EOTM: The Natural World

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EOTM: Creating the Future

Every moment of every day we are moving from a past into a future. We carry the learning with us, but we need not carry the mistakes that were the source of the learning. We need not carry with us the resentments or shames of the past if we look forward and realize that we can create a world in which they don't exist, but we have to stop carrying them forward.

We are constantly moving into a future which we are continously creating. Actions in this moment create effects in the next. As we shape those actions with intent, so do we shape the future.

There is a reason that grand intent is called "vision". We must "see" the future in the eye of the mind before we can create it. If all we can "see" is the ills of the past and recreate the future in the image of the past by reacting to it, that is as good a definition of hell as is needed.

See a future which emphasizes the best of humanity, not its worst.

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EOTM: The Environment

It's where we all live folks. We're treating it like a convenience store combined with a toilet bowl. We are digging holes and ripping it up to make stuff to sell to people who will eventually throw it away and have to dig another hole to bury it in. All the time we are producing toxic byproducts which poison us and every other form of life on the planet.

We'd better get a clue. Malthus* was right. Humanity is expanding its numbers not only to the limit of the food supply, but also to the limit of the sewage treatment capacity. The earth can no longer absorb and cleanse the toxic wastes produced by so many human beings. We need to take immediate steps to slow population growth and reduce the amount of pointless purposeless consumption that we all do. Science is not going to save us. We are not going to all get into space ships and find new worlds once we have used this one up. We have finally discovered that we can't throw our garbage over the neighbor's fence and forget it. That garbage will eventually come back to us in our water, or our air, or our food.

I'm tired of drowning in your shit.

* Malthus stated that any population will grow exponentially up to the limits of its food supply, which grows arithmetically.

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EOTM: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Motorcycles do put one into a zen state. There is something about their marvelous simplicity. So much that we thought was essential turns out to be excess baggage. Our lives depend on being totally aware in the moment and clearing our minds of things which are not significant at the present time.

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EOTM: Visual Reality

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EOTM: Models of Man: Where To? ...From Here...

The Human Race -

I saw recently an article which stated that some anthropologists believe that the human race stopped evolving physically about 100,000 years ago. Now, never-mind that this span of time is merely an evolutionary eye-blink - human evolution now seems to have become cultural evolution.

Perhaps we are witnessing the divergence of humanity into several subspecies, like so many science fiction works have suggested. Since humans have had the hubris to take over the course of their own evolution as a race, one has to wonder about the future types that humanity will become.

Homo Urbanis: Urban or Hive Man
Homo Terminus: End Men, Omega Men
Homo Mechanicus: Machine Man: BORG I
Homo Electronicus: Wired Man: BORG II

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EOTM: How the Women's Movement Taught Women to Hate Men -- by Erin Pizzey

Men's Rights Agency - News & Views

How The Women's Movement Taught Women to Hate Men - By Erin Pizzey

We were sitting around a coffee table in my house, in Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith in London listening to a bossy woman wearing National Health round glasses and a long Indian skirt. She smelled of insense and to few baths. We were all nursing large gin and tonics which was the staple drink in the Women's Lib. Goldhawk Road weekly meetings.

We were trying to follow her convoluted explanations about our 'role in society.' As far as I knew, I had a very simple role in society. I had always wanted to have lots of children, be happily married, and free to tend my house and garden and cook three course meals for my husband. 'What could possibly be wrong with that I asked?' 'Why,' she said angrily. 'Are so many married women deprived of the status of independent human beings?' The answer was; because marriage is based on the property concept, therefore it must be abolished. I looked at the other women in the group, Angela, a teacher had more idea of what was going on. She had trained as a teacher and was used to this confusing amount of jargon. 'What is wrong with owning a house?' I asked. I was obviously a hopeless brain drain. 'You,' she said turning on me. 'Live in a mink-lined trap,' her face was frozen with rage. I decided I'd better shut up and see what else I was getting wrong. 'Why are the mores of our society unfair to women?' was her next question. The answer to that was 'because men are natural oppressors.'

This was not the time to confess to the fact that I had not only a son but seven adopted sons. Certainly, my daughter Cleo and I waged war in a family where two women were pitted gainst nine males. The most oppressive thing the boys ever did was to leave hair in the wash-basin and they could all cook, iron, sew and clean.

The final question was even more confusing. 'Why is the love of a woman for a man, which involves her being the servant to his needs, lauded as 'her' greatest fulfillment?' The answer reduced the room to a puzzled silence. 'Er,' I asked are we talking about lesbians?' We were. 'We,' they always use the royal we ............... 'don't like men nor do we like hetrosexual women. If there is every to be any equality, marriage and the family must be abolished.' We sat there gawking like fish and she smiled a very satisfied smile and glared at me.

I had followed the career of a journalist called Nancy Spain. She worked on 'SHE' magazine. Her radical lesbian ideas interested me and she was writing for the Guardian long before the Guardian Mafia of feminist journalists got going. She died in an aeroplane crash but left behind many of her acolyte's. These were the faces I saw in those early days of the feminist collectives. I went to work in the Women's Liberation Work Shop in Newport Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue. I also attended the first women's conferences and I was struck by the hundreds and hundreds of women claiming to be radical militant lesbians. The first women's conferences were destroyed by violent fisticuffs between these women and most of us were very afraid of them. As far as I was concerned these women did not speak for my gay friends anymore than the radical feminists spoke for all women in our country who were very happy at home with their husbands and their children.

In reality, this was a very minor group of women who were only able to hurl abuse at heterosexual women and their families because they were white, middle class and had media jobs. Before very long they were employing each other and 'marginalizing' the men who tried to work along side them. Men, intimidated by their brutal, violent behavior, moved on and out of many jobs. According to these women all women were victims of men's violent behavior, any attempt for men to fight back met with behind scenes maneuvering and men LET IT HAPPEN.

Fed up with the war, I decided to stay away from the in-fighting that dominated the women's liberation movement and turn my attention to helping in my own local community. I got a letter from the women's liberation office, throwing me out an banning me from attending any of the collectives. The so called women's liberation' movement spread like a cancer across the English chattering classes. I visited the houses of feminist women with my son who carried his action man toys. In their houses there was no vestige of anything 'boyish' at all. No Tonka trucks, no boys toys - nothing that could encourage a boy to think of himself as masculine. The whole idea of men and masculinity in those houses, we considered disgusting. We, the mothers, sat around the kitchen tables rearranging the world according to Marx. I, who had enjoyed men's company enormously, for the feeling that these women underneath all the political chatter, really disliked men. There was nothing sensual about their houses. They disliked cooking and if they had to cook for guests, it was not producing good food and wine that delighted their guests, but a rather rapid need to compete with each other. Was it, I wondered, an English middle class phenomenon? This dislike and need to sneer at men? Certainly their boys were confused and crying. There was no way I could interest my sons in dolls, not that I would want to try. Useless to tell these women that Marx never did anything to women. Was unkind to his family and refused to have women in the Politburo. The feminist gurus had done their job well and most of the women I knew complained about their awful lives. I couldn't see what was awful about having the freedom to do exactly what I pleased and when I pleased. Not for me the daily office rush. I pushed my pram around Shepherd's Bush Market loaded with other people's children and my own. I dreamed of finding a house where I could build a useful community centre in our midst.

The dream materialized but with it, the awful certainty that if I attracted funds and publicity. I would hear the tramp of the man-hating feminists trying to oust me and take over. That is what happened, and the first little get together I ran to encourage other groups to open refuges was dominated by the lesbians and feminists who crowded into our little church hall and voted themselves into a national movement. We, horrified and unused to political manoeuvring, abstained. 'There isn't a working glass women among you,' one of my mothers yelled. This has always been the truth of this disastrous movement. Born in ivory tower academia, it had no relevance to women on the street. 'If only you were all lesbians, you would have no problems of violence,' we were told. We often had women beaten up by their female partners in our refuge. The worst beating I ever saw was between a vicar's daughter and her lover.

All through my career, as a journalist, a writer and a social reformer, I have been hounded and bullied by feminist women and their coat trailing 'new men.' Any of us who have gone to all girl schools, particularly boarding schools, will verify the awful bullying and violence that goes on amongst the girls. For so many years women were tyrants behind their front doors. They were able to sexually abuse, batter and intimidate their children and their husbands now, with the advent of the women's movement, they moved out into the world. They took their aggressive, bullying and intimidating behavior with them. Talking with the men who were accused of abusing their women, I was aware of this movement with its wild and extravagant claims against men had fueled the flames of insecurity and anger in men. I watched horror stricken, as in home after home, I saw boys denied not only their access to their fathers, but also access to all that was normal and masculine in their lives.

Our universities rushed into grasping funding for 'Women's Studies,'' Gender politics,' became the new way to brain wash women with very little education. By now the Politically Correct movement was beginning to hatch and a new form of 'mind control' was devised. Feminists became the new 'thought police.'

The sudden promescuity of women came as a shock to me. The atmosphere of intense dislike for men and anything male lay like a miasma in so many English middle class houses. Overnight in the late sixties in England, confusion reigned. If feminists hated men so much why were so many of them sleeping with the enemy? I am the daughter of a diplomat born in China and it was my Amah who was the one to insist that myself and my twin sister be put out on the hill side. Failing to achieve that she wanted our feet bound. It was women in Africa who practised ritual circumcisions on their daughters. I knew that because I worked with missionaries in Africa. I was fighting a lost cause and what bothered me then and bothered me now, is that men made no attempt to defend themselves.

By now the 'new man' was beginning to emerge and he was not a pretty sight. Parroting everything in the woman in his life was teaching, he could usually be found in woman's conferences running the creches and trying to looking 'caring.' Mostly he was stoned, confused and angry. Maybe because as far as I could see, the new feminists made no effort to share an equal relationship with their male partners. They saw themselves as 'superior beings.' The new men were expected to take their places a few steps behind their women and to do as they were told. Mostly, they had to accept the dictates of the dictators and quietly get on with the household chores and take care of the children. But what ever a new man did, he could never atone for the sins of other men. Any man who disobeyed his partner, was subjected to expulsion from the matrimonial home and in many cases, from a relationship with his children. Now, there were a legion of feminist lawyers and therapists to make their 'sisters' were fully supported in the battle to destroy men.

Why did the relationship between men and women go so badly wrong? I think it goes back to my point about the choices men and women made in the sixties. Men were tired of their roles as 'macho men.' They were strangled in their uniforms of ties and suits. They had no choices in the late fifties but to take on a wife and children and the cost of a mortgage dangled around their necks. In the sixties they rebelled and wanted to take a less violent and domineering role in their lives. They turned to this romantic image of women as soft and gentle. They saw this image as an emotional life style denied to men. Women, however, rebelled against this image of themselves, indeed in so many cases it was a false image, and doomed the masculine concepts of authoritarian rule and aggression and even to wearing the hated suits and ties that men had discarded. Men, for so long, subjected themselves emotionally to women and hated women for their dependence. Women adopting male bullying and aggressive roles and still hating the fact that they need and want men in their lives.

What needs to happen? First of all there has to be a carefully worked out and civilized dialogue that cannot be invaded by the extremes of the right or the left. Both men and women have been guilty of politicizing human relationships. Human relationships are not a matter of political solutions. Any country that has tried to create a political solution to human problems has ended up with concentration camps and gulags. The deep wounds between men and women will take time to heal. It is imperative that women who do not hate men and wish to live in peace with them, should be given space in newspapers and magazines to have their say. Films should be made about women who have made a success of their homes and their families. Bringing up a family requires a large degree of maturity. An ability to sublimate the personal needs and wishes until such time as the children are grown and have left the home. Later, those years of sacrifice will bring the parents such joy. Of course, there will be women who want to work and not have a family. As long as the women has clearly thought out her priorities there is no harm. Just lately my life is too full of nearly forty something women, who have had fulfilling careers but the biological clock is ticking and they are afraid. Now they decide they do want children and a father for their children - for many it is too late and the future, for them is not bright. Some women will be able to balance a home and a career. These women tend to be wealthy and can afford the help needed to bring up the children. Many women will be forced to go out to work against their will. This is because we live in a Western world where caring for children has become devalued and only work outside the house carries with it monitory compensation.

I believe that love between men and women is the strongest relationship on this earth. For now, we have to fight to protect family life. Hopefully, as we move, into a new century, men and women can meet each other not only as equals, partners and friends but also as lovers.

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS ERIN PIZZEY

Erin Patria Pizzey, nee Carney. da Cyril Carney MBE Diplomatic Service (d 1980)m. Ruth Patricia Last. b. 19 Feb. 1939.

Educ. Leweston Manor, Sherbourne Dorest; m 1961 9m dis 1979) 1.Amos b1976, d.cleo b. 1961. 7 adopted sons ,granchildren Keita Craig b. 21 Apr 1977 Amber Craig b 24 Jan. 1979. Dymitri Scott b 24 Jan. 1990.

Career:

International author USA Harper Collins. Translation rights to: Japan, Russia, Greece, Brazil, Poland, Latvia, Israel, Italy, Hungary, Turkey. All English speaking countries. Published poet and playwright. International founder of refuges for battered women and children working in the field of Domestic Violence.

Awards:

International Order of volunteers For Peace, Diploma Of Honour (Italy) 1981. Nancy Astor Award for Journalism 1983. World congress of Victimology (San Francisco) 1987. St. Valentino Palm d'Oro International Award for Literature, Italy, February 14th 1994.

Non fiction:

Scream Quietly Or The Neighbours Will Hear (first book in the world on wife battering - out of print)

Infernal Child - a memoir - out of print

Slut's Cookbook

Erin Pizzey Collects

Prone To Violence - working with violent women - out of print.

Fiction:

The Watershed

In The Shadow Of The Castle

The Pleasure Palace

First Lady

The Consul General's Daughter

The Snow Leopard Of Shanghai

Other Lovers

Swimming With Dolphins

For The Love Of A Stranger

Kisses

The Wicked World Of Women

The Fame Game (in progress)

Hugs and Kisses (in progress)

Short Stories:

The Man In The Blue Van

The Frangipani Tree

Addictions

Dancing

Sand

Contributed to The New Statesman, The Sunday Times, Cosmopolitan.
Contributed to journals and newspapers internationally and completed two world tours lecturing on domestic violence and helping to set up refuges. Invited by the German Government to Berlin to speak and to show my film 'SCREAM QUIETLY OR THE NEIGHBOURS WILL HEAR.' 1977 Lunch of honour on Capitol Hill sponsored by Congresswoman Lindy Boggs and Congressman Newton-Steer. 1978 invited by Mental Health Association of New Zealand to give lecture tour. 1979 invited by US Government and sponsored by The Salvation Army to do a second lecture tour of 21 cities. 1979 film SCREAM QUIETLY OR THE NEIGHBOURS WILL HEAR aired twice nationally on PBS in America. 1982 asked to be resident expert on family Violence show on 'Phil Donahue.' 1884 gave evidence in San Antonio, Texas to President Reagan's Attorney General's Task Force on Family Violence. Guest of honour in Rome of a conference of women International Supreme Court Judges, 1994.

Films and documentaries:

Scream Quietly Or The Neighbours Will Hear. Chiswick Women's Aid - a teaching film. That Awful Woman - my work in America. Cutting Edge Channel 4 Sanctuary.

Recreations: Reading, writing, cooking, antiques, violing, gardening, wine, food and travel.

EOTM: Feminism Led to Masculine Rage

September 20, 1999

Feminism led to masculine rage

By JEAN SONMOR

Toronto Sun

I'm walking around steaming and I don't know who I'm mad at -- except maybe myself.
The reason for my irritation is simple enough on one level: Those nasty engineers at Queen's University in Kingston, the ones who like to dye themselves purple for frosh week, are at it again. Apparently -- trying to outdo each other insulting and degrading women. "Go Down or Go Home" is their pathetic rallying cry.

Ho hum. Old story. Sexual bravura at its least alluring. A decade ago their predecessors were more violent. Queen's achieved international notoriety for their posters responding to the No Means No campaign-- "No Means Kick Her In The Teeth," "No Means On Your Knees, Bitch"

This year, though, my son is there. First year, living in the thick of it all, in residence. So now I have a personal interest in how brutal and misogynistic the prevailing attitudes are at the place where my husband and I are spending $13,000 or $14,000 over the next seven months to have our son "educated." (The total cost is more but he's contributing his summer savings.)

In the summer there was a minor skirmish when signs went up identifying the AMS (the Alma Mater Society, the student government) as the "All Male Society." The matter was handled internally -- after all, seven of the top 10 jobs are held by women and the editor of the school paper is a woman. "All Male Society" had its ironic twist.

It would be naive to think there aren't rambunctious anti-feminists everywhere. But at Queen's they seem to feel a little freer -- or maybe a little angrier. But the steam that's rising from me, although provoked by the hyper-aggressive poster-makers, has more to do with the ugly impasse between the sexes that we're living through. And for that I blame my generation of women. How come we didn't see this coming? How come we were so caught up in our own stuff that we turned men into the enemy, and now must suffer the consequences?

These students are kids, for heaven's sake, not bitter, wounded 50-year-olds who've been through the marital and professional wars and lost on both counts. Their attitude is societal rather than personal. These guys have absorbed their hostility from the air around them. And who's providing that air? Their feminist mothers and fathers? The media? The women they date?

More and more worrying goes on about what has happened to this generation of boys. Skyrocketing suicide rates. Plummeting grades. Little ambition or focus.( A recent American survey of Grade 8 kids found the girls twice as likely as the boys to aspire to a career in management.) And if you have teenagers you don't have to read books such as Harvard psychologist William Pollack's Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood to see how much surer girls are than boys about where they're going and what they want. "It's as if our sons are unwittingly mirroring ... our own adult ambivalence about masculinity," Pollack writes.

At least some of the hostility toward women must be laid at the feet of feminism. That dreary, doctrinaire me-firstism that many women find embarrassing is still around in spades. In commenting on a recent story that fewer men are now teaching high school, the women educators were indifferent. High school boys don't need teacher-role models, they said. No research shows that. But we've spent nearly two decades on affirmative action trying to balance the gender equation at the universities. Why? Presumably because role models are important to young women. Go figure.

Anyhow, I digress. What I wanted to say was about how carelessly a certain kind of woman embraced feminism in the 1970s. (I'm not discounting myself but I tempered my views as I watched my sons grow up -- living proof that the personal is the political.) We tried to seize power. We saw an opening. We saw unfairness. We never bothered our heads about the consequences. But, looking back, it's pretty clear to me that many -- though not all -- of us already had all kinds of power. It was subtle but very real. Almost without reflection, en masse, we threw over that highly nuanced balance between the sexes and decided to redraw the map -- unilaterally.

What did we expect? Capitulation? That all we had to do was say we wanted to take our place at the boardroom table, show we were smart and strategic enough, and the men, those who prized that kind of accomplishment above all other, would simply bow and retreat? And retreat to what? The housework and family nurturing that we had suddenly decided wasn't enough for us? Now, if you can believe the trend watchers, many women are burned out on superwoman and want to head back.

Trouble is, with all the carnage -- and attitude -- around, that's not possible.

***

Jean Sonmor can be reached by e-mail at jsonmor@sunpub.com.

Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com.

Copyright © 1999, Quebecor New Media Limited Partnership.

EOTM: The War Against Men -- by David Shackleton

We are approaching once again the grim anniversary of Marc Lepine's murder of 14 female engineering students at Montreal's École Polytechnique. Last year, here in Ottawa, women held a candlelight vigil (men were not welcome) at the city's monument to women killed by men, at which words and tears of grief and rage at men were expressed. It is a strange ritual, an annual re-opening of a wound and an almost exultant display of anger, like Jews visiting Auschwitz to rekindle their outrage (which, to their credit, I have never heard of them doing). Such passionate public rituals are deep windows into our culture, but what they reveal does not always match what the participants believe.

In 1993 I read a library book in which were transcribed all the conversations between a popular radio talk show host (I can't remember which one) and his listeners, in the few weeks after the 'Montreal Massacre'. For me, an eager student and detective of gender culture, it made fascinating reading. Many of the callers took the feminist position that Lepine's murders were representative of general male misongyny; some (mainly men) disagreed strongly with that position and insisted that he was a lone madman, representative of no one but himself. It was only after I finished the book that I realized; in all the hundreds of exchanges, some basic points had been overlooked and a fundamental question had never been asked. In fact, I have never heard it asked to this day. In this article I propose to ask and to answer this question.

First, something usually overlooked. Marc Lepine wasn't trying to kill women. He was trying to kill feminists. Before he opened fire, he said to the female engineering students, "You're all feminists. I hate feminists!" And in his suicide note, Lepine wrote, "Feminists have wrecked my life." In all of the vast discussion and analysis of his motives and his circumstances, isn't it curious that no one, to my knowledge, has yet taken him seriously and looked at his life to discover why he believed it had been wrecked by feminists.

The reason, of course, is that we assume we already know. Feminists, we believe, are pursuing the equal rights of women, and insecure, patriarchal men like Lepine resent having to share their male privileges with women, hence their anger and hate. But this explanation is built on an assumption and a stereotype: let's check them out. In particular, let's now ask the basic question that was never asked in all the Montreal Massacre debate: Are there ways in which feminism is genuinely damaging, even wrecking, the lives of men?

But before I continue, I need to confess to you that I hate doing this. I, like most men of my generation, was conditioned to protect women, to see them as more delicate and fragile, more pure and valuable. I learned to see them as morally superior, above the dirty, grubbing impusles of sexual and materialistic need that I knew were part of my makeup. I didn't like that, but I could live with it because I also had areas of superiority: I was stronger and more competent in the work world, more mechanical and more rational. I couldn't have articulated these things then as I have here, but at some level I knew them, and they felt right. I knew that a good man, in an emergency, would sacrifice his life to save that of a woman, as so many men have, and that also seemed right to me. And, I confess to you, I have not yet removed this brainwashing from my soul. Despite years of awareness of my conditioning and active personal work to dismantle it, there is still a part of me that wants things to be this way, that knows no way to find redemption from my personal unworthiness except in the approving, affirming eyes of a loving woman. When I think with this part of me, I know that honour comes from having the power to abuse her, but choosing not to, and instead protecting and cherishing her.

This historical, archetypal, unhealed part of me is clear that men's and women's roles are different, and that it does not fall to me, a man, to correct women on moral issues. That is their purview, their jurisdiction. But it is bigger than that. It is not just their jurisdiction, but their right, and I am unworthy to do it, lacking their purity. And so when necessity drives me, finally, to speak out and say, "But that's not true, not right," I feel, at a deep level, ashamed. I feel I have abused women, I feel I have lost my route to redemption, I feel fundamentally unworthy. Is this why men who in desperation murder women, perhaps their wife (or ex wife) and children, frequently then turn their gun, as Marc Lepine did, on themselves? I think so.

And so I wish, as I begin my analysis of Feminism, to apologise to women for my presumption in stepping onto their turf. And yet, it is necessary, for things have gone very badly wrong. And I can deal with what it brings up for me, for that old, conditioned, patriarchal part of me is no longer all, or even most, of who I am today, and for that Feminism deserves some of the credit.

All of modern feminist analysis is built on one conceptual foundation: that men as a gender have more power than women. Not just different power, but greater power. Liberal, socialist, radical, eco - all brands of feminism share this one foundation. All the theories and policies, the institutions and accomplishments of feminism (eg. legislation on date rape, sexual harrassment, employment equity, domestic violence; women's shelters and crisis lines, programs for abused women and abusive men as well as the biases in family court), all are founded on and justified by this one belief. If this belief is false, then all these activities are not correcting an existing imbalance, but rather creating or worsening one. I will argue that this foundation of feminism is false, that power between men and women is balanced and has been throughout history.

My argument hinges on violence. Consider that in prehistoric society there was a need, on occasion, for either aggressive or defensive fighting. Such needs arise naturally from the competition between tribes for resources, or for any number of more complex reasons. (The modern notion that primitive societies were peaceful and harmonious is a nostalgic fantasy: most, like the Native Americans, were warlike long before they encountered Europeans.) Given the boiological differences between men and women which lead naturally to the women being engaged in child rearing and the men in hunting (and which division of labour is also common in the animal kiingdom), this task of war would tend to fall to men. And that would result in a problem. For once men, as a gender, organize themselves as a fighting force, what is to prevent them from taking over the society, enslaving women and taking what they wish from them? As, indeed, happens to this day in military coups. But why doesn't it happen everywhere, all the time?

The answer is that nature always finds a balance. The balance in this case was provided by an honour code. In elegantly simple fashion, men held the physical power and women the moral power. Each had a power over the other, and each had something the other needed. Men had the physical power but needed the moral affirmation of women in order to achieve social status, not to mention a wife and children. Women had the moral power but needed the physical protection and perhaps also the provision of food and shelter of men. Of course, at first i imagine there were many tribes where the men enslaved the women. What must have happened is that such tribes were less effective, less efficient than those where the balance of power was invented and men and women were able to work cooperatively, and so over time evolution favoured those with an honour code restraining the force of the warrior men. And we are their descendents.

This honour code has taken many forms over time, from the ritual chivalry of the middle ages to the exaggerated puritanism of the Victorians, but it has always been (usually covertly - or at least, unknown to men) focused on and controlled by women. Its deepest root is, of course, the power that women have to grant or withhold sexual favours, and so to cut off a 'dishonourable' man from the right to progeny or a normal life. (And incidentally, this is the reason why the sexual revolution of the fifties failed to deliver us to sexual equality, but instead resulted in the rise of Feminism, which restored sexual control by women under the guise of equality ‹ but that's another article.) This honour code is deeply and fundamentally alive in men today, and it is still society's greatest defense against both individual and collective male violence. And this is where the urgency of our present situation is apparent, for Feminism has, for the first time in history, turned women from shaming individual men who are judged dishonourable, to shaming men in general and masculinity as an institution. And the very real danger in this is that if men come to perceive that there is no way for them to achieve honour, to be recognized publicly and privately as 'good' men, then they may sense that they have little to lose by taking what they want, since they have little to gain by restraining themselves. I very much fear that if we do not turn aside from our still-growing, wholesale shaming of men and the Patriarchy and all things male, that our future may contain civil violence of a degree we have never seen before.

I will not attempt to prove my thesis to you in this article. That is the task of a future book, and anyway, all the evidence needed is available to those who look for it‹not least in the pages of the issues of this magazine. And, reassuringly, more and more books are now being published, written by women, which point penetratingly and powerfully to the fallacies in the Feminist position. But let us not underestimate the power that Feminism holds. The deepest, most deadly power given to women by tribal evolution is the power to shame. It had to be powerful, because it balanced the most deadly power given to men; the power to kill. That power to shame the deep souls of men is the power that Feminism is using today to silence the men who would otherwise shout its errors and lies aloud. As I confessed early in this article, it is not easy for a man to grow out of his dependence on women for his essential honour. This is deep masculine stuff: "death before dishonour" is not a trivial male cry. Men have run from trenches directly into machine gun fire rather than face their terror of shame and dishonour. But our recovery as men begins with telling the truth about ourselves and naming our oppressions. I hope that I and Everyman can help lead men forward toward real emancipation.

And I ask for the help of women in this. As you cease to identify with Feminism for the power and control it seems to give you, and begin instead to welcome and affirm the men in your lives who choose to stand their own ground and describe honestly how feminist analysis does not tell the truth about their lives, so you will create the environment in which men can more easily tell their truths. And in this way you will create greater honesty in your life between men and women. That is the direction we must go, and as swiftly as we can, if we are to lessen the tensions that are still growing between men and women, and avoid the possibility of vast civil violence that could erupt if men are shamed beyond their limits, before they have the moral strength from their own resources to restrain their tendencies towards violence. This, to my mind, is the most important message that Marc Lepine has for us. Is he, perhaps, representative of a possible future, one in which men, shamed beyond endurance by a male-hating Feminist establishment, strike out in desperation at those they judge responsible? I most earnestly hope not.

David Shackleton is a thinker and writer on gender, and editor and publisher of Everyman: A Men's Journal, the only Canadian magazine of the men's movement. Reach him at PO Box 4617, Station E, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5H8, Canada, or by email at editor@everyman.org. Check out the Everyman website at www.everyman.org

David Shackleton
Editor and Publisher
Everyman: A Men's Journal
PO Box 4617, Station E,
Ottawa, ON K1S 5H8
http://www.everyman.org
"The World Changes When We Do"

EOTM: Feminism Exposed: Our blindness to feminine evil -- by David Shackleton

I want, in this essay, to sketch out the synthesis of ideas that I expect will be the foundation for my life's work. Last month I began to write a book on this subject, and I don't expect to be able to deal adequately with the scope of these ideas in less than a book. Nevertheless, I want to try here to plant some seeds, to share my thinking in this abbreviated form, so that others can begin to think about and dialogue on these ideas.

My personal resistance to these conclusions has been profound. I have fought against them, like a fish on a hook, for almost two years, because I don't want them to be true. The very best result that I can imagine would be that someone would show me the error in my analysis, and that my conclusions are mistaken. I hope for that, but I do not expect it. It feels like time to stop resisting and to follow the path in front of me.

Introduction

I will argue that the feminine archetype is now dominant in the western world, and that, most dangerously, we are virtually blind to the shadow side of this archetype. As a result, while we are vigilant against masculine forms of evil, feminine evil is taking over our culture, and feminism is the leading and driving ideology of this process. This situation has its roots in our childraising practice in the last fifty years, and is closely analagous to the historical rise of Nazism in Germany. The resulting human misery and destruction is already massive, and seems likely to exceed that of WWII. However, the eventual result will be that we take women off the pedestal, recognize their capacity for evil as we already have for men, and move finally into real gender maturity and equality.

Masculine and Feminine Archetypes 

There is some confusion about archetypes. In King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, Moore and Gillette define them as "instinctual patterns and energy configurations, probably inherited genetically through the generations of our species," and which "provide the very foundations of our behaviours." 1 I like to think of archetypes in terms of a metaphor. I imagine that the psychic world of Jung's collective unconscious is like a jungle, where paths have been trod by people's behaviour since the beginning of time. Those paths that many people have walked throughout history (e.g., mother, father, warrior, woodcutter, etc.) have been made wide by the passage of many feet, and efficient by those creative minds who blazed shortcuts that others chose to follow. Such paths are psychically easy to walk, compared to the difficulty of cutting a new path through the jungle or of following one seldom-used and overgrown. These paths are archetypes, typical psychological ways of being, and they have an energy that resists stepping off the path. This metaphor matches Carl Jung's description when he says, "There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing only the possibility of a certain kind of perception or action." 2 (emphasis in original)

Two fundamental archetypes are the masculine and the feminine; together they divide up the whole psychological realm into complementary pairs of opposites. They are groups of psychological behaviours that have commonly and stereotypically been associated with males and females throughout history. Note that individual men and women can and do display varying degrees of masculinity and femininityÑthese archetypes are not equivalent to being male or female.

The archetypal masculine and feminine are what is known as polar opposites. Jung explained that all psychic life is governed by a necessary opposition, and that this opposition is inherent in human nature. For, he said, "the psyche is ... a self-regulating system," and "there is no balance, no system of self-regulation, without opposition." "Everything human is relative, because everything rests on the inner polarity; for everything is a phenomonon of energy. Energy necessarily depends on a pre-existing polarity, without which there could be no energy. There must always be high and low, hot and cold, etc., so that the equilibrating process--which is energy--can take place." 3

A few examples of such complementary opposite pairs of behaviours are given below:

Masculine Feminine

Competitive Cooperative Hierarchical Consensual Overt Covert Direct Indirect Intellectual Emotional Physical Psychological Objective Subjective Physically coercive Deceptive

It is important to realize that since each pair of complementary opposites consists of different active or evaluative approaches to a situation, they cannot be employed simultaneously, but rather represent alternative strategies or choices. Which strategy will be best cannot be determined in general, but depends entirely on the situation. Human psychological wholeness or maturity can be conceived of as becoming competent in the use of all such strategies. However, we naturally tend to prefer and overuse those strategies with which we are familiar as individuals or cultures, and most of us, due to reinforcement and conditioning in childhood, and probably to genetic predisposition as well, embrace first that set of behaviours and attitudes culturally appropriate for our gender. Boys tend to absorb and manifest those behaviours and attitudes described above as masculine, and girls to value and embrace the complementary feminine set. One consequence of that, of course, is that men and women are pychologically drawn to each other. The opposites attract because we unconsciously seek out what we lack.

Note that neither the masculine nor the feminine archetype is either dominant or derivative: both are equal in power and value (although our individual and cultural value systems generally rank one above the other). This equality is inherent in the dualistic nature of all polar opposites: like day and night, up and down, good and bad, they create and define each other. Also, any particular strategy, masculine or feminine, can be used for good or ill, to help or to harm: none are good or bad in essence, but only in application and intention. However, again, we tend as individuals and as cultures to group them into categories of right and wrong, good and bad; categories which vary widely from one area to another, and which change--sometimes rapidly--from age to age.

My final point about archetypes is their power to move whole populations in ways of which they are unaware. Jung, who formulated the concept, said that, }... from within the realm of the subjective psyche, ... the archetype presents itself as numinous, that is, it appears as an experience of fundamental importance. Whenever it clothes itself with adequate symbols, ... it takes hold of the individual in a startling way, creating a condition of 'being deeply moved', the consequences of which may be immeasurable." 4 And James Hillman: "... one thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance. By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a god." 5

The New Theory of Psychohistory 

In his groundbreaking book Foundations of Psychohistory, Lloyd deMause says, "It is not often recognised that psychohistory is the only new social science to be founded in the twentieth century--sociology, psychology and anthropology all having broken away from philosophy in the nineteenth century. ... [This] 'psychogenic theory of history' ... can be summarised as the theory that history involves the acting out by adults of group fantasies which are based on motivations initially produced by the evolution of childhood. ... The theory states that it is not 'economic class' nor 'social class' but 'psychoclass'--shared childrearing modes--that is the real basis for understanding motivation in history." 6

I have been approaching this conclusion for several years, driven by the realization that 'culture' or 'social beliefs' must be derivative rather than prime causes. But if so, what causes culture, what determines the nature of our group beliefs and motivations and hence, historical actions? Sociology's only answer is 'prior culture'--an infinite regress of causation. The answer is obvious, once you see it. Culture is an artifact of group psychology. And group psychology, like individual psychology, is a consequence primarily of childhood experience. It was wonderfully affirming for me when I discovered, just last month, that the science of psychohistory, well developed if not well known, explains history in terms of the acting out of group psychology with its roots in childhood experience.

A central thesis of this essay is that the dominant psychosocial theme of the twentieth century has been the evolution of our psyches beyond traditional, one-sided masculinity and femininity towards individual and cultural wholeness. Group psychology, like individual psychology, follows this path by emphasizing first one pole, one archetype, and then the other. During such times of extreme cultural gender polarization, our fear of change means that we are unwilling to move on to the next stage until the pain and distress of our archetypal one-sidedness has grown to massive proportions. Let's start our examination of this pattern by looking at the psychohistorical gender roots of Nazism.

German Childraising Practice 

My first hint that there might be gender roots to Nazism came when I read Alice Miller's magnificent For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence. She writes, "On the basis of available documents, we can easily gain an impression of the atmosphere in which Adolf Hitler grew up. The family structure could well be characterized as the prototype of a totalitarian regime. Its sole, undisputed, often brutal ruler is the father. The wife and children are totally subservient to his will, his moods and his whims; they must accept humiliation and injustice unquestioningly and gratefully. Obedience is their primary rule of conduct." 7 But was this the general pattern throughout Germany? I asked this question of Lloyd deMause, author of Foundations of Psychohistory. He replied, 'German childrearing was horrific at the end of the 19th century, with tight swaddling for a full year, high infanticide rates, enormous neglect during infancy, battering ..., authoritarianism, moving children around and abandoning them, overcontrol, etc. I can show French, British and American childrearing was much in advance of German. So the early traumatic childrearing is all there, though widely denied by most historians." Alice Miller adds an interesting note about Jewish culture: "... Jewish fathers in Eastern Europe were not trained to be harsh and brutal. They were not forced, like German fathers, to suppress their soft, helpless side from childhood on." 8

German childrearing practice was, in the decades around 1900, almost universally autocratic, with authority focused in the father and brutally enforced with strict physical punishment and extreme lack of empathy for the feelings of the child. The father's decisions were beyond reproach: any complaint was cause for further punishment. Archetypally, this is hypermasculine: any trace of feminine qualities such as empathy or affection is seen as weakness. If such a childhood is universal within a culture so that children never see or experience an alternative, then most idealize it, embrace their parents' view that the abuse they received was deserved and appropriate. They grow up with a particular kind of hole in their psyches, a hole that I call the father wound. The father wound consists of an inability to recognize masculine forms of abuse, and a need to find ways to repeat such abuse in their own lives, but with themselves in the controlling position, as the perpetrators. (The most common form of this, of course, is parents repeating the patterns of abuse with their own children, but this time with themselves in the role of the powerful and righteous one). Where a psychic wound is ubiquitous in a culture, as it was in Germany in the first half of this century, the stage is set for an abusive political ideology to capture the nation, provided that it exactly matches the forms of the original childhood experience.

This, more than any external conditions, is the ground from which Nazism grew in Germany. Consider how well the political ideology matched the original childhood abuse. Nazism was autocratic, rigidly hierarchical, and brutal, with a total lack of empathy or compassion toward human suffering. It embraced Aryan Germans as the 'master race' (allowing most Germans to see themselves as the ones in control), allowed no complaint or criticism against it, and righteously, brutally punished all dissent. It was led by a hypermasculine father figure seen as all-knowing and infallible, who ruled with absolute authority and to whom all deferred, but who presented himself as being, and was believed to be, dedicated to the welfare of those he ruled. In every way, Nazism matched and repeated the major forms and patterns of German childrearing.

A personality or an ideology that emerges from the dark side of a gender archetype always exaggerates the features of the gender it is emphasizing, and fears and rigorously defends against the strengths of the other archetypal pole. An example of this is offered by Jungian analyst Lawrence Jaffe: "The Nazis were great enemies of feeling, though friendly to inferior feeling, better known as sentimentality. (Goering, murderer of thousands, wept inconsolably when his pet canary died.) The Nazis made a sport of placing themselves in situations which would naturally elicit feeling, only to then deliberatedly withhold it. The one who exhibited the least feeling would be accounted the winner. We may fairly assume that Hitler himself unconsciously equated his inner feeling side, his shadow, with Jewishness, and experienced it as a threat to his masculine strength and purposiveness." 9

When hypermasculine military aggression was added to the legendary German scientific and bureaucratic efficiency, Nazism became the purest example of the dark side of the masculine archetype in ideological form in modern times. Germany became a culture possessed by archetypal masculine evil.

Evil Ideology Defined

Evil is a powerful word, and I use it here only after long and careful consideration. In recent years, with the general decay of religious convictions in the west, we have become confused about evil. Indeed, modern New Age and secular humanistic thinking is that evil has no existence, is all 'shadow projection'. I once shared this notion, but I have now concluded that such thinking is dangerously naive. Scott Peck wrote in The Road Less Travelled, "... I have to conclude that evil is real. It is not the figment of the imagination of a primitive religious mind feebly attempting to explain the unknown. There really are people, and institutions made up of people, who respond with hatred in the presence of goodness and would destroy the good insofar as it is in their power to do so. They do this not with conscious malice, but blindly, lacking awareness of their own evilÑindeed, seeking to avoid any such awareness." 10 And from Alice Miller, "The Jungian notion of the shadow, and the notion that evil is the reverse of good, are aimed at denying the reality of evil. But evil is real. It is not innate but acquired, and it is never the reverse of good, but rather its destroyer. ... When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to this production of evil." 11

What is evil? The simplest answer is that evil is anti-life. If, as Jung claimed, the purpose of life and the deepest human desire is to develop ourselves fully, to become all that we can be, then evil strives to reverse this process, to regress towards infantilism. To assist in the practical recognition of evil, I offer my own definition, which has three necessary components. Evil is: 1. The desire for unearned consumption or privilege, plus; 2. The coercion or deception of others in order to achieve it, and; 3. The insistent rationalization of such behaviour as moral and righteous.

Although not explicit in the definition, all the cruelty and brutal destruction that we associate with evil are built on this foundation.

Enjoying unearned consumption or privilege is essentially the role of an infant or child. A child is unique before the law in enjoying rights without responsibilities, whereas adulthood is the state of being a net producer, consuming and producing--in legal terms, of having rights and responsibilities. Traditionally, and archetypically, men's responsibility/production has been physical, economic and political. Exerting themselves against the entropic forces of decay and randomness, they have created order and organization, resulting in food on the table and laws in the land. Women's responsibility/production area has been moral and emotional. In their relationships with their families, especially their children, their emotional exertion returns comfort for pain, peace for anger, security for fear. The quality and sustainability of any society is based entirely on the level of production in these areas: physical/economic/political and moral/emotional. In a healthy society, individuals and institutions trade their production for that of others in conscious, non-coercive, non-deceptive contracts. Traditional marriage is the basic example of this trade, where the man's external production of food and shelter is traded for the woman's 'internal' production of the moral and emotional development of children and domestic relationship harmony.

If some are to enjoy unearned consumption, others must produce more or consume less. Where this is not offered willingly, as it is to children and welfare recipients, for example, some will seek to take it by force or deception. An example is burglary. However, burglars are not evil unless they meet the third criteria, and attempt to justify their actions to themselves and to others as morally righteous. It is this last feature of evil that makes it so pernicious, for the attack on reason can be utterly confusing, and make the destructive nature of evil actions extremely hard to recognize.

An evil ideology contains within its formal arguments such a disguised attack on reason, in the form of purported moral justifications for unearned privilege (for the favoured group) extracted coercively from others. In the case of Nazism, these others were the Jews, whose property was confiscated, and the surrounding nations, whose lands were regarded as forfeit to the German need for 'lebensraum' (living space), whose peoples were enslaved (coerced production without consumption rights) and whose property was seized, all by force and justified by self-serving moral arguments.

Evil is ever amongst us. However, those unique circumstances when, because of ubiquitous childrearing modes in a particular place and time, an evil ideology captures an entire nation or culture, give rise to suffering and destruction on a massive scale. Such, I conclude, is what happened in Nazi Germany--and World War II and the Holocaust were the result. I believe that something very similar is taking shape today, in the case of feminism and the culture of the western world.

The Feminine Archetype 

Idealized Something deeply significant happened after WWII. The world was already reeling from the experience of two World Wars and the Great Depression in the space of a single generation. When the excesses of Nazism were exposed at Nuremberg, when the atom bombs were dropped on Japan, the world recoiled in horror. But what we recoiled from was our own nature. Male institutions and male government were seen as flawed and dangerous. At an archetypal level, we decided as a whole culture that masculinity was suspect, and we took men 'off the pedestal'. As a consequence, because of the oppositional nature of masculine and feminine archetypes, women were established even more strongly on the pedestal. (One result of this is that our image of the mature, ideal or enlightened person is now archetypically feminine in nature: non-aggressive, cooperative rather than competitive, gentle, nurturing, sensitive.) In practice, we began to idealize women and to demonize men. Where there were major problems in the family or the world, we anticipated that they would have male causes and that women would be found to be innocent victims. In fact, we became resistant to any other finding. The focus of moral authority in the family shifted to the mother, since fathers, as males, were ashamed and suspect. In an interview with Bert Hoff, Robert Johnson (author of the books He, She and We about masculine and feminine archetypes) said, "[Women] are stepping into [power] roles as men are retreating and becoming wimpish. I grew up in a family like that. My mother ruled, and my father said 'yes'. That's very common--almost a stereotype for post-World War II marriages." 12 Which is not to say that masculine forms of child abuse ceased, just as feminine forms of abuse certainly weren't absent in father-dominated German families. Rather, the mother became the parent who effectively wielded 'the power that mattered'.

But feminine archetypal power takes different forms than masculine. Where a father's authority is usually overt and direct, that of a mother is more commonly covert and indirect. For example, a mother saying to a child, "YouÕve been so bad, just wait till your father gets home" maintains the appearance of the father being the one who is in charge, when it is clear that it is actually the mother who is judge and jury, and will probably set the sentence. Where a father's discipline is physical and intellectual (e.g., a spanking or a reasoned explanation why something is wrong), a mother's is typically psychological and emotional (e.g., "If it wasn't for you I wouldn't be stuck in this dump" or "you've made me cry"). And, most fundamentally, where the masculine archetype coerces through force and the creation of fear, the feminine archetype coerces through deception and the creation of shame.

This change in our perceptions of men and women has had some huge benefits. For the first time ever, we have publicly recognized and acknowledged child abuse by men. And wife abuse. All forms of archetypally maculine abusiveness, in fact. Because of this new cultural awareness of male forms of violence (i.e., overt sexual or physical abuse), victims of these abuses gain the opportunity to work through and heal these wounds in therapy, in self-help groups, in workshops, in women's shelters and with friends. They may write about their experiences and their recovery. The strong cultural support for the victim, the conviction that abuse is never the child's fault, enables progress against the powerful tendency to repress and avoid such painful feelings.

Because of this, we no longer have a ubiquitous father wound in our psyches. There is no possibility that an evil masculine ideology like Nazism could take over our culture, for its abusiveness and hypocrisy would be quickly recognized. We are no longer idealizing men and in denial about masculine forms of evil. However, we are still in deep denial of feminine evil. In the last fifty years, the feminine forms of child abuse have remained unrecognized. And as long as abuse is unrecognized, it cannot be healed. Today, we have a ubiquitous mother wound.

We gained this wound because our mothers, idealized in modern culture (since now we believed men were responsible for the evil in the world), abused us in feminine ways without our recognizing it as abuse. And with feminine forms of abuse unrecognized, there was no stigma or consequence to mothers for such abuse. Indeed, like the German fathers, they believed that their words and actions were good parenting. And, just as German mothers feared to stand up to the physically abusive fathers, so modern fathers are ashamed to stand up to psychologically abusive mothers. The damage to the soul of the child remains unrecognized. And, with no public consciousness of the destructiveness of such forms of abuse, there is little possibility for large numbers of people to recover as adults. Our mother wound today remains massive, universal, and unhealed.

What is this feminine abuse? It is the separation of the child from his or her trust in their own mind, their own feelings. It is the substitution of the mother's self-serving, subjective determination of right and wrong, of guilt and innocence, for a repeatable, objective standard. It is the crushing of natural emotional expression in the child because such expression is felt by the mother to be distasteful, distressing or inconvenient. As always in abuse, it is the exercise of coercive power in the interest of the exerciser, in this case the mother, and against the interest of the child. It is a form of what Anne Miller calls "poisonous pedagogy". She writes, "Since training in many cultures begins in infancy during the initial symbiotic relationship between mother and child, this early conditioning makes it virtually impossible for the child to discover what is actually happening to him. The child's dependence on his or her parents' love also makes it impossible in later years to recognize these traumatizations, which often remain hidden behind the early idealization of the parents for the rest of the child's life." 13

Archetypal feminine abuses are indirect (exercised through others such as the father or siblings), psychological or emotional ("you should be ashamed of yourself", or "stop your crying at once"), covert (often communicated by no more than a glance that says, "You're such a disappointment"), manipulative (you can't understand because you're not a woman/not an adult/etc.), and psychologically rather than physically incestuous ("let me tell you what your father is really like"). Such behaviour is seen as adequate parenting, not ideal perhaps, but not really harmful. Nowhere is it a criminal offense, as are the masculine forms of child abuse. Yet, I argue that it is at least as damaging as are the masculine abuses with which we are familiar, but that the wounds it produces are different. Fundamentally, it is built on the use of shame to control behaviour (as opposed to the dark masculine which uses fear for the same purpose). Where fear attacks the will, shame kills the soul. In her book Shame: Spiritual Suicide, Vicki Underland Rosow says that shame is systemic in our western culture, and gives examples of its use in religion, politics, education, helping professions, and science.

So we, in the West, because of our childrearing practice, possess a massive, ubiquitous, archetypally feminine wound in our psyches, of which we are unconscious, and which I call the mother wound. According to this thesis, then, we are ripe for the appearance of an evil feminine ideology to exploit this wound. This ideology is already among us, and its name is feminism.

Feminism 

Firstly, it is important to say to what I refer with the name feminism. A standard defense against any criticism of feminism is that it is no one thing, but many shades of beliefs and affiliations, such as liberal feminism, socialist or marxist feminism, radical feminism, ecofeminism, etc. Of course these branches exist, but this is irrelevant. Any ideology is identified by its basic tenets, which remain unchanged across all its variations, since it is they that unite the varieties under the one banner. In the case of feminism, all branches share the same basic belief that history has been a story of general oppression of women by men. Indeed, this is acknowledged by feminists as the essential, defining principle, for example, by Alison M. Jaggar and Paula Rothenberg Struhl in their book Feminist Frameworks, where they say, "... the conservative view of womenÕs situation in society is not feminist, because it denies that women are oppressed." 14

Further, I want to be very clear that it is not my intention, nor would I consider it valid, to indict feminism based on the words or actions of any radical elements or 'lunatic fringe'. Only the consistent messages of its major, acknowledged spokespersons and the major policies that it has pursued will be used here to build a case. My focus is on modern, mainstream feminism, which for brevity I will refer to simply as feminism. And, while my research indicates that the same phenomenon is operating throughout the Western world, I will confine my examples to North American feminism, since this is the area that I know best.

Feminism is an Evil Ideology

If feminism is indeed an ideology which is exploiting a ubiquitous 'mother wound', then the forms it has taken will exactly match and repeat the feminine forms of child abuse, just as Nazism matched the German masculine mode. Is this the case? It is non-hierarchical: indeed, feminists make much of their peer-level, consensual processes, and there are no national or international 'heads' or chiefs of the feminist movement. Similarly, it is indirect, in that nowhere is there an overtly feminist legislature, university, law court or military, or even a female one. Rather, feminism exerts its power indirectly, having those in positions of power do its bidding without needing itself to hold those positions in order to achieve its aims. In this it operates exactly like the mother in post-war families, where the father's authority seems to be intact, yet it is the mother's will that rules.

Feminism is subjective rather than objective, driven by women's feelings about what is right--which exactly reflects the way that mothers decided what was right in modern families. In issues of law, where objectivity and repeatability are vital, feminism has successfully argued that any unwelcome or hostile feeling in a woman is to be regarded as establishing sexual harassment. And modern anti-stalking legislation discards hard-won fundamental freedoms such as equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, and rights to freedom of association and to property (for men) in order to ensure that "no one [is made to] feel afraid and unsafe in their own home or community" 15 (emphasis added). Extensive feminist writing on gender equality is simply rationalizations of women's feelings of inequality, for when analyzed carefully, modern feminist arguments always reveal themselves to be built not on objective gender equality but on female superiority. Even feminist philosophy, now founded in post-modern constructivism, standpoint theory and "women's ways of knowing", is essentially subjective.

Like post-war mothers, feminism portrays itself as the virtuous victim struggling to correct male injustices. Requests for change are never presented as simply, "Let's work together to achieve this goal ...", but always as grievances, as arguments that women are owed more money, more power, more rights, more ... consumption of society's production. The argument is always moral in nature, always filled with angst and outrage, and always favours women. Feminists do not mention the many ways that women enjoy gender advantage over men--except to deny their reality or their import--because they never feel any disadvantage but their own.

Finally, and most importantly, feminism gets its way through the inculcation of shame. Here is the lever, the engine of modern social control: a lever that can be operated only by or on behalf of women. For, when we were tiny, it was our mothers who convinced us that we were unworthy except when we pleased them, no good unless we had their approval. The deep sense of shame that was planted in the psyches of both boys and girls, that I call the mother wound, now provides the means for feminists to effectively control every area of social power. Male--and female--legislators, judges, academics, managers, all re-experience those intense feelings of shame and unworthiness they felt as children, when angry women say or imply that they are bad. Indeed, their whole lives have been built around reassuring themselves that they are worthy through good works, public accomplishment or financial success. However, none of these external defenses can stand for long against feminist shaming if the inner psyche still carries the mother wound, still gives to Woman the ultimate power to determine its worth.

Just how powerful is shame as a coercive technique? Powerful, wealthy men gave up their lives to save those of women and children on the Titanic in 1912. Why? Because of the shame they would feel as a coward, if they didn't. In wartime, average men will run directly into machine gun fire, knowing they will die a meaningless death, rather than face the shame they would feel if they fled the battle. Shame is the most intense psychological pain we can feel. We usually prefer to die. It's that big.

I have shown, very briefly, that the forms adopted by ideological feminism match those of modern, archetypally feminine child abuse. But does feminism meet the definition of an evil ideology? Let us see.

Firstly, does feminism seek unearned privilege--rights without responsibilities? A major plank of modern feminism from the beginning has been reproductive rights; specifically, a woman's right to abort an unwanted child. Has feminism sought to address the issues of others affected by this right, such as the fetus, the father or society? No, feminists have universally repudiated all responsibility to such others. They demandÑand have receivedÑthe unilateral right to abort an unborn child, or not, as they choose. (Note that this is a brand new right, and not one that men ever had.) In 1969, Betty Friedan said, "Only one voice needs to be heard on the question of whether a woman will or will not bear a child, and that is the voice of the woman herself: her own conscience, her own conscious choice." 16 Fetuses have no rights at all, since, feminists argue, "A woman's body, a woman's choice". This emotive, shaming slogan ignores all the ways that a fetus is unique from all other female body parts--for example that it can grow into a person, that it is the result of a sexual act with a man, and that it can be male or female--in favour of the obscuring argument that it is enclosed in and fed by the woman's body. And so we have the iniquitous situation that the father has no say in whether his offspring lives or dies, is not even required to be notified of the pregnancy, yet is legally obliged to support the child if the woman chooses to keep it--and whether he intended or wishes to be a father or not. And society, again with no say in the woman's choice, yet must foot the bills for welfare moms. Saying to a woman, "If you didn't want a child, you shouldn't have had sex" is met by feminists with howls of outrage and accusations of discrimination--yet this is exactly what those same feminists say to men in the same situation. Clearly, in women's area of traditional responsibility--reproduction--feminism wants no gender equality, but rather has sought and won rights for women and responsibilities for men.

What about in other areas? In men's areas of traditional responsibility, the real equality issues--the right to vote, laws against gender discrimination in employment, in salary, in housing, in access to professional roles--were addressed years ago. Today, all feminist initiatives--every single one--are about giving women rights over men, and men responsibility for women. Thus we have employment equity (affirmative action) for jobs where men predominate, but not for those where women are in the majority. We have ever more punitive enforcement of child support, but no enforcement at all for access by fathers to their children. We have zero tolerance (i.e., arrest the man on the woman's word) against male violence against women based on feminist advocacy studies that model all domestic violence in terms of male oppression of female victims, and deny the reality of women's equal initiation of violence in the home. We have sexual harassment laws addressing the ways that men might abuse women's sexuality in the workplace, but no laws addressing (or even acknowledging) women's use of their sexuality to unfairly advance their careers. We have even defined obscenity, here in Canada, in terms of what harms women! 17

All of these feminist initatives seek women's advantage coercively, which is the second criterion describing an evil ideology. Feminists are not saying to men and to society, "Offer these things where you choose." No, they insist (and have been granted) that these rights be given the coercive force of law. And in doing so, they employ their own, archetypally feminine forms of coercion: deception and shame. Deception appears in the creation and use of false and distorted statistics (such as the many studies showing that women continue to earn less than men, but which ignore differences between men and women in hours worked, years of experience, overtime, credentials and the like, which when factored in account entirely for the differences in apparent earnings). And shame is coercive in a similar way to blackmail, in that the ability of legislators, academics, judges--and voters!--to consider the issues dispassionately and make free, sensible choices is virtually eliminated by their need to avoid their denied but still devastating feelings of shame if they ever see themselves as abusive to women.

In Canada, a feminist initiative of the moment is pay equity. A Human Rights Tribunal has ordered the federal government to pay approximately five billion dollars to (mostly) female government workers, because their work was "undervalued" with respect to that of men. This argument is totally fallacious. Unequal pay for equal work and discrimination in hiring (the real equality issues) have been illegal in North America for years. Any woman who wanted the higher paying 'male' work could have competed for it like the men. The fact is, salaries are set by market demand: where many people desire a particular kind of employment (such as clerical office work), the supply forces salaries down. And that's as it should be, since the price of production then represents the real costs. (Communist Russia went broke trying to make the market serve ideological goals.) What the pay equity advocates really want is the cushy, attractive office work they desire, and the higher salaries of the less desirable (hence higher paid) jobs. They want to be subsidised on the backs of others. They want to increase their consumption without any increase in their production. They want a legal entitlement to it. And they're getting it.

The third aspect of an evil ideology is the maintenance of an image of total and perpetual moral righteousness. Many of the examples already discussed have already made this apparent, so I will confine myself to exposing the basic strategies employed.

If one is pursuing goals (women's advantage) which must be disguised, then it is vital to have devices by which meaningful debate can be avoided or deflected. Feminism has three basic strategies for this: 1. Where there is a difference in society between men's and women's roles, ignore the real causes and present the difference always as evidence of male oppression and discrimination against women--and demand compensatory programs (e.g., abortion on demand, sexual harassment, pay equity, censorship of pornography, etc.). 2. Where there is no difference between men's and women's roles, or such differences as do exist already favour women, create biased studies and statistics to argue that women are disadvantaged. Claim that difference as evidence of male oppression and demand compensatory programs (e.g., women's health, violence against women). If necessary, introduce "violence against women and children" as an emotional trump card to shut down debate of the real issues. (e.g., allegations of child or wife abuse in child custody cases). 3. If anyone opposes or criticises feminist claims, silence or isolate them through shame, by accusing them of "backlash", i.e., of being opposed the equality of women in order to maintain their own selfish or oppressive behaviour. (Note that this also works against women, who are said to be "colonized" by the patriarchy.) Summary: Never, under any circumstances, yield the moral high ground. It seems that feminism, not love, means never having to say you're sorry! (e.g., the contortions that feminists are performing as they rationalize their support for Bill Clinton in the face of behaviour that, in anyone else, they would condemn. As, indeed, they condemned United States Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas for the alleged 'crime' of making suggestive or lewd personal comments in the workplace.)

Conclusion

I have tried to sketch a picture of where I believe we are today, and how we got here. I want to finish with some words about where I think we are going.

What is the ultimate objective of modern feminism? Feminists sincerely believe that it is equality that they seek. But it is not. Because they are unconsciously acting out of the mother wound, their goal is to regress women to the state of childhood: i.e., rights without responsibilities, consumption without production. For men, they have the opposite objective: responsibilities without rights. People with responsibilities but no rights are slaves. We are currently headed, unconsciously but inevitably, for a world in which women are children and men are slaves. Not until we recognize the truth of this and recoil in horror as a whole culture, will we wake up from this nightmare.

The situation is very grave, but the real war has not yet begun. We are still appeasing feminists, trying to give them enough of what they want so that we won't have to confront them in their power, much as the allies did with Hitler in 1936-39. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. In fact, as then, it will lead to disaster.

The coming war is unavoidable. At a psychological level, we have to take women off the pedestal, and we won't do that as a culture until we see the evil that they do, as we already have with men. But we are very attached to idealizing women. 'Motherhood' is our last great god(dess), and so it will take massive suffering before we will be willing to see women's dark side and let them be fully human.

The war I refer to will not be a physical war--that would be an archetypal masculine form. Rather, it will be a spiritual war, a war about meaning and life purpose and what is true. It will need not physical soldiers, but people who have done their own healing and become emotionally and morally strong, who are recovering from being controlled through shame. In the short term, I believe that we will see increasing levels of violence and delinquency as traditional social restraints break down, increasingly strident claims that it is all the fault of men, ever-greater penalization of men and 'protection' of women and children, and rising levels of psychological distress, despair and suicide. Feminism will become ever more virulent and radical. We will know that we have won, that we are beginning to emerge from it when anger and fear finally turn to grief, when we see massive grief across our whole culture, grief at what we have done, at what we have allowed to happen to our children and to ourselves.

I can only guess how long this process will take: probably at least twenty years. Comparing it to the situation in Nazi Germany, two things stand out. The first is that the mother wound is deeper than the father wound, because our relationship with out mother is the first and deepest relationship we make. That, of course, is why we did the father work first--it was easier. And so the working out of the mother wound will be harder and more distressing, and perhaps require more suffering before we are finished with it. And the second thing is that there are no "allies" waiting in the wings to save us. We must do what Nazi Germany was unable to do: we must find the resources to recognizze and to battle this evil from within our own culture, even while still possessed and blinded by the power of our mother wound. I don't know how we will do it, but I see no alternative.

I realize, as I write these words, that most will deny them, that it is no small thing for us to recognize the truth about the system that we are immersed in. It is as difficult as recognizing the truth about our families. Indeed, it is recognizing the truth about our families. This is not comfortably remote, like Nazism is now for most of us, but archetypally powerful in our psyches right now. It is significant, perhaps, that there was no effective resistance to Nazism within Germany, from the beginning to the end of the Third Reich. Consider what that means. Despite all of the atrocities, the loss of personal freedoms, the social and political abuses, and the massive financial and personal costs of the war, Nazism yet enjoyed apparent popular support throughout Germany until the end. Clearly, it satisfied a vital need. That is the kind of challenge that I believe we are facing.

I want to end on a more positive note. On the other side of this challenge lies cultural maturity, social consciousness. The mother wound is the last ubiquitous psychological wound. When it, too, is healed, we will, for the very first time in all of history, be conscious as a culture of all the forms of archetypal childhood abuse, and their consequences in later life. We will work out and recover from our shame issues just as we do now with our physical and sexual abuse issues, and we will begin, for the first time ever, to transact consciously rather than codependently with each other as the general pattern of social intercourse. What forms of government, of entertainment, of social discourse we will then create and enjoy, I can hardly imagine. I probably won't be alive to see it. But I intend to live to help it come to pass.


References --

1 King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, Harper Collins 1990, p.9.

2 Collected Works #9, Carl Gustav Jung, Bollinger, paragraph 99.

3 The Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916, Carl Gustav Jung, in Collected Works #7, Bollinger, pp.60, 74.

4 Introduction to M. Esther Harding, WomenÕs Mysteries, Carl Gustav Jung, in Collected Works #18, Bollinger.

5 A Blue Fire: Selected Writings, James Hillman, Harper Collins, N.Y., 1991, p.24.

6 Foundations of Psychohistory, Lloyd deMause, Creative Roots Inc., N.Y.,1982, pp.i-ii.

7 For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence, Alice Miller, pub. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, N.Y., 1983, p.146.

8 The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, Alice Miller, Doubleday, 1990, p.54.

9 Liberating the Heart: Spirituality and Jungian Psychology, Lawrence W. Jaffe, Inner City Books, Toronto, 1990, p.112.

10 The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, M. Scott Peck, Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1978, p.278.

11 Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries, Alice Miller, Doubleday, N.Y., 1990, pp.142-143.

12 ÒMale and Masculine: An Interview with Robert A JohnsonÓ by Bert Hoff, in MenÕs Voices: A Quarterly Journal, Vol 1 #3, Summer/Fall Ô98, The WhiteRock Alternative, Seattle, WA, p23.
13 For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence, Alice Miller,Farrar/Strauss/Giroux, NY, 1983, p.4.

14 Feminist Frameworks, Alison M. Jaggar & Paula Rothenberg Struhl, McGraw-Hill, 1978, p.69.

15 ÒManitoba Legislation on Stalking and Domestic ViolenceÓ by David Shackleton, in Everyman: A MenÕs Journal, #34, Nov/Dec Ô98, Ottawa, ON, p55.

16 ÒAbortion: A WomanÕs Civil RightÓ speech by Betty Friedan to the First National Conference for Repeal of Abortion Laws, Chicago, 1969, in It Changed My Life:Writings on the WomenÕs Movement, Betty Friedan, Random House 1976, p123.

17 Canadian Supreme Court ÒButlerÓ decision, 1992.

David Shackleton is a thinker and writer on gender, and editor and publisher of Everyman: A Men's Journal. He specifically requests comments and correspondence about the ideas and arguments in this essay, as he is now expanding this thesis into a book. Contact him at

PO Box 4617, Stn. E,
Ottawa, ON
K1S 5H8
Canada

E-mail: editor@everyman.org - http://www.everyman.org/

EOTM: The S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto -- by Valerie Solanas

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

It is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. The male is a biological accident: the y (male) gene is an incomplete x (female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, of love, friendship, affection or tenderness. He is a completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone. His responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the service of his drives and needs; he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can't relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. He is a half dead, unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness; consequently, he is at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob, since only those capable of absorption in others can be charming. He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings--hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt--and moreover he is aware or what he is or isn't.

Although completely physical, the male is unfit even for stud service. Even assuming mechanical proficiency, which few men have, he is, first of all, incapable of zestfully, lustfully, tearing off a piece, but is instead eaten up with guilt, shame, fear and insecurity, feelings rooted in male nature, which the most enlightened training can only minimize; second, the physical feeling he attains is next to nothing; and, third, he is not empathizing with his partner, but is obsessed with how he's doing, turning in an A performance, doing a good plumbing job. To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo. It's often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure.

Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he's lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he'll swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and, furthermore, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving physical tension isn't the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It's not ego satisfaction; that doesn't explain screwing corpses and babies.

Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive. He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is ("prove he's a Man"). His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing (Big Man with a Big Dick tearing off a Big Piece). Since he's attempting to prove an error, he must "prove" it again and again. Screwing, then, is a desperate, compulsive attempt to prove he's not passive, not a woman; but he is passive and does want to be a woman.

Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female, and by claiming as his own all female characteristics--emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc. --and projecting onto women all male traits--vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female--public relations. (He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.) The male claim that females find fulfillment through motherhood and sexuality reflects what males think they'd find fulfilling if they were female.

Women, in other words, don't have penis envy; men have pussy envy. When the male accepts his passivity, defines himself as a woman (males as well as females think men are women and women are men), and becomes a transvestite he loses his desire to screw (or to do anything else, for that matter; he fulfills himself as a drag queen) and gets his cock chopped off. He then achieves a continuous diffuse sexual feeling from "being a woman". Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female. Sex is itself a sublimation.

The male, because of his obsession to compensate for not being female combined with his inability to relate and to feel compassion, has made of the world a shitpile. He is responsible for:
War: The male's normal method of compensation for not being female, namely, getting his Big Gun off, is grossly inadequate, as he can get it off only a very limited number of times; so he gets it off on a really massive scale, and proves to the entire world that he's a "Man". Since he has no compassion or ability to empathize or identify, proving his manhood is worth an endless number of lives, including his own--his own life being worthless, he would rather go out in a blaze of glory than plod grimly on for fifty more years.

Niceness, Politeness and "Dignity": Every man, deep down, knows he's a worthless piece of shit. Overwhelmed by a sense of animalism and deeply ashamed of it; wanting, not to express himself, but to hide from others his total physicality, total egocentricity, the hate and contempt he feels for other men, and to hide from himself the hate and contempt he suspects other men feel for him; having a crudely constructed nervous system that is easily upset by the least display of emotion or feeling, the male tries to enforce a "social" code that ensures a perfect blandness, unsullied by the slightest trace of feeling or upsetting opinion. He uses terms like "copulate", "sexual congress", "have relations with" (to men, "sexual relations" is a redundancy), overlaid with stilted manners; the suit on the chimp.

Money, Marriage and Prostitution, Work and Prevention of an Automated Society: There is no human reason for money or for anyone to work more than two or three hours a week at the very most. All non-creative jobs (practically all jobs now being done) could have been automated long ago, and in a moneyless society everyone can have as much of the best of everything as she wants. But there are non-human, male reasons for maintaining the money-work system:

1. Pussy. Despising his highly inadequate self, overcome with intense anxiety and a deep, profound loneliness when by his empty self, desperate to attach himself to any female in dim hopes of completing himself, in the mystical belief that by touching gold he'll turn to gold, the male craves the continuous companionship of women. The company of the lowest female is preferable to his own or that of other men, who serve only to remind him of his repulsiveness. But females, unless very young or very sick, must be coerced or bribed into male company.

2. Supply the non-relating male with the delusion of usefulness, and enable him to try to justify his existence by digging holes and filling them up. Leisure time horrifies the male, who will have nothing to do but contemplate his grotesque self. Unable to relate or to love, the male must work. Females crave absorbing, emotionally satisfying, meaningful activity, but lacking the opportunity or ability for this, they prefer to idle and waste away their time in ways of their own choosing--sleeping, shopping, bowling, shooting pool, playing cards and other games, breeding, reading, walking around, daydreaming, eating, playing with themselves, popping pills, going to the movies, getting analyzed, traveling, raising dogs and cats, lolling on the beach, swimming, watching T.V., listening to music, decorating their houses, gardening, sewing, nightclubbing, dancing, visiting, "improving their minds" (taking courses), and absorbing "culture" (lectures, plays, concerts, "arty" movies). Therefore, many females would, even assuming complete economic equality between the sexes, prefer living with males or peddling their asses on the street, thus having most of their time for themselves, to spending many hours of their days doing boring, stultifying, non-creative work for somebody else, functioning as less than animals, as machines, or, at best,--if able to get a "good" job--co-managing the shitpile. What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.

3. Power and control. Unmasterful in his personal relations with women, the male attains to general masterfulness by the manipulation of money and of everything and everybody controlled by money, in other words, of everything and everybody.

4. Love substitute. Unable to give love or affection, the male gives money. It makes him feel motherly. The mother gives milk; he gives bread. He is the Breadwinner.

5. Provides the male with a goal. Incapable of enjoying the moment, the male needs something to look forward to, and money provides him with an eternal, never-ending goal: Just think what you could do with 80 trillion dollars--Invest it! And in three years time you'd have 300 trillion dollars!!!

6. Provides the basis for the male's major opportunity to control and manipulate--fatherhood.

Fatherhood and Mental Illness (fear, cowardice, timidity, humility, insecurity, passivity): Mother wants what's best for her kids; Daddy only wants what's best for Daddy, that is peace and quiet, pandering to his delusion of dignity ("respect"), a good reflection on himself (status) and the opportunity to control and manipulate, or, if he's an "enlightened" father, to "give guidance". His daughter, in addition, he wants sexually--he gives her hand in marriage; the other part is for him. Daddy, unlike Mother, can never give in to his kids, as he must, at all costs, preserve his delusion of decisiveness, forcefulness, always-rightness and strength. Never getting one's way leads to lack of self-confidence in one's ability to cope with the world and to a passive acceptance of the status quo. Mother loves her kids, although she sometimes gets angry, but anger blows over quickly and even while it exists, doesn't preclude love and basic acceptance. Emotionally diseased Daddy doesn't love his kids; he approves of them--if they're "good", that is, if they're nice, "respectful", obedient, subservient to his will, quiet and not given to unseemly displays of temper that would be most upsetting to Daddy's easily disturbed male nervous system--in other words, if they're passive vegetables. If they're not "good", he doesn't get angry--not if he's a modern, "civilized" father (the old-fashioned ranting, raving brute is preferable, as he is so ridiculous he can be easily despised)--but rather expresses disapproval, a state that, unlike anger, endures and precludes a basic acceptance, leaving the kid with a feeling of worthlessness and a lifelong obsession with being approved of; the result is fear of independent thought, as this leads to unconventional, disapproved of opinions and way of life.

For the kid to want Daddy's approval it must respect Daddy, and, being garbage, Daddy can make sure that he is respected only by remaining aloof, by distantness, by acting on the precept "familiarity breeds contempt", which is, of course, true, if one is contemptible. By being distant and aloof, he is able to remain unknown, mysterious, and, thereby, to inspire fear ("respect").

Disapproval of emotional "scenes" leads to fear of strong emotion, fear of one's own anger and hatred, and to a fear of facing reality, as facing it leads at first to anger and hatred. Fear of anger and hatred combined with a lack of self-confidence in one's ability to cope with and change the world, or even to affect in the slightest way one's own destiny, leads to a mindless belief that the world and most people in it are nice and that the most banal, trivial amusements are great fun and deeply pleasurable.

The effect of fatherhood on males, specifically, is to make them "Men", that is, highly defensive of all impulses to passivity, faggotry, and of desires to be female. Every boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her, but Daddy forbids this; he is the mother; he gets to fuse with her. So he tells the boy, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, to not be a sissy, to act like a "Man". The boy, scared shitless of and "respecting" his father, complies, and becomes just like Daddy, that model of "Man"-hood, the all-American ideal--the well-behaved heterosexual dullard.

The effect of fatherhood on females is to make them male--dependent, passive, domestic, animalistic, nice, insecure, approval and security seekers, cowardly, humble, "respectful" of authorities and men, closed, not fully responsive, half dead, trivial, dull, conventional, flattened out and thoroughly contemptible. Daddy's Girl, always tense and fearful, uncool, unanalytical, lacking objectivity, appraises Daddy, and thereafter, other men, against a background of fear ("respect") and is not only unable to see the empty shell behind the aloof facade, but accepts the male definition of himself as superior, as a female, and of herself, as inferior, as a male, which, thanks to Daddy, she really is.

It is the increase of fatherhood, resulting from the increased and widespread affluence that fatherhood needs in order to thrive, that has caused the general increase of mindlessness and the decline of women in the United States since the 1920s. The close association of affluence with fatherhood has led, for the most part, to only the wrong girls, namely, the "privileged" middle-class girls, getting "educated".

The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch--everything he touches turns to shit.

Suppression of Individuality, Animalism (domesticity and motherhood) and Functionalism: The male is just a bundle of conditioned reflexes, incapable of a mentally free response; he is tied to his early conditioning, determined completely by his past experiences. His earliest experiences are with his mother, and he is throughout his life tied to her. It never becomes completely clear to the male that he is not part of his mother, that he is he and she is she.

His greatest need is to be guided, sheltered, protected and admired by Mama (men expect women to adore what men shrink from in horror--themselves) and, being completely physical, he yearns to spend his time (that's not spent "out in the world" grimly defending against his passivity) wallowing in basic animal activities--eating, sleeping, shitting, relaxing and being soothed by Mama. Passive, rattle-headed Daddy's Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the "respect" of any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the puny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.

The reduction to animals of the women of the most backward segment of society--the "privileged, educated" middle-class, the backwash of humanity--where Daddy reigns supreme, has been so thorough that they try to groove on labor pains and lie around in the most advanced nation in the world in the middle of the twentieth century with babies chomping away on their tits. It's not for the kids' sake, though, that the "experts" tell women that Mama should stay home and grovel in animalism, but for Daddy's; the tit's for Daddy to hang onto; the labor pains for Daddy to vicariously groove on (half dead, he needs awfully strong stimuli to make him respond).

Reducing the female to an animal, to Mama, to a male, is necessary for psychological as well as practical reasons: the male is a mere member of the species, interchangeable with every other male. He has no deep-seated individuality, which stems from what intrigues you, what outside yourself absorbs you, what you're in relation to. Completely self-absorbed, capable of being in relation only to their bodies and physical sensations, males differ from each other only to the degree and in the ways they attempt to defend against their passivity and against their desire to be female.

The female's individuality, which he is acutely aware of, but which he doesn't comprehend and isn't capable of relating to or grasping emotionally, frightens and upsets him and fills him with envy. So he denies it in her and proceeds to define everyone in terms of his or her function or use, assigning to himself, of course, the most important functions--doctor, president, scientist--thereby providing himself with an identity, if not individuality, and tries to convince himself and women (he's succeeded best at convincing women) that the female function is to bear and raise children and to relax, comfort and boost the ego of the male; that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.

Prevention of Privacy: Although the male, being ashamed of what he is and of almost everything he does, insists on privacy and secrecy in all aspects of his life, he has no real regard for privacy. Being empty, not being a complete, separate being, having no self to groove on and needing to be constantly in female company, he sees nothing at all wrong in intruding himself on any woman's thoughts, even a total stranger's, anywhere at any time, but rather feels indignant and insulted when put down for doing so, as well as confused--he can't, for the life of him, understand why anyone would prefer so much as one minute of solitude to the company of any creep around. Wanting to become a woman, he strives to be constantly around females, which is the closest he can get to becoming one, so he created a "society" based on the family--a male-female couple and their kids (the excuse for the family's existence), who live virtually on top of one another, unscrupulously violating the females' rights, privacy and sanity.

Isolation, Suburbs and Prevention of Community: Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she is exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual by becoming a "rugged individualist", a loner, equating non-co-operation and solitariness with individuality.

There is yet another reason for the male to isolate himself: every man is an island. Trapped inside himself, emotionally isolated, unable to relate, the male has a horror of civilization, people, cities, situations requiring an ability to understand and relate to people. So, like a scared rabbit, he scurries off, dragging Daddy's little asshole along with him to the wilderness, the suburbs, or, in the case of the "hippie"--he's way out, Man! --all the way out to the cow pasture where he can fuck and breed undisturbed and mess around with his beads and flute.

The "hippie", whose desire to be a "Man", a "rugged individualist", isn't quite as strong as the average man's, and who, in addition, is excited by the thought of having lots of women accessible to him, rebels against the harshness of a Breadwinner's life and the monotony of one woman. In the name of sharing and co-operation, he forms the commune or tribe, which, for all its togetherness and partly because of it (the commune, being an extended family, is an extended violation of the females' rights, privacy and sanity) is no more a community than normal "society".

A true community consists of individuals--not mere species members, not couples--respecting each other's individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally--free spirits in free relation to each other-and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of "society" is the family; "hippies" say the tribe; no one says the individual.

The "hippie" babbles on about individuality, but has no more conception of it than any other man. He desires to get back to Nature, back to the wilderness, back to the home of the furry animals that he's one of, away from the city, where there is at least a trace, a bare beginning of civilization, to live at the species level, his time taken up with simple, non-intellectual activities--farming, fucking, bead stringing. The most important activity of the commune, the one on which it is based, is gangbanging. The "hippie" is enticed to the commune mainly by the prospect of all the free pussy--the main commodity to be shared, to be had just for the asking but, blinded by greed, he fails to anticipate all the other men he has to share with, or the jealousies and possessiveness of the pussies themselves.

Men cannot co-operate to achieve a common end, because each man's end is all the pussy for himself. The commune, therefore, is doomed to failure: each "hippie" will, in panic, grab the first simpleton who digs him and whisk her off to the suburbs as fast as he can. The male cannot progress socially, but merely swings back and forth from isolation to gangbanging.

Conformity: Although he wants to be an individual, the male is scared of anything in himself that is the slightest bit different from other men; it causes him to suspect that he's not really a "Man", that he's passive and totally sexual, a highly upsetting suspicion. If other men are A and he's not, he must not be a man; he must be a fag. So he tries to affirm his "Manhood" by being like all the other men. Differentness in other men, as well as in himself, threatens him; it means they're fags whom he must at all costs avoid, so he tries to make sure that all other men conform.

The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess. The farthest out male is the drag queen, but he, although different from most men, is exactly like all other drag queens; like the functionalist, he has an identity--he is a female. He tries to define all his troubles away--but still no individuality. Not completely convinced that he's a woman, highly insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made feminine stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.

To be sure he's a "Man", the male must see to it that the female be clearly a "Woman", the opposite of a "Man", that is, the female must act like a faggot. And Daddy's Girl, all of whose female instincts were wrenched out of her when little, easily and obligingly adapts herself to the role.

Authority and Government: Having no sense of right or wrong, no conscience, which can only stem from an ability to empathize with others...having no faith in his non-existent self, being necessarily competitive and, by nature, unable to co-operate, the male feels a need for external guidance and control. So he created authorities--priests, experts, bosses, leaders, etc. --and government. Wanting the female (Mama) to guide him, but unable to accept this fact (he is, after all, a MAN), wanting to play Woman, to usurp her function as Guider and Protector, he sees to it that all authorities are male.

There's no reason why a society consisting of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other, complete and having no natural reason to compete, should have a government, laws or leaders.

Philosophy, Religion and Morality Based on Sex: The male's inability to relate to anybody or anything makes his life pointless and meaningless (the ultimate male insight is that life is absurd), so he invented philosophy and religion. Being empty, he looks outward, not only for guidance and control, but for salvation and for the meaning of life. Happiness being for him impossible on this earth, he invented Heaven.

For a man, having no ability to empathize with others and being totally sexual, "wrong" is sexual "license" and engaging in "deviant" ("unmanly") sexual practices, that is, not defending against his passivity and total sexuality which, if indulged, would destroy "civilization", since "civilization" is based entirely on the male need to defend himself against these characteristics. For a woman (according to men), "wrong" is any behavior that would entice men into sexual "license"--that is, not placing male needs above her own and not being a faggot.

Religion not only provides the male with a goal (Heaven) and helps keep women tied to men, but offers rituals through which he can try to expiate the guilt and shame he feels at not defending himself enough against his sexual impulses; in essence, that guilt and shame he feels at being a male.

Most men, utterly cowardly, project their inherent weaknesses onto women, label them female weaknesses and believe themselves to have female strengths; most philosophers, not quite so cowardly, face the fact that male lacks exist in men, but still can't face the fact that they exist in men only. So they label the male condition the Human Condition, pose their nothingness problem, which horrifies them, as a philosophical dilemma, thereby giving stature to their animalism, grandiloquently label their nothingness their "Identity Problem", and proceed to prattle on pompously about the "Crisis of the Individual", the "Essence of Being", "Existence preceding Essence", "Existential Modes of Being", etc., etc.

A woman not only takes her identity and individuality for granted, but knows instinctively that the only wrong is to hurt others, and that the meaning of life is love.

Prejudice (racial, ethnic, religious, etc.): The male needs scapegoats onto whom he can project his failings and inadequacies and upon whom he can vent his frustration at not being female.
Competition, Prestige, Status, Formal Education, Ignorance and Social and Economic Classes: Having an obsessive desire to be admired by women, but no intrinsic worth, the male constructs a highly artificial society enabling him to appropriate the appearance of worth through money, prestige, "high" social class, degrees, professional position and knowledge and, by pushing as many other men as possible down professionally, socially, economically, and educationally.
The purpose of "higher" education is not to educate but to exclude as many as possible from the various professions.

The male, totally physical, incapable of mental rapport, although able to understand and use knowledge and ideas, is unable to relate to them, to grasp them emotionally; he does not value knowledge and ideas for their own sake (they're just means to ends) and, consequently, feels no need for mental companions, no need to cultivate the intellectual potentialities of others. On the contrary, the male has a vested interest in ignorance; he knows that an enlightened, aware female population will mean the end of him. The healthy, conceited female wants the company of equals whom she can respect and groove on; the male and the sick, insecure, unself-confident male female crave the company of worms.

No genuine social revolution can be accomplished by the male, as the male on top wants the status quo, and all the male on the bottom wants is to be the male on top. The male "rebel" is a farce; this is the male's "society", made by him to satisfy his needs. He's never satisfied, because he's not capable of being satisfied. Ultimately, what the male "rebel" is rebelling against is being male. The male changes only when forced to do so by technology, when he has no choice, when "society" reaches the stage where he must change or die. We're at that stage now; if women don't get their asses in gear fast, we may very well all die.

Prevention of Conversation: Being completely self-centered and unable to relate to anything outside himself, the male's "conversation", when not about himself, is an impersonal droning on, removed from anything of human value. Male "intellectual conversation" is a strained, compulsive attempt to impress the female.

Daddy's Girl, passive, adaptable, respectful of and in awe of the male, allows him to impose his hideously dull chatter on her. This is not too difficult for her, as the tension and anxiety, the lack of cool, the insecurity and self-doubt, the unsureness of her own feelings and sensations that Daddy instilled in her make her perceptions superficial and render her unable to see that the male's babble is a babble; like the aesthete "appreciating" the blob that's labeled "Great Art", she believes she's grooving on what bores the shit out of her. Not only does she permit his babble to dominate, she adapts her own "conversation" accordingly.

Trained from early childhood in niceness, politeness and "dignity", in pandering to the male need to disguise his animalism, she obligingly reduces her "conversation" to small talk, a bland insipid avoidance of any topic beyond the utterly trivial--or, if "educated", to "intellectual" discussion, that is, impersonal discoursing on irrelevant abstractions--the Gross National Product, the Common Market, the influence of Rimbaud on symbolist painting. So adept is she at pandering that it eventually becomes second nature and she continues to pander to men even when in the company of other females only.

Apart from pandering, her "conversation" is further limited by her insecurity about expressing deviant, original opinions and the self-absorption based on insecurity and that prevents her conversation from being charming. Niceness, politeness, "dignity", insecurity and self-absorption are hardly conducive to intensity and wit, qualities a conversation must have to be worthy of the name. Such conversation is hardly rampant, as only completely self-confident, arrogant, outgoing, proud, tough-minded females are capable of intense, bitchy, witty conversation.
Prevention of Friendship (Love): Men have contempt for themselves, for all other men, and for all women who respect and pander to them; the insecure, approval-seeking, pandering male females have contempt for themselves and for all women like them; the self-confident, swinging, thrill-seeking female females have contempt for men and for the pandering male females. In short, contempt is the order of the day.

Love is not dependency or sex, but friendship, and, therefore, love can't exist between two males, between a male and a female or between two females, one or both of whom is a mindless, insecure, pandering male; like conversation, love can exist only between two secure, free-wheeling, independent, groovy female females, since friendship is based on respect, not contempt.

Even among groovy females deep friendships seldom occur in adulthood, as almost all of them are either tied up with men in order to survive economically, or bogged down in hacking their way through the jungle and in trying to keep their heads above the amorphous mass. Love can't flourish in a society based on money and meaningless work; it requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship. Our "society" provides practically no opportunity to engage in such activities.
Having stripped the world of conversation, friendship and love, the male offers us these paltry substitutes:

"Great Art" and "Culture": The male "artist" attempts to solve his dilemma of not being able to live, of not being female, by constructing a highly artificial world in which the male is heroized, that is, displays female traits, and the female is reduced to highly limited, insipid subordinate roles, that is, to being male.

The male "artistic" aim being, not to communicate (having nothing inside him, he has nothing to say), but to disguise his animalism, he resorts to symbolism and obscurity ("deep" stuff). The vast majority of people, particularly the "educated" ones, lacking faith in their own judgment, humble, respectful of authority ("Daddy knows best" is translated into adult language as "Critic knows best", "Writer knows best", "Ph.D knows best"), are easily conned into believing that obscurity, evasiveness, incomprehensibility, indirectness, ambiguity and boredom are marks of depth and brilliance.

"Great Art" proves that men are superior to women, that men are women, being labeled "Great Art", almost all of which, as the anti-feminists are fond of reminding us, was created by men. We know that "Great Art" is great because male authorities have told us so, and we can't claim otherwise, as only those with exquisite sensitivities far superior to ours can perceive and appreciate the greatness, the proof of their superior sensitivity being that they appreciate the slop that they appreciate.

Appreciating is the sole diversion of the "cultivated"; passive and incompetent, lacking imagination and wit, they must try to make do with that; unable to create their own diversions, to create a little world of their own, to affect in the smallest way their environments, they must accept what's given; unable to create or relate, they spectate. Absorbing "culture" is a desperate, frantic attempt to groove in an ungroovy world, to escape the horror of a sterile, mindless existence. "Culture" provides a sop to the egos of the incompetent, a means of rationalizing passive spectating; they can pride themselves on their ability to appreciate the "finer" things, to see a jewel where there is only a turd (they want to be admired for admiring). Lacking faith in their ability to change anything, resigned to the status quo, they have to see beauty in turds because, so far as they can see, turds are all they'll ever have.

The veneration of "Art" and "Culture"--besides leading many women into boring, passive activity that distracts from more important and rewarding activities, from cultivating active abilities--allows the "artist" to be set up as one possessing superior feelings, perceptions, insights and judgments, thereby undermining the faith of insecure women in the value and validity of their own feelings, perceptions, insights and judgments.

The male, having a very limited range of feelings and, consequently, very limited perceptions, insights and judgments, needs the "artist" to guide him, to tell him what life is all about. But the male "artist", being totally sexual, unable to relate to anything beyond his own physical sensations, having nothing to express beyond the insight that for the male life is meaningless and absurd, cannot be an artist. How can he who is not capable of life tell us what life is all about? A "male artist" is a contradiction in terms. A degenerate can only produce degenerate "art". The true artist is every self-confident, healthy female, and in a female society the only Art, the only Culture, will be conceited, kookie, funky females grooving on each other and on everything else in the universe.

Sexuality: Sex is not part of a relationship; on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily--far more easily than she may think--condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly-sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape. The lecherous male excited the lustful female; he has to--when the female transcends her body, rises above animalism, the male, whose ego consists of his cock, will disappear.

Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male "culture", in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. The nicest women in our "society" are raving sex maniacs. But, being just awfully, awfully nice they don't, of course, descend to fucking--that's uncouth--rather they make love, commune by means of their bodies and establish sensual rapport; the literary ones are attuned to the throb of Eros and attain a clutch upon the Universe; the religious have spiritual communion with the Divine Sensualism; the mystics merge with the Erotic Principle and blend with the Cosmos, and the acid heads contact their erotic cells.

On the other hand, those females least embedded in the male "Culture", the least nice, those crass and simple souls who reduce fucking to fucking, who are too childish for the grown-up world of suburbs, mortgages, mops and baby shit, too selfish to raise kids and husbands, too uncivilized to give a shit for anyone's opinion of them, too arrogant to respect Daddy, the "Greats" or the deep wisdom of the Ancients, who trust only their own animal, gutter instincts, who equate Culture with chicks, whose sole diversion is prowling for emotional thrills and excitement, who are given to disgusting, nasty, upsetting "scenes", hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth, who'd sink a shiv into a man's chest or ram an icepick up his asshole as soon as look at him, if they knew they could get away with it, in short, those who, by the standards of our "culture" are SCUM...these females are cool and relatively cerebral and skirting asexuality.

Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, "morals", the "respect" of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around...and around and around...they've seen the whole show--every bit of it-the fucking scene, the sucking scene, the dyke scene--they've covered the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier--the peter pier, the pussy pier...you've got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM's been through it all, and they're now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out. But SCUM doesn't yet prevail; SCUM's still in the gutter of our "society", which, if it's not deflected from its present course and if the Bomb doesn't drop on it, will hump itself to death.

Boredom: Life in a "society" made by and for creatures who, when they are not grim and depressing are utter bores, can only be, when not grim and depressing, an utter bore.
Secrecy, Censorship, Suppression of Knowledge and Ideas, and Exposes: Every male's deep-seated, secret, most hideous fear is the fear of being discovered to be not a female, but a male, a subhuman animal. Although niceness, politeness and "dignity" suffice to prevent his exposure on a personal level, in order to prevent the general exposure of the male sex as a whole and to maintain his unnatural dominant position in "society", the male must resort to:

1. Censorship. Responding reflexively to isolated words and phrases rather than cerebrally to overall meanings, the male attempts to prevent the arousal and discovery of his animalism by censoring not only "pornography", but any work containing "dirty" words, no matter in what context they are used.

2. Suppression of all ideas and knowledge that might expose him or threaten his dominant position in "society". Much biological and psychological data is suppressed, because it is proof of the male's gross inferiority to the female. Also, the problem of mental illness will never be solved while the male maintains control, because first, men have a vested interest in it--only females who have very few of their marbles will allow males the slightest bit of control over anything, and second, the male cannot admit to the role that fatherhood plays in causing mental illness.

3. Exposes. The male's chief delight in life--insofar as the dense, grim male can ever be said to delight in anything--is in exposing others. It doesn't much matter what they're exposed as, so long as they're exposed; it distracts attention from himself. Exposing others as enemy agents (Communists and Socialists) is one of his favorite pastimes, as it removes the source of the threat to him not only from himself, but from the country and the Western world. The bugs up his ass aren't in him; they're in Russia.

Distrust: Unable to empathize or feel affection or loyalty, being exclusively out for himself, the male has no sense of fair play; cowardly, needing constantly to pander to the female to win her approval, that he is helpless without, always on edge lest his animalism, his maleness be discovered, always needing to cover up, he must lie constantly; being empty, he has no honor or integrity--he doesn't know what those words mean. The male, in short, is treacherous, and the only appropriate attitude in a male "society" is cynicism and distrust.

Ugliness: Being totally sexual, incapable of cerebral or aesthetic responses, totally materialistic and greedy, the male, besides inflicting on the world "Great Art", has decorated his unlandscaped cities with ugly buildings (both inside and out), ugly decors, billboards, highways, cars, garbage trucks and, most notably, his own putrid self.

Hate and Violence: The male is eaten up with tension, with frustration at not being female, at not being capable of ever achieving satisfaction or pleasure of any kind; eaten up with hate--not rational hate that is directed against those who abuse or insult you--but irrational, indiscriminate hate...hatred, at bottom, of his own worthless self.

Violence serves as an outlet for his hate and, in addition--the male being capable only of sexual responses and needing very strong stimuli to stimulate his half-dead self--provides him with a little sexual thrill.

Disease and Death: All diseases are curable, and the aging process and death are due to disease; it is possible, therefore, never to age and to live forever. In fact, the problems of aging and death could be solved within a few years, if an all-out, massive scientific assault were made on the problem. This, however, will not occur within the male establishment, because:

1. The many male scientists who shy away from biological research, terrified of the discovery that males are females, and show marked preference for virile, "manly" war and death programs.

2. The discouragement of many potential scientists from scientific careers by the rigidity, boringness, expensiveness, time-consumingness and unfair exclusivity of our "higher" educational system.

3. Propaganda disseminated by insecure male professionals, who jealously guard their positions, so that only a highly select few can comprehend abstract scientific concepts.

4. Widespread lack of self-confidence brought about by the father system that discourages many talented girls from becoming scientists.

5. Lack of automation. There now exists a wealth of data which, if sorted out and correlated, would reveal the cure for cancer and several other diseases and possibly the key to life itself. But the data is so massive it requires high speed computers to correlate it all. The institution of computers will be delayed interminably under the male control system, since the male has a horror of being replaced by machines.

6. The money system's insatiable need for new products. Most of the few scientists around who aren't working on death programs are tied up doing research for corporations.

7. The male likes death--it excites him sexually and, already dead inside, he wants to die.
Incapable of a positive state of happiness, which is the only thing that can justify one's existence, the male is, at best, relaxed, comfortable, neutral, and this condition is extremely short-lived, as boredom, a negative state, soon sets in; he is, therefore, doomed to an existence of suffering relieved only by occasional, fleeting stretches of restfulness, which state he can achieve only at the expense of some female. The male is, by his very nature, a leech, an emotional parasite and, therefore, not ethically entitled to live, as no one has the right to live at someone else's expense.
Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.

However, this moral issue will eventually be rendered academic by the fact that the male is gradually eliminating himself. In addition to engaging in the time-honored and classical wars and race riots, men are more and more either becoming fags or are obliterating themselves through drugs. The female, whether she likes it or not, will eventually take complete charge, if for no other reason than that she will have to--the male, for practical purposes, won't exist.

Accelerating this trend is the fact that more and more males are acquiring enlightened self-interest; they're realizing more and more that the female interest is their interest, that they can live only through the female and that the more the female is encouraged to live, to fulfill herself, to be a female and not a male, the more nearly he lives; he's coming to see that it's easier and more satisfactory to live through her than to try to become her and usurp her qualities, claim them as his own, push the female down and claim she's a male. The fag, who accepts his maleness, that is, his passivity and total sexuality, his femininity, is also best served by women being truly female, as it would then be easier for him to be male, feminine. If men were wise they would seek to become really female, would do intensive biological research that would lead to men, by means of operations on the brain and nervous system, being able to be transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women.

Whether to continue to use females for reproduction or to reproduce in the laboratory will also become academic: what will happen when every female, twelve and over, is routinely taking the Pill and there are no longer any accidents? How many women will deliberately get or (if an accident) remain pregnant? No, Virginia, women don't just adore being brood mares, despite what the mass of robot, brainwashed women will say. When society consists of only the fully conscious the answer will be none. Should a certain percentage of women be set aside by force to serve as brood mares for the species? Obviously this will not do. The answer is laboratory reproduction of babies.

As for the issue of whether or not to continue to reproduce males, it doesn't follow that because the male, like disease, has always existed among us that he should continue to exist. When genetic control is possible--and it soon will be--it goes without saying that we should produce only whole, complete beings, not physical defects or deficiencies, including emotional deficiencies, such as maleness. Just as the deliberate production of blind people would be highly immoral, so would be the deliberate production of emotional cripples.

Why produce even females? Why should there be future generations? What is their purpose? When aging and death are eliminated, why continue to reproduce? Why should we care what happens when we're dead? Why should we care that there is no younger generation to succeed us?

Eventually the natural course of events, of social evolution, will lead to total female control of the world and, subsequently, to the cessation of the production of males and, ultimately, to the cessation of the production of females.

But SCUM is impatient; SCUM is not consoled by the thought that future generations will thrive; SCUM wants to grab some thrilling living for itself. And, if a large majority of women were SCUM, they could acquire complete control of this country within a few weeks simply by withdrawing from the labor force, thereby paralyzing the entire nation. Additional measures, any one of which would be sufficient to completely disrupt the economy and everything else, would be for women to declare themselves off the money system, stop buying, just loot and simply refuse to obey all laws they don't care to obey. The police force, National Guard, Army, Navy and Marines combined couldn't squelch a rebellion of over half the population, particularly when it's made up of people they are utterly helpless without.

If all women simply left men, refused to have anything to do with any of them--ever, all men, the government, and the national economy would collapse completely. Even without leaving men, women who are aware of the extent of their superiority to and power over men, could acquire complete control over everything within a few weeks, could effect a total submission of males to females. In a sane society the male would trot along obediently after the female. The male is docile and easily led, easily subjected to the domination of any female who cares to dominate him. The male, in fact, wants desperately to be led by females, wants Mama in charge, wants to abandon himself to her care. But this is not a sane society, and most women are not even dimly aware of where they're at in relation to men.
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The conflict, therefore, is not between females and males, but between SCUM--dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females, who consider themselves fit to rule the universe, who have free-wheeled to the limits of this "society" and are ready to wheel on to something far beyond what it has to offer--and nice, passive, accepting, "cultivated", polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy's Girls, who can't cope with the unknown, who want to continue to wallow in the sewer that is, at least, familiar, who want to hang back with the apes, who feel secure only with Big Daddy standing by, with a big, strong man to lean on and with a fat, hairy face in the White House, who are too cowardly to face up to the hideous reality of what a man is, what Daddy is, who have cast their lot with the swine, who have adapted themselves to animalism, feel superficially comfortable with it and know no other way of "life", who have reduced their minds, thoughts and sights to the male level, who, lacking sense, imagination and wit can have value only in a male "society", who can have a place in the sun, or, rather, in the slime, only as soothers, ego boosters, relaxers and breeders, who are dismissed as inconsequents by other females, who project their deficiencies, their maleness, onto all females and see the female as a worm.
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But SCUM is too impatient to hope and wait for the de-brainwashing of millions of assholes. Why should the swinging females continue to plod dismally along with the dull male ones? Why should the fates of the groovy and the creepy be intertwined? Why should the active and imaginative consult the passive and dull on social policy? Why should the independent be confined to the sewer along with the dependent who need Daddy to cling to?
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A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder:
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SCUM will become members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and unwork. For example, SCUM salesgirls will not charge for merchandise; SCUM telephone operators will not charge for calls; SCUM office and factory workers, in addition to fucking up their work, will secretly destroy equipment. SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to unwork at.
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SCUM will forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers and subway token sellers of their jobs and run buses and cabs and dispense free tokens to the public.
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SCUM will destroy all useless and harmful objects--cars, store windows, "Great Art", etc.
Eventually SCUM will take over the airwaves--radio and TV networks--by forcibly relieving of their jobs all radio and TV employees who would impede SCUM's entry into the broadcasting studios.
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SCUM will couple-bust--barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them up.
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SCUM will kill all men who are not in the Men's Auxiliary of SCUM. Men in the Men's Auxiliary are those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good, men who are playing ball with SCUM. A few examples of the men in the Men's Auxiliary are: men who kill men; biological scientists who are working on constructive programs, as opposed to biological warfare; journalists, writers, editors, publishers and producers who disseminate and promote ideas that will lead to the achievement of SCUM's goals; faggots who, by their shimmering, flaming example, encourage other men to de-man themselves and thereby make themselves relatively inoffensive; men who consistently give things away--money, things, services; men who tell it like it is (so far not one ever has), who put women straight, who reveal the truth about themselves, who give the mindless male females correct sentences to parrot, who tell them a woman's primary goal in life should be to squash the male sex (to aid men in this endeavor SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence: "I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd," then proceed to list all the ways in which he is. His reward for so doing will be the opportunity to fraternize after the session for a whole, solid hour with the SCUM who will be present. Nice, clean-living male women will be invited to the sessions to help clarify any doubts and misunderstandings they may have about the male sex); makers and promoters of sex books and movies, etc., who are hastening the day when all that will be shown on the screen will be Suck and Fuck (males, like the rats following the Pied Piper, will be lured by Pussy to their doom, will be overcome and submerged by and will eventually drown in the passive flesh that they are); drug pushers and advocates, who are hastening the dropping out of men.
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Being in the Men's Auxiliary is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for making SCUM's escape list; it's not enough to do good; to save their worthless asses men must also avoid evil. A few examples of the most obnoxious or harmful types are: rapists, politicians and all who are in their service (campaigners, members of political parties, etc.); lousy singers and musicians; Chairmen of Boards; Breadwinners; landlords; owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play Musak; "Great Artists"; cheap pikers and welchers; cops; tycoons; scientists working on death and destruction programs or for private industry (practically all scientists); liars and phonies; disc jockeys; men who intrude themselves in the slightest way on any strange female; real estate men; stock brokers; men who speak when they have nothing to say; men who loiter idly on the street and mar the landscape with their presence; double dealers; flim-flam artists; litterbugs; plagiarizers; men who in the slightest way harm any female; all men in the advertising industry; psychiatrists and clinical psychologists; dishonest writers, journalists, editors, publishers, etc.; censors on both the public and private levels; all members of the armed forces, including draftees (LBJ and McNamara give orders, but servicemen carry them out) and particularly pilots (if the bomb drops, LBJ won't drop it; a pilot will). In the case of a man whose behavior falls into both the good and bad categories, an overall subjective evaluation of him will be made to determine if his behavior is, in the balance, good or bad.
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It is most tempting to pick off the female "Great Artists", double dealers, etc. along with the men, but that would be impractical, as there would be no one left; all women have a fink streak in them, to a great or lesser degree, but it stems from a lifetime of living among men. Eliminate men and women will shape up. Women are improvable; men are not, although their behavior is. When SCUM gets hot on their asses it'll shape up fast.
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Simultaneously with the fucking-up, looting, couple-busting, destroying and killing, SCUM will recruit. SCUM, then, will consist of recruiters; the elite corps--the hard core activists (the fuck-ups, looters and destroyers) and the elite of the elite--the killers.
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Dropping out is not the answer; fucking-up is. Most women are already dropped out; they were never in. Dropping out gives control to those few who don't drop out; dropping out is exactly what the establishment leaders want; it plays into the hands of the enemy; it strengthens the system instead of undermining it, since it is based entirely on the non-participation, passivity, apathy and non-involvement of the mass of women. Dropping out, however, is an excellent policy for men and SCUM will enthusiastically encourage it.
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Looking inside yourself for salvation, contemplating your navel, is not, as the Drop Out people would have you believe, the answer. Happiness lies outside yourself, is achieved through interacting with others. Self-forgetfulness should be one's goal, not self-absorption. The male, capable of only the latter, makes a virtue of an irremediable fault and sets up self-absorption, not only as a good but as a Philosophical Good, and thus gets credit for being deep.
SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to attempt to achieve its ends. Such tactics are for nice, genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such action as is guaranteed to be ineffective. In addition, only decent, clean-living, male women, highly trained in submerging themselves in the species, act on a mob basis. SCUM consists of individuals; SCUM is not a mob, a blob. Only as many SCUM will do a job as are needed for the job. Also, SCUM, being cool and selfish, will not subject itself to getting rapped on the head with billy clubs; that's for the nice, "privileged, educated", middle-class ladies with a high regard for the touching faith in the essential goodness of Daddy and policemen. If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.
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SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil disobedience basis, that is, as opposed to openly violating the law and going to jail in order to draw attention to an injustice. Such tactics acknowledge the rightness of the overall system and are used only to modify it slightly, change specific laws. SCUM is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it. Also, SCUM--always selfish, always cool--will always aim to avoid detection and punishment. SCUM will always be furtive, sneaky, underhanded (although SCUM murders will always be known to be such).
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Both destruction and killing will be selective and discriminate. SCUM is against half-crazed, indiscriminate riots, with no clear objective in mind, and in which many of your own kind are picked off. SCUM will never instigate, encourage or participate in riots of any kind or any other form of indiscriminate destruction. SCUM will coolly, furtively, stalk its prey and quietly move in for the kill. Destruction will never be such as to block off routes needed for the transportation of food and other essential supplies, contaminate or cut off the water supply, block streets and traffic to the extent that ambulances can't get through or impede the functioning of hospitals.
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SCUM will keep on destroying, looting, fucking-up and killing until the money-work system no longer exists and automation is completely instituted or until enough women co-operate with SCUM to make violence unnecessary to achieve these goals, that is, until enough women either unwork or quit work, start looting, leave men and refuse to obey all laws inappropriate to a truly civilized society. Many women will fall into line, but many others, who surrendered long ago to the enemy, who are so adapted to animalism, to maleness, that they like restrictions and restraints, don't know what to do with freedom, will continue to be toadies and doormats, just as peasants in rice paddies remain peasants in rice paddies as one regime topples another. A few of the more volatile will whimper and sulk and throw their toys and dishrags on the floor, but SCUM will continue to steamroller over them.
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A completely automated society can be accomplished very simply and quickly once there is a public demand for it. The blueprints for it are already in existence, and its construction will only take a few weeks with millions of people working at it. Even though off the money system, everyone will be most happy to pitch in and get the automated society built; it will mark the beginning of a fantastic new era, and there will be a celebration atmosphere accompanying the construction.
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The elimination of money and the complete institution of automation are basic to all other SCUM reforms; without these two the others can't take place; with them the others will take place very rapidly. The government will automatically collapse. With complete automation it will be possible for every woman to vote directly on every issue by means of an electronic voting machine in her house. Since the government is occupied almost entirely with regulating economic affairs and legislating against purely private matters, the elimination of money and with it the elimination of males who wish to legislate "morality" will mean that there will be practically no issues to vote on.
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After the elimination of money there will be no further need to kill men; they will be stripped of the only power they have over psychologically independent females. They will be able to impose themselves only on the doormats, who like to be imposed on. The rest of the women will be busy solving the few remaining unsolved problems before planning their agenda for eternity and Utopia--completely revamping educational programs so that millions of women can be trained within a few months for high level intellectual work that now requires years of training (this can be done very easily once our educational goal is to educate and not to perpetuate an academic and intellectual elite); solving the problems of disease and old age and death and completely redesigning our cities and living quarters. Many women will for a while continue to think they dig men, but as they become accustomed to female society and as they become absorbed in their projects, they will eventually come to see the utter uselessness and banality of the male.
The few remaining men can exist out their puny days dropped out on drugs or strutting around in drag or passively watching the high-powered female in action, fulfilling themselves as spectators, vicarious livers* or breeding in the cow pasture with the toadies, or they can go off to the nearest friendly suicide center where they will be quietly, quickly and painlessly gassed to death.
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Prior to the institution of automation, to the replacement of males by machines, the male should be of use to the female, wait on her, cater to her slightest whim, obey her every command, be totally subservient to her, exist in perfect obedience to her will, as opposed to the completely warped, degenerate situation we have now of men, not only not existing at all, cluttering up the world with their ignominious presence, but being pandered to and groveled before by the mass of females, millions of women piously worshipping before the Golden Calf, the dog leading the master on the leash, when in fact the male, short of being a drag queen, is least miserable when abjectly prostrate before the female, a complete slave. Rational men want to be squashed, stepped on, crushed and crunched, treated as the curs, the filth that they are, have their repulsiveness confirmed.
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The sick, irrational men, those who attempt to defend themselves against their disgustingness, when they see SCUM barreling down on them, will cling in terror to Big Mama with her Big Bouncy Boobies, but Boobies won't protect them against SCUM; Big Mama will be clinging to Big Daddy, who will be in the corner shitting in his forceful, dynamic pants. Men who are rational, however, won't kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise.
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*It will be electronically possible for him to tune in to any specific female he wants to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this, as it won't hurt them in the slightest and it is a marvelously kind and humane way to treat their unfortunate, handicapped fellow beings.
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