscle and intellect and women have been valued by their appearance, sexuality and reproductive abilities. That's been the natural division of labor in our species. But this changed dramatically as we entered the oil age.

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