"In the beginning, there was the "Battle of the sexes", and it was bad enough. Then, on the end of the 2nd millenium, woman made "Gender War" on men, and they looked at it, and it was worse. "
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To all women: The lot of you can go to hell.
Amidst all the lies, gnashing of teeth, blame and counter-blame of the gender war, one simple fact remains - men's participation in the culture is voluntary. While a huge body of laws exists to enumerate the things we are prohibited from doing, only a few exist which require us to *do* something. The voluntary and enthusiastic participation of men in this culture is one of the reasons for the vitality it once had. It has taken a long time to beat down the spirits of men who would still love to participate and contribute, but the unrelenting war against men waged by the feminists for the past 35 years has finally managed to do so.
As all the dog-faces, grunts, and foot-soldiers in any war know, the generals will keep throwing men's bodies to be blown apart long after it has become clear that the battle is lost and the war cannot be won. Everyone has lost this stupid war waged and declared by spoiled, indulged, and not-very-bright children against the very people who spoiled and indulged them.
Far from the mythical "backlash" that the paranoid hate-mongers have used to breathe one last breath of life into their movement of error, the real counter-attack is that men have begun to back OFF. The boomer generation is now past the point where the biological imperative to continue the species drives men to seek out women and court their favor. The relentless exploitation of women's built-in power which they inherit with their physiology has left an entire generation of men at middle age with no reason whatsoever to think the least bit kindly toward women, and even less reason to seek them out. Forced to adapt to lifestyles without women, against their wishes, many men have managed to do so and found an unexpected freedom in the priestly lifestyle.
No longer forced to sell themselves into wage slavery in order to support the consuming habits of the bottomless pits that women have become, these men are free in a way that no group of people has ever been: they can participate in the culture, or not, as they choose. Freed from the relentless exploitation of them to extract the $$$ that they buy with hours of their lives in order to feed the vast cancer of unlimited consumption, these men gain back the only thing that is truly theirs to begin with: the hours of their lives.
These men are deserters from the gender war.
Like all deserters in all wars, however, they do not advertise themselves - for to do so would simply make them targets. Quite the opposite, these men go out of their way to make themselves invisible. Far from there being "no good men" as women have been bitching about for years, there are millions of ethical and committed men living their lives without women and refusing to have anything to do with them. There are more never-married men over the age of 40 in the US than the entire population of New Zealand. The number of never-married men in their 30s has more than doubled in the past decade. The percentage of men who have never been married has risen from 25% in 1960 to 31% in 1996. The percentage of men who are single has risen steadily from 31% in 1960 to 42% in 1996. If this were all due to the choices of women, then why have we heard for the past 20 years the uninterrupted laments of women that "men won't make commitments."
As Abe Lincoln observed, you can fool some of the men all of the time, and all of the men some of the time, but you cannot fool *all* of the men *all* of the time. With fatherhood and the simple fact of finding a woman attractive and letting her know about it effectively criminalized by Sexual Harassment, Rape, and anti-male-biased Domestic Violence laws, men who are by nature law-abiding are honoring those laws and giving women as wide a berth as possible. Since they don't want to do the time, they aren't doing the crime.
After hearing from women for years about all the things they aren't going to do for men any more, and adding up all the demands for "more" from women, a simple cost-benefit analysis shows that a lot of men simply can't afford the luxury of a woman, and have opted for a simpler, more spartan lifestyle. Women have made themselves into the Edsels of the new millenium: overpriced luxury products that no one wants.
The legacy of hate sown by the infantile tantrums of women as they embraced their newly discovered history-long victimhood will linger in the culture for decades, poisoning the wells of relationships that they would like to drink from. Having tasted the bitter tainted alkali water of the self-obsessed modern woman, men are moving on to new territory and leaving women behind. All the books about the "plight" of men which seem to be the fad right now, 1999, cannot convince those who have achieved it that a life without women in it is not far preferable to one with them. We have not seemed to be able to stop the hate in more than 3 decades, so it has come time to move away from it.
You can take your demands, and your bashing, and your lies about us, and your hallucinations of a world-wide and history-long conspiracy of men spending every waking moment thinking up nasty things to do to you called "Patriarchy", and all your petty and insignificant complaints about toilet seats and asking for directions, and wrap them all up together and go to hell with them and rot and burn there.
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Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Saturday, March 26, 2005
EOTM: Men, Are You Sick of It?
Are you sick of the universal belief that men owe women something in return for sex, other than caring sex?
Are you sick of having to pay for love, affection, and sex by performing or promising to perform or with gifts or insincere attention while your own love is thrown away, devalued, and denigrated?
Are you sick of being manipulated and controlled by the threat of witholding love, affection, and sex from you?
Are you sick of swimming upstream against dozens of rejections to become sexual with a woman, only to find that by doing so you not only incur an emotional debt but also the obligation to meet her sexual needs regardless of whether yours are getting met?
Are you sick of women who think their part of sex is done when they show up?
Are you sick of being called a rapist, harrasser, and molester?
Are you sick of giving away all your power, your self-esteem, and your freedom in return for unsatisfying sex?
Are you sick of hearing how you think with your dick and not your head?
Are you sick of being set up to have to lie by being expected and demanded to feel differently than you do and if you are honest about your feelings having to get into a hell of a fight over it?
Are you sick of hearing women talk about "The Rules" and how women make the rules and men are expected to abide by them, and the belief that their moral superiority gives them the right to demand that we allow them to dictate to us every aspect of our behavior and even our thoughts and emotions?
Are you sick of being expected to "prove" your "love" over and over and to work long hours at a high stress job so you have the money to provide for her needs and buy her the expensive and romantic gifts she wants, stressing yourself out and making yourself half crazy, only to have her pounce on you and bitch you out for not meeting her emotional needs as well while you are emotionally starving to death?
If so, consider going on strike.
Men's sexual attention is so unwelcome and distressing to women that they are seeking to pass more and stricter laws against it, demanding improved enforcement of the laws against it, and more severe penalties for its expression. Let us begin to listen to them and, since they find it so odious, cease to bother and burden them with it.
Before you dismiss me as totally crazy, hear me out. The definitions of rape have been so expanded that it is no longer necessary to even have sex with a woman to be convicted for raping her. How many dates have you been on with a woman whose company was so charming and pleasant that it was worth spending years in prison, or even going to trial and having your life and career ruined for? How many women have you slept with where the sex was so bad, or costly, or simply a waste of time that it wasn't even worthwhile to go back to that woman for more of the mediocre same, much less prison? How many times have you ended up trapped in a totally unsatisfying relationship which didn't really meet any of your needs, sexual or otherwise, simply because you felt you owed her for having sex with you? How many times have you been told there was something wrong with you for not loving a woman enough when you'd knocked yourself out for her, then ask her for something and have her freak completely out over it and make you feel like shit?
If you were having regular sex with a warm, loving, and giving woman, you probably wouldn't be reading this page, you'd be in bed with her. Look back at what sex really has been like for you. Forget all the social bullshit about men liking sex. None of your buddies are watching inside your head. Have you ever shown interest just out of habit or reflex or because everyone around you was? Without everyone telling you how good it is supposed to be, has it been worth all the costs? If the answer is yes, you are one lucky man. If the answer is no, that should tell you something.
Women who hate sexuality in general, and men's sexuality in particular, are getting out of control. Women have used rape charges and accusations in the same way that they have accused us of using rape - to keep us in a perpetual state of fear. And women are fully aware of it. Now little boys as young as 6 years old are being labeled harassers, placed on probation, and forced to undergo social remediation for the innocent act of kissing a little girl, one who asked to be kissed. Our sexuality has already been stolen from us and devalued and used to manipulate us into commitments which are seldom to our benefit and always at our expense. Now it is being used to make us criminals and strip away all our freedom.
Something must be done to stop this runaway abuse of laws which were created with good intentions. Going on strike is a time-honored method for workers to gain leverage against the abuse of power. Men have been doing all the shit-work of being the sexual aggressors for a long time. Like the work of being the breadwinner, we shouldered it good-naturedly out of a sense of honor and responsibility, having been told that was our role, and because it used to have its rewards. The rewards have been gone for a long time, now it is being turned into a criminal act. Something must be done to stop this insanity before we end up being put in prison or forced to undergo "counseling" for the incredibly vicious act of saying "hello" to a woman or telling her we find her attractive.
This is Germany in the 1930s all over again. The feminazi party is rolling unchecked through our lives, our bedrooms, and is trying to control what's inside our very heads. It has gone so far that a woman can suggest "reducing" our numbers to 10% of our current levels, keeping the remainder of us around as breeding stock, and suffer less sanction than Earl Butz did for his public racist slur which ended his career. We are quickly being reduced to the level of farm animals; sperm crops. And, also like Germany in the 30s, the reason that the power of this destructive party continues to grow unchecked is that well meaning citizens do not see its monstrous excesses and oppose them. If someone does not begin to oppose the sexual holocaust, then all males stand the chance of ending up in a sexual Auschitz or Dachau. Like William Heatherington.
Supposedly there are millions of decent worthwhile women out there who want to love us and be loved by us. Maybe you know one or more of them. But there are also millions who hate us and want to destroy us: to remake us in the image of some social ideal based on nothing more than the rantings of fanatics and zealots who hate us. We need to moblize the ones who do not hate us to abandon their passive support of those who do, and the only way I know how to do that is to go underground like the Resistance did and watch for those who are motivated enough to get out and try to find us. When these women find good and decent men unavailable to them, when they can no longer safely sit back and let us take all the risks to find them and bring to them the benefits of loving sexuality, perhaps they will begin to rethink the social conditions which they have supported by their passive acceptance and active willingness to trust any woman more than they trust any man.
Either they will ante up the willingness to be true equals and share the power they have always had in sexual relationships and begin to share the risks we have always had to take to initiate them by respecting our needs and learning how to deal us in ways which are not completely obnoxious, or they will sleep alone. I, for one, am no longer willing to take all the risks necessary to bring them something which they supposedly want, but are unwilling to move one inch out of their own power postion or take any action whatsoever to bring about, paricularly when the risks now involve such major criminal penalties, and accusations which can destroy my career and my life are being encouraged to be falsified to serve "useful political puposes".
Enough is enough. It is time to give them exactly what they have been asking for. No, more than asking for, demanding.
Only by refusing to continue to do the shit work of initiation do we have a chance of slowing this insanity before we are all driven to suicide: as 4 times as many of us are today compared to 20 years ago. Only when enough of us gain enough sense of worth of ourselves and our sexuality that we demand that it be respected and valued equally to the sexuality of women, and that the criminalization of it and its exploitation via histrionic victimhood be STOPPED, will we again have the chance to live as free men.
Striking is easy. No dues, no meetings, no collectivist hive mentality, no pledges except to yourself. All you have to do is look inside yourself and decide whether you, yourself, have ever done any of these grievous harms supposedly done women and, if you have not, completely absolve yourself of guilt and shame over it. Inform yourself and find that most of those claims are outright lies. Honestly evaluate how well your past sexual experiences have really met YOUR needs, claim your rightful status as a human being worthy of getting those needs met, and make the committment to yourself that you will never again allow a woman to benefit from association with you who does not respect them as well. Stop providing women with the benefits of the best part of yourself despite their best efforts to destroy it.
Give them what they are telling us they want, damn it! For thousands of years we have been asking them to tell us what they want and they are telling us quite clearly that they want us to fear them and not find them attractive and not approach them. Listen to them! Listen to what they are telling us and heed them!
When you do, you will find a peace with and regain a sense of value of yourself that you have not had since you were a little boy. You will find that living without them is really less painful than what you have been doing. Step off society's treadmill which demands that you prove yourself by your success and avoid women who demand that you prove your love with expensive gifts which you must completely whore yourself to get/keep a high-stress job in order to afford. Stop putting up with the man-bashing which has become so automatic and predictable that it is part of every conversation, every television show, damn near every interaction that you have which involves a woman: which you can only avoid when by yourself or in the company of other men. Refuse to put up with it. Either ask the basher to leave, or leave yourself. Particularly do not put up with it from other men. Confront these "Uncle-Toms", these "house-niggers", and tell them that if they want to spit on their own manhood that you cannot stop them, but you will no longer allow them to spit on yours.
You can escape from this nightmare to a valley of serenity and sanity, if you will only let go of your need to support those who are trying to kill in you that which makes you real and turn you into a robot. What you offer them is not the vile, horrible, violent, exploitive thing they are making it out to be. It is not your worst, it is your BEST! Reclaim its value. Stop giving it away and feeling like you have to pay someone to accept it. If you do pay someone, make it a professional who negotiates a fair price up front, then gives you what you've paid for. We can never teach those who hate us to value us instead until we claim our own value. Even if they never learn, we will suffer less from holding onto it than we do from our current efforts to beg them to love us.
You can join the strike at any time, and drop out at any time, and rejoin any time. It is precisely the value of the individual which we celebrate, and of which we fight to promote acceptance, that distinguishes us from the collectivist thinkers who demand the sacrifice of all life to the fullfillment of their mentally-ill ideals. The sexual strike is not a pledge of celibacy. It is not sex-hating and sex-negating. It is sexuality affirming. It simply makes clear the absolute condition that all parties must accept and honor AND themselves affirm that value or they don't get to participate and enjoy its benefits at someone else's expense: YOURS!
Anytime you find a woman who loves and cherishes you for what you are, recognizes the way you know how to show love as the expression of the love that it is and shares her own sexuality with you freely and warmly and with no other expectation or obligation than to love her freely and warmly in return, drop out of the strike and thank whatever creator you worship for your great good fortune.
Until then, refuse to go more than halfway and spend no time waiting for a woman who hasn't already figured out that she needs to go the other half. If you cannot sit and wait, then go ahead and make the first call, but do not make the second, nor spend any time waiting for it. Respond to any woman who makes an obnoxious approach to you, of the type that women are so fond of bashing men for, by pointing out to her that she would likely find such an approach an obnoxious turn off and so do you. Do not feel obligated to find a woman attractive simply because she expresses an attraction to you and you are so desperate for love and sex that you will try to fool yourself into thinking yourself into being attracted to her. Never, never, never attempt to "prove" your love by buying an expensive and useless gift, putting money in the pockets of male jewelry store owners and employees so they can buy their wives expensive and useless gifts to "prove" how much they love them.
Redfine the "sin" of sex and change its spelling to SEN, which stands for "Sexual Equality NOW!" If you want to go "public", wear the slogans "On Strike for REAL Sexual Equality" and "SEN" proudly and talk to anyone who asks you about them.
Only we can reclaim the value of ourselves and our sexuality in a society which is determined to strip of us them and use them only to serve society's purpose of turning us into machines which do nothing but work and spend what we earn in order to consume.
We must stop stop the insanity if we can.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Are you sick of having to pay for love, affection, and sex by performing or promising to perform or with gifts or insincere attention while your own love is thrown away, devalued, and denigrated?
Are you sick of being manipulated and controlled by the threat of witholding love, affection, and sex from you?
Are you sick of swimming upstream against dozens of rejections to become sexual with a woman, only to find that by doing so you not only incur an emotional debt but also the obligation to meet her sexual needs regardless of whether yours are getting met?
Are you sick of women who think their part of sex is done when they show up?
Are you sick of being called a rapist, harrasser, and molester?
Are you sick of giving away all your power, your self-esteem, and your freedom in return for unsatisfying sex?
Are you sick of hearing how you think with your dick and not your head?
Are you sick of being set up to have to lie by being expected and demanded to feel differently than you do and if you are honest about your feelings having to get into a hell of a fight over it?
Are you sick of hearing women talk about "The Rules" and how women make the rules and men are expected to abide by them, and the belief that their moral superiority gives them the right to demand that we allow them to dictate to us every aspect of our behavior and even our thoughts and emotions?
Are you sick of being expected to "prove" your "love" over and over and to work long hours at a high stress job so you have the money to provide for her needs and buy her the expensive and romantic gifts she wants, stressing yourself out and making yourself half crazy, only to have her pounce on you and bitch you out for not meeting her emotional needs as well while you are emotionally starving to death?
If so, consider going on strike.
Men's sexual attention is so unwelcome and distressing to women that they are seeking to pass more and stricter laws against it, demanding improved enforcement of the laws against it, and more severe penalties for its expression. Let us begin to listen to them and, since they find it so odious, cease to bother and burden them with it.
Before you dismiss me as totally crazy, hear me out. The definitions of rape have been so expanded that it is no longer necessary to even have sex with a woman to be convicted for raping her. How many dates have you been on with a woman whose company was so charming and pleasant that it was worth spending years in prison, or even going to trial and having your life and career ruined for? How many women have you slept with where the sex was so bad, or costly, or simply a waste of time that it wasn't even worthwhile to go back to that woman for more of the mediocre same, much less prison? How many times have you ended up trapped in a totally unsatisfying relationship which didn't really meet any of your needs, sexual or otherwise, simply because you felt you owed her for having sex with you? How many times have you been told there was something wrong with you for not loving a woman enough when you'd knocked yourself out for her, then ask her for something and have her freak completely out over it and make you feel like shit?
If you were having regular sex with a warm, loving, and giving woman, you probably wouldn't be reading this page, you'd be in bed with her. Look back at what sex really has been like for you. Forget all the social bullshit about men liking sex. None of your buddies are watching inside your head. Have you ever shown interest just out of habit or reflex or because everyone around you was? Without everyone telling you how good it is supposed to be, has it been worth all the costs? If the answer is yes, you are one lucky man. If the answer is no, that should tell you something.
Women who hate sexuality in general, and men's sexuality in particular, are getting out of control. Women have used rape charges and accusations in the same way that they have accused us of using rape - to keep us in a perpetual state of fear. And women are fully aware of it. Now little boys as young as 6 years old are being labeled harassers, placed on probation, and forced to undergo social remediation for the innocent act of kissing a little girl, one who asked to be kissed. Our sexuality has already been stolen from us and devalued and used to manipulate us into commitments which are seldom to our benefit and always at our expense. Now it is being used to make us criminals and strip away all our freedom.
Something must be done to stop this runaway abuse of laws which were created with good intentions. Going on strike is a time-honored method for workers to gain leverage against the abuse of power. Men have been doing all the shit-work of being the sexual aggressors for a long time. Like the work of being the breadwinner, we shouldered it good-naturedly out of a sense of honor and responsibility, having been told that was our role, and because it used to have its rewards. The rewards have been gone for a long time, now it is being turned into a criminal act. Something must be done to stop this insanity before we end up being put in prison or forced to undergo "counseling" for the incredibly vicious act of saying "hello" to a woman or telling her we find her attractive.
This is Germany in the 1930s all over again. The feminazi party is rolling unchecked through our lives, our bedrooms, and is trying to control what's inside our very heads. It has gone so far that a woman can suggest "reducing" our numbers to 10% of our current levels, keeping the remainder of us around as breeding stock, and suffer less sanction than Earl Butz did for his public racist slur which ended his career. We are quickly being reduced to the level of farm animals; sperm crops. And, also like Germany in the 30s, the reason that the power of this destructive party continues to grow unchecked is that well meaning citizens do not see its monstrous excesses and oppose them. If someone does not begin to oppose the sexual holocaust, then all males stand the chance of ending up in a sexual Auschitz or Dachau. Like William Heatherington.
Supposedly there are millions of decent worthwhile women out there who want to love us and be loved by us. Maybe you know one or more of them. But there are also millions who hate us and want to destroy us: to remake us in the image of some social ideal based on nothing more than the rantings of fanatics and zealots who hate us. We need to moblize the ones who do not hate us to abandon their passive support of those who do, and the only way I know how to do that is to go underground like the Resistance did and watch for those who are motivated enough to get out and try to find us. When these women find good and decent men unavailable to them, when they can no longer safely sit back and let us take all the risks to find them and bring to them the benefits of loving sexuality, perhaps they will begin to rethink the social conditions which they have supported by their passive acceptance and active willingness to trust any woman more than they trust any man.
Either they will ante up the willingness to be true equals and share the power they have always had in sexual relationships and begin to share the risks we have always had to take to initiate them by respecting our needs and learning how to deal us in ways which are not completely obnoxious, or they will sleep alone. I, for one, am no longer willing to take all the risks necessary to bring them something which they supposedly want, but are unwilling to move one inch out of their own power postion or take any action whatsoever to bring about, paricularly when the risks now involve such major criminal penalties, and accusations which can destroy my career and my life are being encouraged to be falsified to serve "useful political puposes".
Enough is enough. It is time to give them exactly what they have been asking for. No, more than asking for, demanding.
Only by refusing to continue to do the shit work of initiation do we have a chance of slowing this insanity before we are all driven to suicide: as 4 times as many of us are today compared to 20 years ago. Only when enough of us gain enough sense of worth of ourselves and our sexuality that we demand that it be respected and valued equally to the sexuality of women, and that the criminalization of it and its exploitation via histrionic victimhood be STOPPED, will we again have the chance to live as free men.
Striking is easy. No dues, no meetings, no collectivist hive mentality, no pledges except to yourself. All you have to do is look inside yourself and decide whether you, yourself, have ever done any of these grievous harms supposedly done women and, if you have not, completely absolve yourself of guilt and shame over it. Inform yourself and find that most of those claims are outright lies. Honestly evaluate how well your past sexual experiences have really met YOUR needs, claim your rightful status as a human being worthy of getting those needs met, and make the committment to yourself that you will never again allow a woman to benefit from association with you who does not respect them as well. Stop providing women with the benefits of the best part of yourself despite their best efforts to destroy it.
Give them what they are telling us they want, damn it! For thousands of years we have been asking them to tell us what they want and they are telling us quite clearly that they want us to fear them and not find them attractive and not approach them. Listen to them! Listen to what they are telling us and heed them!
When you do, you will find a peace with and regain a sense of value of yourself that you have not had since you were a little boy. You will find that living without them is really less painful than what you have been doing. Step off society's treadmill which demands that you prove yourself by your success and avoid women who demand that you prove your love with expensive gifts which you must completely whore yourself to get/keep a high-stress job in order to afford. Stop putting up with the man-bashing which has become so automatic and predictable that it is part of every conversation, every television show, damn near every interaction that you have which involves a woman: which you can only avoid when by yourself or in the company of other men. Refuse to put up with it. Either ask the basher to leave, or leave yourself. Particularly do not put up with it from other men. Confront these "Uncle-Toms", these "house-niggers", and tell them that if they want to spit on their own manhood that you cannot stop them, but you will no longer allow them to spit on yours.
You can escape from this nightmare to a valley of serenity and sanity, if you will only let go of your need to support those who are trying to kill in you that which makes you real and turn you into a robot. What you offer them is not the vile, horrible, violent, exploitive thing they are making it out to be. It is not your worst, it is your BEST! Reclaim its value. Stop giving it away and feeling like you have to pay someone to accept it. If you do pay someone, make it a professional who negotiates a fair price up front, then gives you what you've paid for. We can never teach those who hate us to value us instead until we claim our own value. Even if they never learn, we will suffer less from holding onto it than we do from our current efforts to beg them to love us.
You can join the strike at any time, and drop out at any time, and rejoin any time. It is precisely the value of the individual which we celebrate, and of which we fight to promote acceptance, that distinguishes us from the collectivist thinkers who demand the sacrifice of all life to the fullfillment of their mentally-ill ideals. The sexual strike is not a pledge of celibacy. It is not sex-hating and sex-negating. It is sexuality affirming. It simply makes clear the absolute condition that all parties must accept and honor AND themselves affirm that value or they don't get to participate and enjoy its benefits at someone else's expense: YOURS!
Anytime you find a woman who loves and cherishes you for what you are, recognizes the way you know how to show love as the expression of the love that it is and shares her own sexuality with you freely and warmly and with no other expectation or obligation than to love her freely and warmly in return, drop out of the strike and thank whatever creator you worship for your great good fortune.
Until then, refuse to go more than halfway and spend no time waiting for a woman who hasn't already figured out that she needs to go the other half. If you cannot sit and wait, then go ahead and make the first call, but do not make the second, nor spend any time waiting for it. Respond to any woman who makes an obnoxious approach to you, of the type that women are so fond of bashing men for, by pointing out to her that she would likely find such an approach an obnoxious turn off and so do you. Do not feel obligated to find a woman attractive simply because she expresses an attraction to you and you are so desperate for love and sex that you will try to fool yourself into thinking yourself into being attracted to her. Never, never, never attempt to "prove" your love by buying an expensive and useless gift, putting money in the pockets of male jewelry store owners and employees so they can buy their wives expensive and useless gifts to "prove" how much they love them.
Redfine the "sin" of sex and change its spelling to SEN, which stands for "Sexual Equality NOW!" If you want to go "public", wear the slogans "On Strike for REAL Sexual Equality" and "SEN" proudly and talk to anyone who asks you about them.
Only we can reclaim the value of ourselves and our sexuality in a society which is determined to strip of us them and use them only to serve society's purpose of turning us into machines which do nothing but work and spend what we earn in order to consume.
We must stop stop the insanity if we can.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
EOTM: The Feralization of Culture - Building Better Predators
The following is taken from a correspondence with a man from another English speaking country which is being transformed by feminism.
We have already seen a number of unexpected results from the social changes of the last half of the 20th century. We know that the results will not be what was intended. But we have enough prelimiary data to begin to speculate the outcomes of current trends.
Here is one such speculation. The general topic was sexual freedom, and the context was discussion about why women keep choosing the kind of men they keep complaining about.
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The thing that women find attractive in men is men's command of the unknown. THE THING THAT IS ATTRACTIVE ABOUT MEN IS WHAT THEY MIGHT BECOME.
The thing that men find attractive in women is in women as sustainers of the known, and everything that that is associated with (eg, warmth, nurturance, vulnerability, etc). THE THING THAT IS ATTRACTIVE ABOUT WOMEN IS IN WHAT THEY ARE
"Sexual freedom" absolves women from their responsibilities as filters of variety. They become the choosers of losers, the devolutionary force of humanity.
/- I ask that you consider the following possiblities
1) The purpose of a filter is two-fold. It must not only block passage of something, it must allow passage of something else. Perhaps women's responsibilities have changed to pass more variety, WHAT MEN MIGHT BE, and block more predictability.
2) Perhaps right now what the human race needs IS MORE variety rather than less.
3) Industrialization has proven to be an absolute nightmare for the human race, and it has hastened and intensified a long standing trend for the accumulation of ever increasing amounts of durable wealth in the hands of an ever smaller percentage of the population.
4) The consumption curve is expanding geometrically not only with regard to the food supply, but also with respect to energy consumption and depletion of natural resources. At our CURRENT levels of consumption, we are destroying 17,000 species per year. In 100 more years, half of all the species alive on earth today will be extinct.
5) Industrialization is an abrupt discontinuity in "human progress". It has totally changed our "ecosystem" in the broadest sense of that term. Today the "ecosystem" that the majority of the citizens of western industrialized technology driven countries inhabit is entirely artificial. What was adaptive in the history environment may be maladaptive in the one we inhabit today.
6) Nothing that we face today can be categorized as "known", therefor attempting to sustain the "known" is not only futile, but may be dangerous.
7) I made the comment before about the slow rate of technological change keeping all cultures "synchronized" and how the advent of technology de-synchronized everything. Perhaps we suffer now from too much stability rather than too little.
8) I have stressed the point many times that the social values which included the disregard of sluts and sluttishness was also one which operated in a relatively high degree of survival stress from mortality. We have an omnivorous scavenger here in the US called a raccoon. Having killed most of the normal predators of these creatures, we have seen a burgeoning population of them around cities where garbage is plentiful. However, they now go through cycles of mass die-off from disease because the gene pool is not constantly being culled, and periodic disruptions to their fertility cycles. Live births will suddenly begin to WAY disproportionately favor one sex over the other - either a very high percentage of females, or mostly males.
I would be seriously skeptical of the idea that the sex in abundance is due to any sort of random chance. A decrease in the female population will favor increased aggression among males. An increase will favor the more passive males.
9) Right now we have the first population of a generation of young males ( in the US ) to hit the breeding years without a major war to weed out the most aggressive. The net effect is to decrease the number of potentially available females per male. The effect is small, but there. The Vietnam war took out nearly half a million men of one age cohort, 90% of them with post-war effects. The current generation has lost none. A decrease in the relative number of females increases competition among the males, favoring the most aggressive.
10) During the 3 generations which spanned the two world wars and Vietnam, the increase in the available female ratio favored the more passive males. In the 1960s, Mailer noted that we had a "crisis of masculinity" in this country. We had been breeding the docile type males required by the factory floor.
11) With the fall of industrialization, which began as long ago as the late 1950s, this passive type male suddenly became maladaptive.
12) The transition from a manufacturing ( goods based ) economy to a "service or information" economy completely altered the "ecosystem" without people realizing it. Before the transition to being a nation of "handlers", there was about one "promotion" available for every 10 workers. Climbing the "corporate ladder" of incomes involved following the rules, keeping your mouth shut, and having social connections. Anybody who did these 3 things could assume steady upward progress ( mobility ).
13) By the early 90s, the expansion of the workforce and elevated income expectations had reduced the promotion/worker ratio to 1/30. It was projected to be 1/50 by the end of the decade. This was before GATT and we began exporting our manufacturing base overseas.
14) "Downsizing" and exporting jobs has reached frenzy proportions. There simply are no more companies to create the high-paying jobs to absorb the number of college graduates. If I had a son contemplating college today, I would do everything I could to discourage him. He would face 5x the competition for lower real wages than when this whole paradigm got established.
15) I think the boys who are skipping college are smarter than we are. They don't have any "history" to revere and are making far smarter choices than we are trying to foist on them. Their favorite "toys" are video games which utilize their historic spatial-kinesthetic advantage over women.
16) The entire industrial economy is headed for collapse. These boys are ahead of the curve.
17) Men our age can't see it because of the blind spots created by the sacred cows of our value system.
18) The falsity of the feminist paradigm will come crashing down around their ears when the velocity economy collapses due to the fact that it simply isn't producing anything worth having any more, and no one can afford it anyway.
19) At that point, the most aggressive, hardest males with the lowest income expectations will have the reproductive advantage.
20) Industrialization is the force causing "society" to de-evolve. Actually, it is only DE-evolving from our value system and a set of social values which do not apply in today’s environment.
21) Men like you and I have been royally fucked by this. The men that most embody the traditional values which made the system work are now not getting the rewards from it.
22) Life's a bitch some days.
23) We need to be cautious about turning DEscription into PREscription. Women's role in modulating stability may not always mean that they always drive to maximize stability.
Whether that is their "responsibility" or simply a function of the effect of their choice making, DEscribed after-the-fact, saying that women are "falling down on the job" assumes that we know what "should" be and that is somehow different from what is. Women, with their choices of mates, are creating the males of the future. I think the would-be social architects know a great deal less about the real result of their interventions than anyone imagines.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
We have already seen a number of unexpected results from the social changes of the last half of the 20th century. We know that the results will not be what was intended. But we have enough prelimiary data to begin to speculate the outcomes of current trends.
Here is one such speculation. The general topic was sexual freedom, and the context was discussion about why women keep choosing the kind of men they keep complaining about.
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The thing that women find attractive in men is men's command of the unknown. THE THING THAT IS ATTRACTIVE ABOUT MEN IS WHAT THEY MIGHT BECOME.
The thing that men find attractive in women is in women as sustainers of the known, and everything that that is associated with (eg, warmth, nurturance, vulnerability, etc). THE THING THAT IS ATTRACTIVE ABOUT WOMEN IS IN WHAT THEY ARE
"Sexual freedom" absolves women from their responsibilities as filters of variety. They become the choosers of losers, the devolutionary force of humanity.
/- I ask that you consider the following possiblities
1) The purpose of a filter is two-fold. It must not only block passage of something, it must allow passage of something else. Perhaps women's responsibilities have changed to pass more variety, WHAT MEN MIGHT BE, and block more predictability.
2) Perhaps right now what the human race needs IS MORE variety rather than less.
3) Industrialization has proven to be an absolute nightmare for the human race, and it has hastened and intensified a long standing trend for the accumulation of ever increasing amounts of durable wealth in the hands of an ever smaller percentage of the population.
4) The consumption curve is expanding geometrically not only with regard to the food supply, but also with respect to energy consumption and depletion of natural resources. At our CURRENT levels of consumption, we are destroying 17,000 species per year. In 100 more years, half of all the species alive on earth today will be extinct.
5) Industrialization is an abrupt discontinuity in "human progress". It has totally changed our "ecosystem" in the broadest sense of that term. Today the "ecosystem" that the majority of the citizens of western industrialized technology driven countries inhabit is entirely artificial. What was adaptive in the history environment may be maladaptive in the one we inhabit today.
6) Nothing that we face today can be categorized as "known", therefor attempting to sustain the "known" is not only futile, but may be dangerous.
7) I made the comment before about the slow rate of technological change keeping all cultures "synchronized" and how the advent of technology de-synchronized everything. Perhaps we suffer now from too much stability rather than too little.
8) I have stressed the point many times that the social values which included the disregard of sluts and sluttishness was also one which operated in a relatively high degree of survival stress from mortality. We have an omnivorous scavenger here in the US called a raccoon. Having killed most of the normal predators of these creatures, we have seen a burgeoning population of them around cities where garbage is plentiful. However, they now go through cycles of mass die-off from disease because the gene pool is not constantly being culled, and periodic disruptions to their fertility cycles. Live births will suddenly begin to WAY disproportionately favor one sex over the other - either a very high percentage of females, or mostly males.
I would be seriously skeptical of the idea that the sex in abundance is due to any sort of random chance. A decrease in the female population will favor increased aggression among males. An increase will favor the more passive males.
9) Right now we have the first population of a generation of young males ( in the US ) to hit the breeding years without a major war to weed out the most aggressive. The net effect is to decrease the number of potentially available females per male. The effect is small, but there. The Vietnam war took out nearly half a million men of one age cohort, 90% of them with post-war effects. The current generation has lost none. A decrease in the relative number of females increases competition among the males, favoring the most aggressive.
10) During the 3 generations which spanned the two world wars and Vietnam, the increase in the available female ratio favored the more passive males. In the 1960s, Mailer noted that we had a "crisis of masculinity" in this country. We had been breeding the docile type males required by the factory floor.
11) With the fall of industrialization, which began as long ago as the late 1950s, this passive type male suddenly became maladaptive.
12) The transition from a manufacturing ( goods based ) economy to a "service or information" economy completely altered the "ecosystem" without people realizing it. Before the transition to being a nation of "handlers", there was about one "promotion" available for every 10 workers. Climbing the "corporate ladder" of incomes involved following the rules, keeping your mouth shut, and having social connections. Anybody who did these 3 things could assume steady upward progress ( mobility ).
13) By the early 90s, the expansion of the workforce and elevated income expectations had reduced the promotion/worker ratio to 1/30. It was projected to be 1/50 by the end of the decade. This was before GATT and we began exporting our manufacturing base overseas.
14) "Downsizing" and exporting jobs has reached frenzy proportions. There simply are no more companies to create the high-paying jobs to absorb the number of college graduates. If I had a son contemplating college today, I would do everything I could to discourage him. He would face 5x the competition for lower real wages than when this whole paradigm got established.
15) I think the boys who are skipping college are smarter than we are. They don't have any "history" to revere and are making far smarter choices than we are trying to foist on them. Their favorite "toys" are video games which utilize their historic spatial-kinesthetic advantage over women.
16) The entire industrial economy is headed for collapse. These boys are ahead of the curve.
17) Men our age can't see it because of the blind spots created by the sacred cows of our value system.
18) The falsity of the feminist paradigm will come crashing down around their ears when the velocity economy collapses due to the fact that it simply isn't producing anything worth having any more, and no one can afford it anyway.
19) At that point, the most aggressive, hardest males with the lowest income expectations will have the reproductive advantage.
20) Industrialization is the force causing "society" to de-evolve. Actually, it is only DE-evolving from our value system and a set of social values which do not apply in today’s environment.
21) Men like you and I have been royally fucked by this. The men that most embody the traditional values which made the system work are now not getting the rewards from it.
22) Life's a bitch some days.
23) We need to be cautious about turning DEscription into PREscription. Women's role in modulating stability may not always mean that they always drive to maximize stability.
Whether that is their "responsibility" or simply a function of the effect of their choice making, DEscribed after-the-fact, saying that women are "falling down on the job" assumes that we know what "should" be and that is somehow different from what is. Women, with their choices of mates, are creating the males of the future. I think the would-be social architects know a great deal less about the real result of their interventions than anyone imagines.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
EOTM: Radical Notions
"In the beginning, there was the "Battle of the sexes", and it was bad enough. Then, on the end of the 2nd millenium, man and woman made "Gender War", and they looked at it, and it was worse. "
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The following is a brief, rapid fire, summary of a variety of biological and social perspectives on the gender war. The social structures related to mating are undergoing a profound and radical shift. We need to set aside the issues of value judgements for a moment to see exactly what the trends are and speculate where they might lead if they continue in the present direction. Then we need to reapply the notion of values and decide whether that is truly the way we want things to go. We can shape the future by our choices.
Consider the following a "work in progress." It is an attempt to introduce certain radical notions in a way that will show how they all fit together. I will probably show disrespect to at least one of everyone's sacred cows. I mean these ideas to be provocative, and hope that they can help spark a new dialogue in which more of the basic assumptions regarding human behavior, and certainly the stereotypes, will come under deeply skeptical scrutiny.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One - If you are a dedicated creationist, read no further. Determinism and external causation are so central to feminidiocy that if you accept those basic premises then any battle with feminist theory will boil down to nothing more than Catholics fighting Protestants. Most of what I say is based on Darwin and Malthus and if you reject the work of those two then you will not see that my formulations have any power at all. However, if you can step back a bit you will see that the entire notion of "Patriarchy" is nothing more than a variation on Jehovah or Allah. The claims that wimminists make for the power THEIR male god, Patriarchy, even exceed the claims made by Judeo-Christians and Muslims. J & A at least give their followers enough free will to screw up and fail the entrance requirement to heaven. "Patriarchy" moves everyone like puppets.
Two - there will never be a mass men's movement in the same way that there has been a mass women's movement. Men simply are not joiners in the same way. Men "join" something for the status or other benefit it gives them - all the men's movements so far have been so silly that joining a men's movement is a step below seeking psychological counseling on men's list of things to do.
Three - Whether by genetics or socialization, and I really suspect a combination of both in which natural tendencies are maximized, men are more likely to deny their pain and tough things out. Back in the 1930s, Alfred Adler (an influential writer on the education of children) wrote about the drive to excell or be "superior" which was innate to children, boys in particular. Competition and "winning" are important enough that minor issues of pain are secondary for men.
Four - Feminism is a strawman, a red herring, distracting people's attention from a much larger philosophical war. A woman back in 1957 wrote a book in which all the words, arguments, and claims which the wimminists spout came out of the mouths of both men and women. Marxism is only part of it, but it is a central part - "from each according to ability, to each according to need." If you haven't already, you need to dig into some of the foundations of contemporary feminist theory, particularly the so-called "post- structuralist" notions of (Michael, I believe) Foucault. I have some links if you are interested. What these nutcases have done is to take socialism from an essentially economic theory and made it into a theory of cognition. He literally claims that reality is whatever we decide to perceive it to be. His work is what has given feminidiocy the "woman so oppressed that she doesn't know she is oppressed" notion. His discussion of "internalized social controls" puts the oppression and victim spin on what someone else would call conscience or a sense of ethics. Too bad Freud has taken such a beating by the feminidiots, because Foucault's "internalized controls" map perfectly onto Freud's "superego". Thus sociopathology, the ability to act any damn way they please any damn time they please, and have no concern for the consequences to other people, is the heart and soul of feminist theory.
Five - Thus certain aspects of feminst theory ARE true. Women have been restricted because their selfish nature unconstrained by social controls will be inevitably destructive. The entire foundation of civilization depends on containing individual behaviors within certain boundaries so that the rights of others are not violated. Feminism demands the right for any woman to be free to violate the rights of anyone at any time and suffer no consequences for it. The extreme of this is the right to murder unborn children, born children, and men and get away with consequences less severe than a man suffers for insulting a woman.
Six - Western Civilization is in decline. This gets real tricky because the points I make inevitably trigger knee-jerk reactions in both liberals and conservatives. I make and remark on observations without adding the baggage of judgement. The only way to understand a lot of this is to take an objectivist viewpoint. Western civilization is based on Imperialism, Judeo-Christianity, and urbanization. The American Empire was the successor to the British Empire, which learned everything from the Roman Empire. It is inherently expansionistic which brings us to the Malthus limit. Since Malthus was writing in essentially pre-technological times, he only talked about food supply. Since population increases geometrically while food supply can only increase arithmetically, there will inevitably come a point where the two curves intersect and population will over-run the food supply and mass starvation will set in. War and competition for territory have always been time-tested historic methods for disposing of excess population. About 110 years ago we (European Imperialists) ran out of continents that we could steal from the original inhabitants using our superior weapons technology. While military domination has remained an important tool of "foreign policy" right up to Kosovo today, there has been a switch to economic and industrial domination. The "bad news" side of this is that as other countries industrialize and the "standard of living" rises to match "the American Dream", the consumption of resources, both raw materials and energy, begins to follow the same geometric expansion as the pressure on the food supply. Thus, we must either continue to confiscate the resources and food of other countries at the point of our Armed Forces' guns, or find a way to live within the limits of our resources. That is most certainly NOT the "American" way, so what we have is increased competition for resources which is expressed as agression. While this aggression is temporarily hidden behind the smokescreen of the courts, and the thugs and hiwaymen of today are called "lawyers" and "international bankers", the function is the same: theft from the owners and producers (ability) to serve the self-defined "needs" of the non-producers and non-owners.
Seven - The most destructive notion in Western Civilization today is that of "entitlement". As a naturalist, I point out that no rabbit in the wild is "entitled" to live 10 more minutes. He earns that "privilege" each time he escapes the coyote and forfeits it the moment he fails.
Eight - About 40 years ago the US made a major transition in its economic structure which has gone largely unnoticed and its significance seldom understood and even more seldom remarked upon. In the late 1950s, at the peak of the US industrial success, domination of the world, and consumption of the world's industrial output, the percentage of the population which managed or sold something exceeded the percentage of the population PRODUCING ANYTHING. We made the transition from being a nation mostly of producers to being a nation of "handlers". I can't remember the name of the guy who postulated that a "service economy" (and by implication an "information" economy) was possible, but I contend that history will prove him completely, perversely, wrong. There's a guy in Canada who could be my clone who has done a GREAT job of laying this out, so I'll just refer you to his page and save myself the effort. (http://webhome.idirect.com/~andyt/) Trying to sum up my thesis as succinctly as possible - we have moved from an economy of value-ADDITION to an economy of value-DIVISION. We see this manifested everywhere, but most of all in the feminist demands for "wage-parity" and prating about "glass-ceilings" which absolutely deny and try to refute the principle of value-addition. Women (and minorities as well) are to be compensated NOT on how much value they add to a product or company, but on what they are ENTITLED to because the group to which they belong has never added enough value to have been worth compensating for it. It is no accident that one of the favored professions for these newly "liberated" women has been lawyer. The law gives them the structure to rob people at the point of a gavel rather than a gun.
Nine - At some point in time we will run out of pie to keep cutting up into smaller and smaller pieces while the legal system loots out the biggest pieces for itself. The notion of "capital" is dead in an information economy. We had this lesson presented to us once back in 1929, when capital still really existed, but we weren't paying attention. Keynes's method of counting the $$$ which a lawyer loots out of a productive company as part of the GNP, in effect counting it twice, is the worst case of cooking the books which has ever been perpetrated. A velocity economy MUST accelerate in response to an increasing population. Most of the acceleration since 1967 has been achieved by inflation and the creation of debt. I believe that there is a terminal velocity which will result in a dramatic restructuring of the economy, most likely nearly complete collapse.
Ten - The "glass cellar" will be the safe refuge for the majority of men. The less they earn and expect to earn, and the more directly their work adds real value, the better they will weather the collapse. I discourage every young man I can from going to college and joining "the professions". Attorneys are so common that they are being used instead of lab rats in medical experiments. People don't get nearly so attached to them. HMOs have turned the practice of medicine into piece-work, or worse into a turn-of-the-century sweatshop. MDs are now forming "Doctors UNIONS"! ( now how is THAT for surreal )
Eleven - The education system is not "failing boys", it is failing itself and the culture which supports it. It destroys motivation, rewards conformity and passivity, punishes merit, and totally inverts the contribution/reward system which made this country so phenomenally successful for nearly 3 centuries. The legal looters have turned achievement into a target and accomplishment into a crime to be punished. Boys are bright, they have caught on.
Twelve - The rise of feminism concurrent with the decline of compensation for value-additon is no accident. Feminidiots can NOT add value, so they will always perish in a free market based on value. Only in a government driven oligarchy can they demand high salaries and tenured positions for teaching that there is no reason, no mind, and that there should be no constraints on the behavior of women - including their right to commit murder.
Thirteen - (appropriately) Any bad idea is self-limiting. Even the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its stupid economic ideology. The US will do the same. It is inevitable. There are too many idiots in charge and giving the looters free license to loot.
Fourteen - ( and this one you may find one of the most controversial ) If you have been able to swallow what I said about Malthus, resource and energy consumption, and the notion of hitting a wall that cannot be moved or gone around, this next statement may not seem so hallucinatory: feminism, AIDS, Ebola, and a host of other "new" diseases are related. If you don't hold to the notion that some male all-powerful supernatural entity built the world in his garage with power tools about 6,000 years ago, and accept the archeological record, human beings as they are today have been around for about 60,000 years. Population estimates at the end of the last ice age, about 25,000-30,000 years ago, put the human population of the world at about 250 million. In 1850, the population was about 1.5 billion. It took roughly 30,000 years for the population to increase 6x. In the next 150 years, it increased 4x to approx 6 billion. There were a whole lot of factors which went into this, but Pasteur's germ theory and what I call "death control" is what I consider to be the primary factor. Population levels are the result of two vector forces. The fertility force pushes population levels upward. The mortality force pushes them down. Significantly reduce the mortality force and population levels will surge upward, geometrically, as they did after 1850. The world is one hell of a lot bigger and more complex than most people realize, and the "scientists" understand one hell of lot less than they claim to. Ever heard of lemmings? When their population reaches excessive levels they commit mass suicide. When other animal populations reach excessive levels and the gene pool begins to be compromised, suddenly live births will switch from a 50/50 ratio of male to female and will begin to produce a preponderance of one sex over the other. There are control mechanisms in nature that we haven't even begin to understand yet which reduce excess populations by either increasing mortality or decreasing fertility or both. Since humans are the most successful predator ever, and have killed into extinction all the larger predators who preyed on us about 11,000 years ago, the "new" predators on the human species are now the smallest: the microbes. And to end run the effect of antibiotics, they are the borg of the microbe world: viruses instead of bacteria. "Your T-cells WILL be assimilated. Resistance is futile." The rise of feminism and gay rights and the destruction of the traditional family are social adaptations requiring and causing a FUNDAMENTAL shift in the fertility-maxmizing social structures which have been so successful that humans have bred themselves to the brink of starvation.
Fifteen - So what does all this have to do with men, men's rights, and a men's movement? A couple of significant things. First, we have to look at the criminalization of fatherhood (divorce, child support, and false DV claims), sexual intercourse with women (expanded definitions of rape and statutory rape), and even finding women attractive (sexual harassment) as evidence that this culture has criminalized the male contribution and role in fertility. What women want be damned, what the culture wants is made clear by what it criminalizes: the male contribution to fertilty. C4m, or "non-fathers" rights will need to be an essential part of any coherent men's movement. An effective means of male birth control would go a long way but, for the time being, celibacy (remaining unmarried) and chastity (sexual abstinence) will have to do. By law, the government can confiscate any or all of a man's wages to support A) any children born by a woman married to him, or B) any child conceived by an unmarried woman using his sperm. To show you how radical I am, as a dedicatedly heterosexual male, I consider gay rights to be the only coherent "men's movement" to surface so far. They have found an end run for the wage-slave, specialized beast of burden to haul around a financially and emotionally dependent wife and family, role.
The social roles have been flipped. Where women used to be the gatekeepers (restrainers) of sexual activity, they are now the most ardent pursuers under the dishonest guise of seeking "love." (Not to go into here just how little real "love" there is to a High Maintenance woman who uses marriage to legally loot half or more of her husband's lifetime earnings.) Once large numbers of men figure out how well sexual withholding works, as it has for women for millennia, I expect lots more men to adopt it. This is where time is particularly on the side of boomer males. Just at the time that our hormonal drives are cooling off and the sexual attentions of women becoming almost more of an annoyance than a pleasure, is when we encounter the largest number of single women who have their precious fucking careers, no husband, and aren't attractive enough to deal with unless they COURT US. Revenge is a dish which tastes best eaten cold.
Second, since the "internal controls" of essential civility have been discredited by feminism, we don't even have to be civil to these women. In fact, I learned that when I stopped doing so that my life became many times more managable.
One of the grand old men of Macho, Norman Mailer, said one of my favorite quotes back in the 60s: "There is nothing in the world more over-rated than a good lay, and nothing more under-rated than a good shit." Thoreau said "At my age my time is too valuable to waste listening to some empty headed twit run her mouth simply because she has regular features."
What none of these idiots have figured out yet is that the men involved in today's "mommy and daddy wars" were socialized and developed their value system pre-feminism. Divorce has broken the transmission of viable culture by preventing these men from socializing their sons in the same value system which was based in fertility maximizing social structures. No matter how much the conservatives try to hold on to the old ways, they are dead - gone the way of the dodo bird.
I hope I'm still around to laugh my ass off when these idiots figure out that feminism actually freed men from their wage slavery and protector/provider roles while women pushed them out of the cages they were in because women wanted to take their place in those cages. And I will really split a gut when the post-feminist boys and girls default on the massive debt which the boomers piled up by borrowing their kids future.
Men built civilization for women, now women have tried to push men out and taken the civility out of it. Its gonna be fun to watch them shit razor blades while it crumbles around them. So-called "normal" women deserve what they are going to get because they have sat by in their smug moral superiority and watched the whole thing happen and enjoyed watching men squirm. Our time is coming soon.
I believe that the most important role for middle-aged men is to assassinate women's characters and destroy the mythology of innocence and female moral superiority in the minds of young men. Plus provide a countervoice to the relentless marketing of sex which is designed to make young men slaves and addicts to their sexual appetites. What we need most is a male Shere Hite who blows the lid off this whole best-kept secret of what bum fucks most women are and how obnoxious sex can be when it is nothing but a treat handed out by women in reward for jumping through hoops.
There has been a "men's movement" going on for years that no one has recognized because it looks like millions of wildcat strikes of one. Men are abandoning the culture which is out to kill them. But, in typical male way, they are coming to the decision individually and implementing it in their own unique way. Almost 1/3 of the men of marriage age in this country have never been married. This despite the two decades of whining about "men can't make a committment." Men are abandoning mass media and giving up the yuppie lifestyle. This is why advertising panders so much to women. Boys are jumping off the achievement track and the work-earn-spend treadmill because they know that even if they develop the skills that they will never be able to compete on merit alone and will always have to swim upstream against unfair advantages of women. It IS still "every man for himself" and I don't think it will ever change until this artificially created period of plenty is over.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is a brief, rapid fire, summary of a variety of biological and social perspectives on the gender war. The social structures related to mating are undergoing a profound and radical shift. We need to set aside the issues of value judgements for a moment to see exactly what the trends are and speculate where they might lead if they continue in the present direction. Then we need to reapply the notion of values and decide whether that is truly the way we want things to go. We can shape the future by our choices.
Consider the following a "work in progress." It is an attempt to introduce certain radical notions in a way that will show how they all fit together. I will probably show disrespect to at least one of everyone's sacred cows. I mean these ideas to be provocative, and hope that they can help spark a new dialogue in which more of the basic assumptions regarding human behavior, and certainly the stereotypes, will come under deeply skeptical scrutiny.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One - If you are a dedicated creationist, read no further. Determinism and external causation are so central to feminidiocy that if you accept those basic premises then any battle with feminist theory will boil down to nothing more than Catholics fighting Protestants. Most of what I say is based on Darwin and Malthus and if you reject the work of those two then you will not see that my formulations have any power at all. However, if you can step back a bit you will see that the entire notion of "Patriarchy" is nothing more than a variation on Jehovah or Allah. The claims that wimminists make for the power THEIR male god, Patriarchy, even exceed the claims made by Judeo-Christians and Muslims. J & A at least give their followers enough free will to screw up and fail the entrance requirement to heaven. "Patriarchy" moves everyone like puppets.
Two - there will never be a mass men's movement in the same way that there has been a mass women's movement. Men simply are not joiners in the same way. Men "join" something for the status or other benefit it gives them - all the men's movements so far have been so silly that joining a men's movement is a step below seeking psychological counseling on men's list of things to do.
Three - Whether by genetics or socialization, and I really suspect a combination of both in which natural tendencies are maximized, men are more likely to deny their pain and tough things out. Back in the 1930s, Alfred Adler (an influential writer on the education of children) wrote about the drive to excell or be "superior" which was innate to children, boys in particular. Competition and "winning" are important enough that minor issues of pain are secondary for men.
Four - Feminism is a strawman, a red herring, distracting people's attention from a much larger philosophical war. A woman back in 1957 wrote a book in which all the words, arguments, and claims which the wimminists spout came out of the mouths of both men and women. Marxism is only part of it, but it is a central part - "from each according to ability, to each according to need." If you haven't already, you need to dig into some of the foundations of contemporary feminist theory, particularly the so-called "post- structuralist" notions of (Michael, I believe) Foucault. I have some links if you are interested. What these nutcases have done is to take socialism from an essentially economic theory and made it into a theory of cognition. He literally claims that reality is whatever we decide to perceive it to be. His work is what has given feminidiocy the "woman so oppressed that she doesn't know she is oppressed" notion. His discussion of "internalized social controls" puts the oppression and victim spin on what someone else would call conscience or a sense of ethics. Too bad Freud has taken such a beating by the feminidiots, because Foucault's "internalized controls" map perfectly onto Freud's "superego". Thus sociopathology, the ability to act any damn way they please any damn time they please, and have no concern for the consequences to other people, is the heart and soul of feminist theory.
Five - Thus certain aspects of feminst theory ARE true. Women have been restricted because their selfish nature unconstrained by social controls will be inevitably destructive. The entire foundation of civilization depends on containing individual behaviors within certain boundaries so that the rights of others are not violated. Feminism demands the right for any woman to be free to violate the rights of anyone at any time and suffer no consequences for it. The extreme of this is the right to murder unborn children, born children, and men and get away with consequences less severe than a man suffers for insulting a woman.
Six - Western Civilization is in decline. This gets real tricky because the points I make inevitably trigger knee-jerk reactions in both liberals and conservatives. I make and remark on observations without adding the baggage of judgement. The only way to understand a lot of this is to take an objectivist viewpoint. Western civilization is based on Imperialism, Judeo-Christianity, and urbanization. The American Empire was the successor to the British Empire, which learned everything from the Roman Empire. It is inherently expansionistic which brings us to the Malthus limit. Since Malthus was writing in essentially pre-technological times, he only talked about food supply. Since population increases geometrically while food supply can only increase arithmetically, there will inevitably come a point where the two curves intersect and population will over-run the food supply and mass starvation will set in. War and competition for territory have always been time-tested historic methods for disposing of excess population. About 110 years ago we (European Imperialists) ran out of continents that we could steal from the original inhabitants using our superior weapons technology. While military domination has remained an important tool of "foreign policy" right up to Kosovo today, there has been a switch to economic and industrial domination. The "bad news" side of this is that as other countries industrialize and the "standard of living" rises to match "the American Dream", the consumption of resources, both raw materials and energy, begins to follow the same geometric expansion as the pressure on the food supply. Thus, we must either continue to confiscate the resources and food of other countries at the point of our Armed Forces' guns, or find a way to live within the limits of our resources. That is most certainly NOT the "American" way, so what we have is increased competition for resources which is expressed as agression. While this aggression is temporarily hidden behind the smokescreen of the courts, and the thugs and hiwaymen of today are called "lawyers" and "international bankers", the function is the same: theft from the owners and producers (ability) to serve the self-defined "needs" of the non-producers and non-owners.
Seven - The most destructive notion in Western Civilization today is that of "entitlement". As a naturalist, I point out that no rabbit in the wild is "entitled" to live 10 more minutes. He earns that "privilege" each time he escapes the coyote and forfeits it the moment he fails.
Eight - About 40 years ago the US made a major transition in its economic structure which has gone largely unnoticed and its significance seldom understood and even more seldom remarked upon. In the late 1950s, at the peak of the US industrial success, domination of the world, and consumption of the world's industrial output, the percentage of the population which managed or sold something exceeded the percentage of the population PRODUCING ANYTHING. We made the transition from being a nation mostly of producers to being a nation of "handlers". I can't remember the name of the guy who postulated that a "service economy" (and by implication an "information" economy) was possible, but I contend that history will prove him completely, perversely, wrong. There's a guy in Canada who could be my clone who has done a GREAT job of laying this out, so I'll just refer you to his page and save myself the effort. (http://webhome.idirect.com/~andyt/) Trying to sum up my thesis as succinctly as possible - we have moved from an economy of value-ADDITION to an economy of value-DIVISION. We see this manifested everywhere, but most of all in the feminist demands for "wage-parity" and prating about "glass-ceilings" which absolutely deny and try to refute the principle of value-addition. Women (and minorities as well) are to be compensated NOT on how much value they add to a product or company, but on what they are ENTITLED to because the group to which they belong has never added enough value to have been worth compensating for it. It is no accident that one of the favored professions for these newly "liberated" women has been lawyer. The law gives them the structure to rob people at the point of a gavel rather than a gun.
Nine - At some point in time we will run out of pie to keep cutting up into smaller and smaller pieces while the legal system loots out the biggest pieces for itself. The notion of "capital" is dead in an information economy. We had this lesson presented to us once back in 1929, when capital still really existed, but we weren't paying attention. Keynes's method of counting the $$$ which a lawyer loots out of a productive company as part of the GNP, in effect counting it twice, is the worst case of cooking the books which has ever been perpetrated. A velocity economy MUST accelerate in response to an increasing population. Most of the acceleration since 1967 has been achieved by inflation and the creation of debt. I believe that there is a terminal velocity which will result in a dramatic restructuring of the economy, most likely nearly complete collapse.
Ten - The "glass cellar" will be the safe refuge for the majority of men. The less they earn and expect to earn, and the more directly their work adds real value, the better they will weather the collapse. I discourage every young man I can from going to college and joining "the professions". Attorneys are so common that they are being used instead of lab rats in medical experiments. People don't get nearly so attached to them. HMOs have turned the practice of medicine into piece-work, or worse into a turn-of-the-century sweatshop. MDs are now forming "Doctors UNIONS"! ( now how is THAT for surreal )
Eleven - The education system is not "failing boys", it is failing itself and the culture which supports it. It destroys motivation, rewards conformity and passivity, punishes merit, and totally inverts the contribution/reward system which made this country so phenomenally successful for nearly 3 centuries. The legal looters have turned achievement into a target and accomplishment into a crime to be punished. Boys are bright, they have caught on.
Twelve - The rise of feminism concurrent with the decline of compensation for value-additon is no accident. Feminidiots can NOT add value, so they will always perish in a free market based on value. Only in a government driven oligarchy can they demand high salaries and tenured positions for teaching that there is no reason, no mind, and that there should be no constraints on the behavior of women - including their right to commit murder.
Thirteen - (appropriately) Any bad idea is self-limiting. Even the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its stupid economic ideology. The US will do the same. It is inevitable. There are too many idiots in charge and giving the looters free license to loot.
Fourteen - ( and this one you may find one of the most controversial ) If you have been able to swallow what I said about Malthus, resource and energy consumption, and the notion of hitting a wall that cannot be moved or gone around, this next statement may not seem so hallucinatory: feminism, AIDS, Ebola, and a host of other "new" diseases are related. If you don't hold to the notion that some male all-powerful supernatural entity built the world in his garage with power tools about 6,000 years ago, and accept the archeological record, human beings as they are today have been around for about 60,000 years. Population estimates at the end of the last ice age, about 25,000-30,000 years ago, put the human population of the world at about 250 million. In 1850, the population was about 1.5 billion. It took roughly 30,000 years for the population to increase 6x. In the next 150 years, it increased 4x to approx 6 billion. There were a whole lot of factors which went into this, but Pasteur's germ theory and what I call "death control" is what I consider to be the primary factor. Population levels are the result of two vector forces. The fertility force pushes population levels upward. The mortality force pushes them down. Significantly reduce the mortality force and population levels will surge upward, geometrically, as they did after 1850. The world is one hell of a lot bigger and more complex than most people realize, and the "scientists" understand one hell of lot less than they claim to. Ever heard of lemmings? When their population reaches excessive levels they commit mass suicide. When other animal populations reach excessive levels and the gene pool begins to be compromised, suddenly live births will switch from a 50/50 ratio of male to female and will begin to produce a preponderance of one sex over the other. There are control mechanisms in nature that we haven't even begin to understand yet which reduce excess populations by either increasing mortality or decreasing fertility or both. Since humans are the most successful predator ever, and have killed into extinction all the larger predators who preyed on us about 11,000 years ago, the "new" predators on the human species are now the smallest: the microbes. And to end run the effect of antibiotics, they are the borg of the microbe world: viruses instead of bacteria. "Your T-cells WILL be assimilated. Resistance is futile." The rise of feminism and gay rights and the destruction of the traditional family are social adaptations requiring and causing a FUNDAMENTAL shift in the fertility-maxmizing social structures which have been so successful that humans have bred themselves to the brink of starvation.
Fifteen - So what does all this have to do with men, men's rights, and a men's movement? A couple of significant things. First, we have to look at the criminalization of fatherhood (divorce, child support, and false DV claims), sexual intercourse with women (expanded definitions of rape and statutory rape), and even finding women attractive (sexual harassment) as evidence that this culture has criminalized the male contribution and role in fertility. What women want be damned, what the culture wants is made clear by what it criminalizes: the male contribution to fertilty. C4m, or "non-fathers" rights will need to be an essential part of any coherent men's movement. An effective means of male birth control would go a long way but, for the time being, celibacy (remaining unmarried) and chastity (sexual abstinence) will have to do. By law, the government can confiscate any or all of a man's wages to support A) any children born by a woman married to him, or B) any child conceived by an unmarried woman using his sperm. To show you how radical I am, as a dedicatedly heterosexual male, I consider gay rights to be the only coherent "men's movement" to surface so far. They have found an end run for the wage-slave, specialized beast of burden to haul around a financially and emotionally dependent wife and family, role.
The social roles have been flipped. Where women used to be the gatekeepers (restrainers) of sexual activity, they are now the most ardent pursuers under the dishonest guise of seeking "love." (Not to go into here just how little real "love" there is to a High Maintenance woman who uses marriage to legally loot half or more of her husband's lifetime earnings.) Once large numbers of men figure out how well sexual withholding works, as it has for women for millennia, I expect lots more men to adopt it. This is where time is particularly on the side of boomer males. Just at the time that our hormonal drives are cooling off and the sexual attentions of women becoming almost more of an annoyance than a pleasure, is when we encounter the largest number of single women who have their precious fucking careers, no husband, and aren't attractive enough to deal with unless they COURT US. Revenge is a dish which tastes best eaten cold.
Second, since the "internal controls" of essential civility have been discredited by feminism, we don't even have to be civil to these women. In fact, I learned that when I stopped doing so that my life became many times more managable.
One of the grand old men of Macho, Norman Mailer, said one of my favorite quotes back in the 60s: "There is nothing in the world more over-rated than a good lay, and nothing more under-rated than a good shit." Thoreau said "At my age my time is too valuable to waste listening to some empty headed twit run her mouth simply because she has regular features."
What none of these idiots have figured out yet is that the men involved in today's "mommy and daddy wars" were socialized and developed their value system pre-feminism. Divorce has broken the transmission of viable culture by preventing these men from socializing their sons in the same value system which was based in fertility maximizing social structures. No matter how much the conservatives try to hold on to the old ways, they are dead - gone the way of the dodo bird.
I hope I'm still around to laugh my ass off when these idiots figure out that feminism actually freed men from their wage slavery and protector/provider roles while women pushed them out of the cages they were in because women wanted to take their place in those cages. And I will really split a gut when the post-feminist boys and girls default on the massive debt which the boomers piled up by borrowing their kids future.
Men built civilization for women, now women have tried to push men out and taken the civility out of it. Its gonna be fun to watch them shit razor blades while it crumbles around them. So-called "normal" women deserve what they are going to get because they have sat by in their smug moral superiority and watched the whole thing happen and enjoyed watching men squirm. Our time is coming soon.
I believe that the most important role for middle-aged men is to assassinate women's characters and destroy the mythology of innocence and female moral superiority in the minds of young men. Plus provide a countervoice to the relentless marketing of sex which is designed to make young men slaves and addicts to their sexual appetites. What we need most is a male Shere Hite who blows the lid off this whole best-kept secret of what bum fucks most women are and how obnoxious sex can be when it is nothing but a treat handed out by women in reward for jumping through hoops.
There has been a "men's movement" going on for years that no one has recognized because it looks like millions of wildcat strikes of one. Men are abandoning the culture which is out to kill them. But, in typical male way, they are coming to the decision individually and implementing it in their own unique way. Almost 1/3 of the men of marriage age in this country have never been married. This despite the two decades of whining about "men can't make a committment." Men are abandoning mass media and giving up the yuppie lifestyle. This is why advertising panders so much to women. Boys are jumping off the achievement track and the work-earn-spend treadmill because they know that even if they develop the skills that they will never be able to compete on merit alone and will always have to swim upstream against unfair advantages of women. It IS still "every man for himself" and I don't think it will ever change until this artificially created period of plenty is over.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
EOTM: Man Hating and Man Bashing
Robert Heinlein, in his 1982 novel "Friday" makes the following statement:
"Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms... ( such as when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything as long as it isn't the country as a whole. A very bad sign, Particularism. And, before a revolution can take place, the population must lose faith in both the police and the courts.)...but a *dying* culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A general loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot. This symptom is especially serious in that an individual showing it never thinks of it as ill health but as proof of his/her strength." ( he wrote this in 1982 )
Another wise person with whom I share much of my value system wrote in 1998: "That there is a war between men and women is surely indicative of a society in its death throes."
I have reached the point where the banal cliches about men; how they never ask for directions, what slobs they are; how they think with their "little" heads instead of their big one; are so annoying to me that I refuse to watch television or listen to the radio since they pour out of these public broadcast media in unrelenting streams. A week never goes by without receiving something via email like this list entitled ”More man bashing”.
Like the african-american fed up with "all black people got rhythm" jokes, I never let this sort of mindless hate-mongering go unchallenged. Most people who know me know better than to engage in this sort of infantile self-aggrandizement - elevating themselves by trying to show how far below them some other group is.
The saddest part of this list is how little creativity or real thought it actually shows. A statement such as: "What do you call a man with half a brain?...............Gifted" is completely devoid of the satire, irony, or absurdity which marks most humor and any laughter it provokes comes from nothing more than a sense of loathing. The fact that men themselves will appear to laugh at such jokes comes in part from self-loathing, but more from the fact that many men simply do not know how to fight them.
But the most insidious symptom of the cultural dry rot which allows this was illustrated by the comment of a woman with whom I have no more than a speaking acqaintance. I listened to this woman relate an incident regarding her male (platonic) roommate. He has many medical problems, including hepatitis ‘C’, and has been very sick for the past couple of years. She had purchased one of those pieces of mass market furniture of veneer over particle board which are incredibly dense and heavy. She and a couple of friends were attempting to wrestle this incredibly heavy object up a couple of flights of stairs. He got up off the couch to open the door and placed a hand on an unsupported corner to help steady it.
I was totally taken aback when she concluded her story with a disdainful sneer and said "Being a MA-YAN, he couldn’t just lie there and watch someone else work. He HAD to get up and help". The contempt she showed was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. I have long battled this tendency among women to bash men, often habitually and without thinking as many friends of mine have done until I repeatedly confront them and tell them I will not tolerate it in my presence. What took me by surprise about this particular incident was that, while the bashing is usually about some quality of men which is stereotyped and overstated but still has some basis in the reality of some men’s behavior, in this instance she was bashing him for a trait that I consider admirable.
It was then that I began to understand the true values conflict underlying the gender war, and realize how deep it runs. MEN have become contemptible for their generosity and willingness to help people out, even when it means getting off their asses and forgoing a bit of momentary comfort. John Gray was right, we are from 2 different planets. Like so many men are, I was too stunned to react immediately but later got a severe case of the "I shoulda saids".
I finally got hold of the elusive thing which I had seen at work for years but which had been too slippery to grasp. I understood that there is a certain subgroup of women who WANT to hate us and who LOVE hating us more than they love anything else. If they cannot find anything despicable about us to hate, if we manage to resist being categorized as homogeneous rapists, seducers, abandoners, molesters, incompetents, and so on ad nauseum, then they will find a way to hate us for the very qualities we value most in ourselves and in others: such as generosity and self-sacrifice. And they eschew such values for themselves, without realizing that it is precisely those values on which society is built because they are necessary to allow people to exist in close proximity and high concentrations without going to war over whose needs get met at the expense of the other. Without those values, people turn on each other rather than to each other and the measure of strength becomes not how much one can build, but rather how much one can tear down.
The inevitable outcome of this trend in social values is that when enough people become "strong" enough they will manifest that strength by ripping the culture to shreds.
"Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms... ( such as when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything as long as it isn't the country as a whole. A very bad sign, Particularism. And, before a revolution can take place, the population must lose faith in both the police and the courts.)...but a *dying* culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A general loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot. This symptom is especially serious in that an individual showing it never thinks of it as ill health but as proof of his/her strength." ( he wrote this in 1982 )
Another wise person with whom I share much of my value system wrote in 1998: "That there is a war between men and women is surely indicative of a society in its death throes."
I have reached the point where the banal cliches about men; how they never ask for directions, what slobs they are; how they think with their "little" heads instead of their big one; are so annoying to me that I refuse to watch television or listen to the radio since they pour out of these public broadcast media in unrelenting streams. A week never goes by without receiving something via email like this list entitled ”More man bashing”.
Like the african-american fed up with "all black people got rhythm" jokes, I never let this sort of mindless hate-mongering go unchallenged. Most people who know me know better than to engage in this sort of infantile self-aggrandizement - elevating themselves by trying to show how far below them some other group is.
The saddest part of this list is how little creativity or real thought it actually shows. A statement such as: "What do you call a man with half a brain?...............Gifted" is completely devoid of the satire, irony, or absurdity which marks most humor and any laughter it provokes comes from nothing more than a sense of loathing. The fact that men themselves will appear to laugh at such jokes comes in part from self-loathing, but more from the fact that many men simply do not know how to fight them.
But the most insidious symptom of the cultural dry rot which allows this was illustrated by the comment of a woman with whom I have no more than a speaking acqaintance. I listened to this woman relate an incident regarding her male (platonic) roommate. He has many medical problems, including hepatitis ‘C’, and has been very sick for the past couple of years. She had purchased one of those pieces of mass market furniture of veneer over particle board which are incredibly dense and heavy. She and a couple of friends were attempting to wrestle this incredibly heavy object up a couple of flights of stairs. He got up off the couch to open the door and placed a hand on an unsupported corner to help steady it.
I was totally taken aback when she concluded her story with a disdainful sneer and said "Being a MA-YAN, he couldn’t just lie there and watch someone else work. He HAD to get up and help". The contempt she showed was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. I have long battled this tendency among women to bash men, often habitually and without thinking as many friends of mine have done until I repeatedly confront them and tell them I will not tolerate it in my presence. What took me by surprise about this particular incident was that, while the bashing is usually about some quality of men which is stereotyped and overstated but still has some basis in the reality of some men’s behavior, in this instance she was bashing him for a trait that I consider admirable.
It was then that I began to understand the true values conflict underlying the gender war, and realize how deep it runs. MEN have become contemptible for their generosity and willingness to help people out, even when it means getting off their asses and forgoing a bit of momentary comfort. John Gray was right, we are from 2 different planets. Like so many men are, I was too stunned to react immediately but later got a severe case of the "I shoulda saids".
I finally got hold of the elusive thing which I had seen at work for years but which had been too slippery to grasp. I understood that there is a certain subgroup of women who WANT to hate us and who LOVE hating us more than they love anything else. If they cannot find anything despicable about us to hate, if we manage to resist being categorized as homogeneous rapists, seducers, abandoners, molesters, incompetents, and so on ad nauseum, then they will find a way to hate us for the very qualities we value most in ourselves and in others: such as generosity and self-sacrifice. And they eschew such values for themselves, without realizing that it is precisely those values on which society is built because they are necessary to allow people to exist in close proximity and high concentrations without going to war over whose needs get met at the expense of the other. Without those values, people turn on each other rather than to each other and the measure of strength becomes not how much one can build, but rather how much one can tear down.
The inevitable outcome of this trend in social values is that when enough people become "strong" enough they will manifest that strength by ripping the culture to shreds.
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EOTM: THE BITCH
.Women today have fallen in love with THE BITCH. Desperately in search of a model of female power after having it drilled into their heads for so long that they have none, women have seized upon THE BITCH as their savior, their salvation, and the answer to all which troubles them. And THE BITCH is indeed powerful. Few men are centered enough, secure enough in their own power, and calm enough to not cringe in fear when THE BITCH strikes.
The problem lies in the fact that women have become so addicted to the power of THE BITCH that they have lost the ability to tell the difference between her and THE CRAZY BITCH or THE VICIOUS BITCH or THE LYING BITCH. These faces of the dark feminine give women license to vent their most destructive tendencies and become as emotionally violent as they wish and still have the refuge of an excuse for their destructiveness.
There is a popular T-shirt, poster, coffee-mug theme that is often seen these days: "Caution! I go from 0 to BITCH in 2.0 seconds. AND the bitch switch sticks".
The problem lies in the fact that women have become so addicted to the power of THE BITCH that they have lost the ability to tell the difference between her and THE CRAZY BITCH or THE VICIOUS BITCH or THE LYING BITCH. These faces of the dark feminine give women license to vent their most destructive tendencies and become as emotionally violent as they wish and still have the refuge of an excuse for their destructiveness.
There is a popular T-shirt, poster, coffee-mug theme that is often seen these days: "Caution! I go from 0 to BITCH in 2.0 seconds. AND the bitch switch sticks".
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.This is both a threat of, and an invitation to, violence. An attack is an attack whether it it verbal or physical. What makes THE BITCH so reprehensible is that the violence is only effective when it exploits an emotional bond and thus is a violation of the most basic requirement for a relationship: trust. THE BITCH'S power is greatest against those who care about her and care what she thinks of them. Everyone else can simply shrug it off and go - "CRAZY BITCH". Only those who she betrays are really affected.
Imagine the reaction of women to that same saying changed only slightly, retaining the full meaning and violent intent:"Caution! I go from 0 to FIST in 2.0 seconds. AND the fist is a repeater."
My advice to men: When you see that a woman is in love with THE BITCH, realize that you are late for the door and put as much distance between you and THE CRAZY BITCH as possible.
My advice to women: Before you reach for the emotional meat cleaver, give a moment of thought to how you would like to be treated by someone who may have a legitimate reason to be angry with you. Wield THE BITCH with exactly the same fervor or restraint that you would expect a man to wield THE FIST.
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Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
EOTM: !!!!!!!!!!RAPE!!!!!!!!!!...
"I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." -- Robin Morgan, "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape"
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"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent," -- Catherine MacKinnon in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies, p. 129.
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"The fact is that the process of killing - both rape and battery are steps in that process- is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone
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"Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire, and the first crude stone axe," -- Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, p. 5.
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"All men benefit from rape, because all men benefit from the fact that women are not free in this society; that women cower; that women are afraid; that women cannot assert the rights that we have, limited as those rights are, because of the ubiquitous presence of rape," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone
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Nothing could be farther from the reality of most men's experiences with sex than the characterizations of the radical rape theorists. Sexual freedom for women was once one of the foundations of the so-called "women's liberation" movement, but that has been replaced by a rigid political orthodoxy that is far more restrictive for women than the conditions which were the justification of their need for liberation. As the political has bulldozed its way into the personal, the delicate balance which existed in relationships and made them possible has completely broken down.
Today, nearing the crossover point between the 20th and 21st centuries, it is impossible to approach even the most superficial examination of female/male relationships without having to deal with a bottomless chasm between men and women called rape. The word itself has long since ceased to have any specific meaning because the concept has been so broadened that sex itself, any and all sex, between men and women is now called rape by some. This broadening of the aspect of criminality, violence, within sexual relationships blurs the distinctions between the normal frictions inherent in such an emotionally intense experience and true malicious intent. Indeed, malice on the part of men toward women is assumed and has become impossible for a man to disprove.
Rape has become the metaphor for all the conflicts of power between the sexes, and institutionalizes the underdog position of women. Dissident feminist Camille Paglia characterizes rape as "male power fighting female power". Another dissident feminist group, The Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT), in "Caught Looking", names and describes the female aspect of power in sexual relationships. "It (denial of the possibility of mutuality) puts the woman in the position that the mother has to the infant: she has the power to give or withold." A few paragraphs later they recognize that "subduing the male through sex, a tradtional female stance, did not give women freedom to become sexual persons in their own right." Journalist Nora Fox, writing for "Squire", magazine suggests "Being the superior sex, women long ago learned the surefire way to get our way is to withhold sex. It's the same way we train dogs. Good behavior merits you a treat; bad behavior puts you in the conjugal dog house for the night. Men never seem to catch on." "It's a sad commentary on social Darwinism that sexual withholding works after all these millennia."
It is an even sadder commentary on the female view of relationships to see a woman advocating that women reduce their sexual nature to commodity status, then use it to play a mean and exploitive version of the futures market: artificially manipulating the commodity to create an artificial scarcity which drives up the price. By equating female sexuality with a dog biscuit, this so-called feminist dehumanizes women and demeans their sexuality far more than men ever could. Implicit in her view, as well as the views of radical rape theory, is a dissociation of women from their sexuality. It is not part of them: it is a THING to be passed around, used to manipulate with, but never something to be valued in its own right. If women, as the superior sex, take that view of their own sexuality, why is it a criminal act for men to believe them?
Extending Ms Fox's analogy of treating men like dogs, anyone who has trained a dog knows that effective training requires iron discipline. When using a treat to coerce desired behavior from a dog, any departure from the conditional withholding and giving a treat when the behavior isn't present will create a game where the beloved pet will try to get the treat without the required behavior. There is no malice on the pet's part, he really thinks it is a game - just like tug-of-war or chase-the-ball.
In sexual relationships, men often have to contend with women who constantly flip-flop in their postions. Sometimes it seems like women want to play: other times it seems like the purpose of the same activity has changed to control. When women attempt to grab the maternal power position described by FACT, and place the man in the position of the infant, by using their power to grant or withhold as a manipulative device, as Ms Fox suggests, men react in a variety of ways ranging from hurt to rage. All of these reactions damage the foundation of a relationship and undermine its mutuality. Depending on his socialization and past experiences with women, he may chose to continue it as a game and try to snatch the biscuit from his would-be mistress's hand, knock her down and take it by force, or simply quit the game and go away.
Prior to the extreme expansion of the concepts of rape, continuing the game was considered to be "romance". Above cited Camille Paglia has also made the statement that "what used to be considered unbridled passion is now called 'date rape'". According to feminist theory, rape definitions were previously biased completely toward the male point of view. Reflecting a cultural and social understanding of the "traditional female stance" of "subduing the male through sex", behavior antecedent to the alleged sex act purported to be criminal in nature was considered in determining whether the woman had been engaging in a power play of bait-and-switch or was truly innocent of any action or intent to provoke interest and desire in a man as a method of gaining power over him. This was a form of protection for men from women who understood the nature of their sexual power and were quite willing to abuse it and use it in a manipulative and exploitive way, just as rape laws were a form of protection from men who were willing to abuse their power to violate a woman sexually.
Nothing is so central to feminist theory as the denial of this as a true form of power. Balancing the so-called "patriarchy" has always been the emotional "matriarchy" of intimate relationships. In its current incarnation, the widely accepted fact that women are "relationship and intimacy experts", women retain exclusive power to define the terms and conditions of intimacy. The male point of view is not just denied and negated: it is demanded of men that they not only accede to, but adopt, the female point of view. Females "know" in their special "women's way of knowing" how relationships "should" be conducted, and they grant or withhold the treat of sex as a means of training men to give them what they want.
This point of view has become entrenched in current legal theory and practice. The determination of criminality has shifted completely away from objective interpretation of events to subjective determination based entirely on the perceptions of the female. Behavior on the part of the female which could have been interpreted in the subjective experience of the male as an invitation or enticement to pursue her, the proverbial and inflammatory "she asked for it", and which can turn really ugly if the woman changes the rules at the last moment and grabs for the maternal power postion of withholding what she has previously implied she was quite willing to give away freely, is now ruled inadmissable in determining guilt. However she says it was, is the law now. The ratios of criminal to non-criminal sexual behavior have been entirely reversed. Rape used to exclude anything which was ambiguous or where the woman's intent was unclear: now it includes all these formerly gray areas and only excludes the rare occasions where the woman is clear and unconflicted in her desires and intent; as Robin Morgan stipulates.
Given the realities of dating relationships, and the complex dance of advance/retreat which is characteristic of them, situations without ambiguity seldom exist. In part, it is the very riskiness of the ambiguous situation which provides much of the excitement of sexuality. Several years ago, Antioch College (always at the forefront of "political correctness") formulated a set of rules for the conduct of sexual relationships which required the male to secure explicit verbal consent prior to each escalation of physical intimacy leading to sex. "Can I touch your breast now?" "Can I put my hand inside your panties now?" "Can I put my finger inside you now?" It's hard to imagine that the people who wrote these rules had ever had sex. The cold and unemotional negotiation of sex like a labor contract is a more effective means of killing a rising bout of libido than a cold shower could ever be. The formal distance and restraint required a separation of intellect from experience and a detachment and dissociation from the event which no amount of lust could survive. What little sexual expression survived this over-intellectualization was necessarily contrived and devoid of emotional content. What started out to be about passion became about nothing more than friction.
In most cases, male ardor could not survive the stilted script and wilted like a cut flower under a hot light. In the current formulation of the sexual script, this was exactly the desired result. Men now assumed the role of the gatekeeper formerly filled by women and rather than rely on her to tell him that he was about to go, or had gone too far, he had to take responsibility for making sure he never stepped over the line: if he did, it was "date rape". Rebalancing the stereotypic division of responsibility implicit in the old tradtional roles would have required women to then take on the role of the initiator, which would also require that they take responsibility for their own sexuality and the fact that they are sexual beings. This, of course, is not allowed under the precepts of either the traditional cultural view of female sexuality or the contemporary position of the rape theorists, which are actually identical in their underlying assumptions despite the cosmetic differences used to hide their true intent. "Women do not want sex, they want love and commitment. A woman who willingly engages in sex is participating in her own oppression. A woman who believes that she has had willing sex is weak minded fool who has internalized her own oppression because she is unable to know any better and patriarchy controls her every move." It would also totally compromise her power postion to grant or withhold sex as a means of getting her way: transferring it to the male.
Given the fact that, historically, a woman's sexuality WAS her primary economic asset; and that the cultural institution of marriage was essentially a socially enforced contract in which the male was held responsible and accountable for providing financially for that woman and any products of his access to her sexuality in return for that access; marital law exempted husbands from rape charges. Rape was considered a form of theft, taking a woman's asset without paying for it. Implicit in this structure was the assumption that, by marrying her, the man had entered into a contract of continued payment for continued access. Cultural stereotyping demanded that women dissociate themselves from any enjoyment of their own sexuality lest men "stop buying cows, because they could get the milk for free". The sexual repression of the first Victorian age was so complete that it was considered somehow shameful and perverse if a woman actually enjoyed sex instead of "lying back and thinking of England" so she could somehow endure the shame and degradation of it all. Sex was primarily for the production of children, and the satisfaction of men's "bestial" urges, and the ideal was to get it over with as quickly as possible in order to minimize the shame and degradation of it all.
The quotes at the beginning of this essay reflect a return to values and cultural attitudes which were far more characteristic of the 1880s than the 1980s. Rene Denfeld has referred to this branch of radical feminism as "The New Victorians" in her book of the same name. The radical rape theorists have somehow managed to pull off a hoax of incredible propotions as they push for reinstatement of total repression and denial of female sexuality while justifying it by claiming it is necessary as a tool to fight the very conditions that it creates as an inevitable result.
The modern day mechanism for this is also identical to the ones historically used: destruction of women's sexuality through a variety of mechanisms and making women fear men because of their bestial and violent inherent natures.
Cultures in Africa and the Middle East take a very straightforward approach to the destruction of female sexuality: they simply chop the genitals off little girls somewhere between the ages of 4 and puberty. Commonly known to western cultures as Female Genital Mutilation, or FGM, these grisly practices are known within the cultures which practice them by the more polite and obscure euphemisms of female circumcision, excision, and infibulation. Western cultures, being on the whole more "civilized", use the more "humane" means of leaving the genitals attached but severing the emotional attachment and ownership, as well as all feeling in them, by the mechanism of shame. The western culture version of FGM is "Female Genital Mindfuck" which confuses and sublimates a woman's real feelings and desires into a form reflecting a prevailing cultural value which serves a social purpose. Women are only allowed to experience pleasure within a highly prescribed and proscribed context. She must be "in love": if she is all things are allowed, up to and including murder, if she isn't nothing is allowed.
This highly scripted social context is just as anti-reality when it comes to the behavior of most women as the characterizations of all sex as a form of violence is regarding the real behavior of men. The cultural mechanism which used to allow women to maintain this fiction and still experience their sexuality was men's fulfillment of their part of the sexual script regarding aggression and initiation. Women could put up "token" resistance secure in the knowledge that men would persist through the 150 rejections required to move the relationship from first eye-contact to sexual intimacy, because that was their role - their "JOB". The inevitable misunderstandings and ambiguities would be excused based on a understanding that the deception involved in the artificial roles made real understanding next to impossible. Women could be sexual without the shame by being "in love", "overcome by passion", "carried away in the heat of the moment", or any one of many other euphemisms for the woman letting the man have her way. Once in a while it got out of hand, and a truly dangerous man would ignore the gatekeeping signals which meant "too far", in which case the man would be convicted of rape. The old code of "chivalry" was sufficient to keep most socialized men in check.
When the public code of chivalry was changed from a woman's privilege to a woman's oppression, the entire system began to break down. Eliminating the distinctions between loving consensual sex and violence, and in fact denying that any such distinctions exist, made it impossible for a woman who was not completely clear on her sexuality (and given the contradictions in the culture on the subject of sex, what woman, or man for that matter, COULD be) to understand the gray areas between her own desires and being exploited by men in purely selfish and self-serving manners. Thus any behavior which fell outside the bounds of "politically correct" orthodoxy came to be criminalized. And since that range was narrow indeed, not to mention anti-reality, almost all sexual actions by men toward women came to be regarded as criminal, or "potentially" criminal (as exemplified by characterizing all men as "potential" rapists). Thus the meaning of the term "rape" has been broadened in its usage to include a vast number of acts that have nothing to do with sexuality, but relate only to the aspect of sex now called by the term "gender". Any time men oppose the desires or actions of a woman; whether it be to grab the moral high ground and maternal power to grant or withhold sex (even after an implicit suggestion that it is to be expected) or simply to impose on men something they have every reason and right to resist; it is now called by some variation of "(modifier) rape".
A female sportswriter, in a often quoted incident which occurred in the locker room of a professional football team several years ago, characterized the male players hostility toward her presence in their locker room, while they were running around in various stages of undress, as "mind rape." No male sportscaster would dream of expecting to be able to hang out in a female athletes' locker room indulging his voyeuristic appetites; but when a woman does and men object - the woman, as always, becomes the victim by screaming RAPE!!!! The very term "mind-rape" should be seen as an oxymoron; and probably would except for the rejection of reason, logic, mind, and intelligence itself as "andro-centric" which radical feminsm has made possible. Rape is being used today in the broadest possible sense to cast the subtle pall of criminal violence on any action of men to assert their own power and right to it. The concept of "equal rights" has been totally lost in the grab for power which feminism has become. Any person in a free society should have the right to deny a person of the opposite sex from leering at them in a semi-private environment. Isn't that the entire foundation under the concept of "sexual harassment". The use of the term "rape" to describe such actions by men illustrates how the meaning has been perverted to the point where the term has no meaning at all any more except to make criminals of men who oppose any action or exercise of power by a woman.
This is not to say that forced criminal sex does not exist, it certainly does and should remain a crime subject to the most severe of punishments. But the destruction and criminalization of the gray areas is most decidedly not to the benefit of either women or men. Kate Fillion, in "Lip Service" describes the experience of a young woman whose interpretation of a sexual encounter changes from the beginnings of a wonderful romance and life together to rape as a result of seeing her lover of the previous night sitting with another girl in the college cafeteria. Many writers, female and male alike, have commented on how this trivialization of the term is incredibly insulting and destructive to those who really have been violated.
The much trumpeted statistic that 1/4 of all women will be rape victims relies on a definition of rape that requires denial of 75% of the women's own interpretations of the experience. Fully 3/4 of the women included in the numbers of "rape victims" themselves characterized the experience as a misunderstanding. Almost half of them went on to sleep with the so-called "perpetrators" again. Under the expanded definition of rape used to create the 1/4 statistic: a man who takes a woman out on that "holy grail" of single womanhood, the "Saturday Night Date", drops a couple of hundred bucks on dinner that includes a bottle or 2 of wine, then they end up doing the horizontal boogie, if she has 2nd thoughts about it later - HE HAS RAPED HER.
The complexity of the conditions for "politically correct sex" have become so prohibitive that failure is inevitable. Perhaps the first area where true equality between the sexes is going to be achieved is by making men as inhibited and ambivalent about sex as the popular stereotype of women portrays women to be. Nothing is so ironic as listening to a woman, who never even took high school psychology, make bitter and scathing authoritative pronouncements about men, their nature, their motivations, and particularly their sexuality; then wonder morosely why none of these exploitive creatures approach her in order to force their unwanted attentions upon her.
Historically, men have shouldered a disproportionate share of the burdens and risks associated with the initiation of potential sexual relationships. They did so both in anticipation of certain rewards, and based upon a certain sense of safety that he would be cut a bit of slack if he failed to do it perfectly elegantly. Assigning the role of the initiator to men and the gatekeeper to women, worked to the general benefit of all. Studies have found that the frequency of sex in lesbian relationships is significantly below that in heterosexual relationships, which is again below that in relationships between gay men. Men initiate, women wait. Theres an old workplace poster that talks about a job that "anybody could have done, but it was really nobody's job, so nobody did it, if somebody had done it, things would have been so much better". Men have been very clearly socialized to understand that the shit work of sexual initiation is "their job." However, when the situation is created where an act is both required AND prohibited, almost everyone will make the choice which carries the lesser sanction. In todays culture that means waiting for the woman to "intiate sex out of her own sincere affection and desire" as Robin Morgan demands to avoid a rape charge. No man goes to prison for the crime of waiting. Men and women alike are waiting for Godot, who never shows up.
The ”dull assumption” to which Norman Mailer refers in “Prisoner of Sex”, ie. that the male sex drive is entirely due to an accident of birth, is more repellant to men today than when Mailer wrote about it in 1971. The fact that it has become so deeply entrenched in the public mind, becoming the 21st century equivalent of the "flat earth" view of the 15th century, has driven all eroticism and joy out of sexual relationships. Erin Pizzey, founder of the first women's shelter in the UK, speaks of the "terrible loss of tenderness and romance which has been leached out of the lives of women." In the gender war, the shared bed has become one of the primary battlegrounds.
The persistence, urgency, and ubiquity of the male sex drive and its power ascribed by the radical rape theorists to all men is a complete fallacy. While the cultural perception remains that men want sex more than women; doctors, counselors, and other helping professionals are increasingly called upon to deal with women trying to adjust to the fact that their chosen partners do not have much, if any, interest in sleeping with them. The sexless marriage is becoming far more common than most people realize. Relying entirely on men's sexual desire to compel them to pursue women and place themselves under the power of women to grant or withhold sex is a strategy that fails somewhere around age 40. Women tend to respond to this loss of power to use their sexuality in a manipulative and exploitive manner in the same ugly fashion as women who never had it in the first place: they bash men for it.
Above quoted journalist Nora Fox says, in the same article "... by the time we (women) reach our sexual peak, men are running on fumes". She goes on to suggest using a man's fear of his loss of sexual potency: "Another useful strategy is the withering glance. Begin with eye contact; move down to the zipper. After making sure no camcorders are present, I often combo this move with a disgusted snort followed by a teeth-clenched snarl."
What this woman is advocating is violence: emotional violence. Violence breeds violence and many a man will react to the long term use of such tactics by becoming emotionally or physically violent themselves. This article perfectly illustrates just about every reason why relationships between men and women are breaking down. How could anyone look at the viciousness inherent in this woman's writing and not realize how it destroys the most fundamental quality necessary for a relationship, i.e. trust?
It also illustrates in elgant shorthand fashion the anwer to Wendy Dennis's question: Why are men not out seeking and loving women? Because they are getting no messages whatsoever that women have any wish for them to. Because doing so is now defined as a criminal act. And because, even if their desire to love a woman is strong enough to overcome these first two hurdles, what they find in the majority of cases is not the loving support and appreciation of their love that they expected; but abuse, hatred, and betrayal of trust.
Simplistic formulations of the complexities of emotions, politics and power, which dominate the sexual exchange, deny the reality of the experiences of most people. Sex is nothing but ambiguities, uncertainties, ambivalences. Today's politicized rape climate reverses the proportions of normal and pathological: making the majority experience pathological and holding up an as-yet unachieved ideal as the prototype of "normality". Demanding that sex be female-initiated in order to avoid criminality, as Robin Morgan does, hardly seems to fit with the observed behaviors of most women.
Still, even this extreme position would be more palatable to men than the current situation. Men are still expected, and under great social pressures, to initiate, but are demanded to do so entirely in accordance with women's specifications, desires, and needs. Failure to meet any of these is punishable by imprisonment. Men as human beings have been completely dropped out of the picture: and the expectation now is that they will function either like flesh and blood vibrators or the hero of some romance novel or chick flick embodying a totally dysfunctional blend of contradictory and mutually exclusive characteristics. Needless to say, not many men are passing romantic muster these days.
The extreme negative stereotyping, combined with the impossibly conflicting demands and expectations, enforced by the power of law enforcement and an increasing body of aggressively punitive laws, have led an ever growing number of men to simply "drop out". Feminst author Wendy Dennis observed several years ago "men had backed off from women in response to the feminst agenda". She also remarked in her book that many men simply avoided romantic relationships except when prompted by a bout of loneliness to make a foray into the singles bars. At one point she wonders why these men are not out seeking, dating, and loving women. While she does an adequate job of acknowledging the beating over the head with feminist demands that they remodel themselves which men have endured for the past 3 decades, she never quite got around to fessing up to the fact that men had been told so many times that doing so was tantamount to rape that they decided it was better to be asexual than a criminal.
Countering the stereotypes on which the radical rape theorists rely to justify their push for lesbianism and elimination of men, are the realities of men who have opted out of the whole game as a means of beating the game of sexual politics. One man I spoke with, now in his mid-40s, gave up sex before the age of 30. He says he barely remembers it, and what he does remember of it was more obnoxious than pleasant or rewarding. In speaking of the reasons for his choice, he refers to the fact that things he shared in an atmosphere of trust were invariably used against him with incredibly malicious intent when the nature of the relationship changed. In his descriptions as well as many other conversations with men on this topic, the word "betrayal" comes up again and again.
Joshua Harris, at age 22 when most young people are almost obsessed with romantic relationships, has written a book called "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" and tours the country speaking to young people encouraging them not to date. In his book, he outlines 7 reasons for not dating. Four of the seven have to do with the misunderstandings that are inevitable given the differing expectations, agendas, and perceptions with which men and women tend to enter potentially sexual relationships.
Men now accept "No" as meaning "no". "Maybe" is also regarded as "no." Since "yes" can never mean really mean yes, any "yes" which is not delivered in writing and notarized is interpreted as a "conditional yes": yes (if there is a commitment forthcoming). The hostility that this breeds in men is illustrated by the man who got the "no, maybe, yes, no, no I mean yes" treatment then pulled away from his "date" and began masturbating. While it is easy to see how this was obviously quite hostile and probably hurt the woman's "delicate" feelings, any empathy for her point of view is tempered by the fact that the political climate makes her ambivalence quite safe while ignoring it has assumed life-changing risks for the man.
The runaway abuse of rape, rape shield, and sexual harassment laws has totally remodeled the landscape of romantic relationships. The mechanisms of attraction buried so deeply in our biology and social customs are not easily redefined. The resulting confusion and misunderstandings has attempted to throw away the old without replacing it with anything new. What is left is a caricature. Women and men fear and distrust each other. If anyone had intentionally chosen an issue which is as cloudy and vague as it is powerful as a means to set one group of people against another, they could not possibly have chosen one more powerful or more vague than sex. Sex is the broadest possible criteria to divide the human race into competing groups in hostile camps, and is so central to survival of the species itself that there has been no alternative to men and women crashing into each other trying to sort it out as they were searching for love.
Individual women and individual women have been defined out of existence by the radical and extreme characterizations of sex and rape. People have been awash in a sea of political orthodoxy as the most outspoken of the architects of the "new world order" have invaded their bedrooms and their very minds with more vigor and contempt than anyone ever thought possible. Before women had any more than a decade to savor their newfound sexual freedom which the pill provided, the very people who most loudly claimed to fighting for their liberation and their rights sought to define away those rights and institute an era of sexual repression which would make the Victorian era look like an orgy of unrestrained libido. In the process they sacrificed an entire generation, and broke the fragile thread of the transmission of cultural and social values from parents to children. In the place of parents we now have the falsely benevolent ulitmate parent of government.
By defining this most basic and potentially tender and passionate, but also incredibly powerful and conflicted, experience purely in terms of preferences versus criminality; the stage is set for everyone to lose. Sexuality is clearly one of the most universal and intense of human interactions. There are only about 6 things that we can be relatively certain every human being does or has the desire to do: eat, drink, excrete, sleep, breathe, and have sex. This is why we are so fascinated with it. Public media inundates us with sexual signals: glorifying sex while at the same time waving the pinched-face moralistic finger of shame at any who respond to the signals. Sex, like Christina Hoff-Sommers characterizes feminism in her book "Who Stole Feminism: how women have betrayed women", has been stolen from men and women alike. It has been stolen by fanatics who sold women out by claiming to act in their interests while their true agenda was to shove a new form of political orthodoxy down their throats and into their personal lives. It has been stolen by making women afraid of and hate men.
If women ever decide to reclaim sex from their would-be saviors; if they ever decide to demand the right to say "yes" that Ms Kitty MacKinnon denies them "as a group, because they aren't strong enough to give meaningful consent"; if they ever decide to stop exploiting their sexual powers of withholding and motherhood; they will find lots of loving men ready to join with them.
But women will have to be the ones who reclaim it. For as we all have heard many times: "All men are rapists and that's all they are," -- Marilyn French Author, "The Women's Room"
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Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
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"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent," -- Catherine MacKinnon in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies, p. 129.
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"The fact is that the process of killing - both rape and battery are steps in that process- is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone
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"Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire, and the first crude stone axe," -- Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, p. 5.
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"All men benefit from rape, because all men benefit from the fact that women are not free in this society; that women cower; that women are afraid; that women cannot assert the rights that we have, limited as those rights are, because of the ubiquitous presence of rape," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone
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Nothing could be farther from the reality of most men's experiences with sex than the characterizations of the radical rape theorists. Sexual freedom for women was once one of the foundations of the so-called "women's liberation" movement, but that has been replaced by a rigid political orthodoxy that is far more restrictive for women than the conditions which were the justification of their need for liberation. As the political has bulldozed its way into the personal, the delicate balance which existed in relationships and made them possible has completely broken down.
Today, nearing the crossover point between the 20th and 21st centuries, it is impossible to approach even the most superficial examination of female/male relationships without having to deal with a bottomless chasm between men and women called rape. The word itself has long since ceased to have any specific meaning because the concept has been so broadened that sex itself, any and all sex, between men and women is now called rape by some. This broadening of the aspect of criminality, violence, within sexual relationships blurs the distinctions between the normal frictions inherent in such an emotionally intense experience and true malicious intent. Indeed, malice on the part of men toward women is assumed and has become impossible for a man to disprove.
Rape has become the metaphor for all the conflicts of power between the sexes, and institutionalizes the underdog position of women. Dissident feminist Camille Paglia characterizes rape as "male power fighting female power". Another dissident feminist group, The Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT), in "Caught Looking", names and describes the female aspect of power in sexual relationships. "It (denial of the possibility of mutuality) puts the woman in the position that the mother has to the infant: she has the power to give or withold." A few paragraphs later they recognize that "subduing the male through sex, a tradtional female stance, did not give women freedom to become sexual persons in their own right." Journalist Nora Fox, writing for "Squire", magazine suggests "Being the superior sex, women long ago learned the surefire way to get our way is to withhold sex. It's the same way we train dogs. Good behavior merits you a treat; bad behavior puts you in the conjugal dog house for the night. Men never seem to catch on." "It's a sad commentary on social Darwinism that sexual withholding works after all these millennia."
It is an even sadder commentary on the female view of relationships to see a woman advocating that women reduce their sexual nature to commodity status, then use it to play a mean and exploitive version of the futures market: artificially manipulating the commodity to create an artificial scarcity which drives up the price. By equating female sexuality with a dog biscuit, this so-called feminist dehumanizes women and demeans their sexuality far more than men ever could. Implicit in her view, as well as the views of radical rape theory, is a dissociation of women from their sexuality. It is not part of them: it is a THING to be passed around, used to manipulate with, but never something to be valued in its own right. If women, as the superior sex, take that view of their own sexuality, why is it a criminal act for men to believe them?
Extending Ms Fox's analogy of treating men like dogs, anyone who has trained a dog knows that effective training requires iron discipline. When using a treat to coerce desired behavior from a dog, any departure from the conditional withholding and giving a treat when the behavior isn't present will create a game where the beloved pet will try to get the treat without the required behavior. There is no malice on the pet's part, he really thinks it is a game - just like tug-of-war or chase-the-ball.
In sexual relationships, men often have to contend with women who constantly flip-flop in their postions. Sometimes it seems like women want to play: other times it seems like the purpose of the same activity has changed to control. When women attempt to grab the maternal power position described by FACT, and place the man in the position of the infant, by using their power to grant or withhold as a manipulative device, as Ms Fox suggests, men react in a variety of ways ranging from hurt to rage. All of these reactions damage the foundation of a relationship and undermine its mutuality. Depending on his socialization and past experiences with women, he may chose to continue it as a game and try to snatch the biscuit from his would-be mistress's hand, knock her down and take it by force, or simply quit the game and go away.
Prior to the extreme expansion of the concepts of rape, continuing the game was considered to be "romance". Above cited Camille Paglia has also made the statement that "what used to be considered unbridled passion is now called 'date rape'". According to feminist theory, rape definitions were previously biased completely toward the male point of view. Reflecting a cultural and social understanding of the "traditional female stance" of "subduing the male through sex", behavior antecedent to the alleged sex act purported to be criminal in nature was considered in determining whether the woman had been engaging in a power play of bait-and-switch or was truly innocent of any action or intent to provoke interest and desire in a man as a method of gaining power over him. This was a form of protection for men from women who understood the nature of their sexual power and were quite willing to abuse it and use it in a manipulative and exploitive way, just as rape laws were a form of protection from men who were willing to abuse their power to violate a woman sexually.
Nothing is so central to feminist theory as the denial of this as a true form of power. Balancing the so-called "patriarchy" has always been the emotional "matriarchy" of intimate relationships. In its current incarnation, the widely accepted fact that women are "relationship and intimacy experts", women retain exclusive power to define the terms and conditions of intimacy. The male point of view is not just denied and negated: it is demanded of men that they not only accede to, but adopt, the female point of view. Females "know" in their special "women's way of knowing" how relationships "should" be conducted, and they grant or withhold the treat of sex as a means of training men to give them what they want.
This point of view has become entrenched in current legal theory and practice. The determination of criminality has shifted completely away from objective interpretation of events to subjective determination based entirely on the perceptions of the female. Behavior on the part of the female which could have been interpreted in the subjective experience of the male as an invitation or enticement to pursue her, the proverbial and inflammatory "she asked for it", and which can turn really ugly if the woman changes the rules at the last moment and grabs for the maternal power postion of withholding what she has previously implied she was quite willing to give away freely, is now ruled inadmissable in determining guilt. However she says it was, is the law now. The ratios of criminal to non-criminal sexual behavior have been entirely reversed. Rape used to exclude anything which was ambiguous or where the woman's intent was unclear: now it includes all these formerly gray areas and only excludes the rare occasions where the woman is clear and unconflicted in her desires and intent; as Robin Morgan stipulates.
Given the realities of dating relationships, and the complex dance of advance/retreat which is characteristic of them, situations without ambiguity seldom exist. In part, it is the very riskiness of the ambiguous situation which provides much of the excitement of sexuality. Several years ago, Antioch College (always at the forefront of "political correctness") formulated a set of rules for the conduct of sexual relationships which required the male to secure explicit verbal consent prior to each escalation of physical intimacy leading to sex. "Can I touch your breast now?" "Can I put my hand inside your panties now?" "Can I put my finger inside you now?" It's hard to imagine that the people who wrote these rules had ever had sex. The cold and unemotional negotiation of sex like a labor contract is a more effective means of killing a rising bout of libido than a cold shower could ever be. The formal distance and restraint required a separation of intellect from experience and a detachment and dissociation from the event which no amount of lust could survive. What little sexual expression survived this over-intellectualization was necessarily contrived and devoid of emotional content. What started out to be about passion became about nothing more than friction.
In most cases, male ardor could not survive the stilted script and wilted like a cut flower under a hot light. In the current formulation of the sexual script, this was exactly the desired result. Men now assumed the role of the gatekeeper formerly filled by women and rather than rely on her to tell him that he was about to go, or had gone too far, he had to take responsibility for making sure he never stepped over the line: if he did, it was "date rape". Rebalancing the stereotypic division of responsibility implicit in the old tradtional roles would have required women to then take on the role of the initiator, which would also require that they take responsibility for their own sexuality and the fact that they are sexual beings. This, of course, is not allowed under the precepts of either the traditional cultural view of female sexuality or the contemporary position of the rape theorists, which are actually identical in their underlying assumptions despite the cosmetic differences used to hide their true intent. "Women do not want sex, they want love and commitment. A woman who willingly engages in sex is participating in her own oppression. A woman who believes that she has had willing sex is weak minded fool who has internalized her own oppression because she is unable to know any better and patriarchy controls her every move." It would also totally compromise her power postion to grant or withhold sex as a means of getting her way: transferring it to the male.
Given the fact that, historically, a woman's sexuality WAS her primary economic asset; and that the cultural institution of marriage was essentially a socially enforced contract in which the male was held responsible and accountable for providing financially for that woman and any products of his access to her sexuality in return for that access; marital law exempted husbands from rape charges. Rape was considered a form of theft, taking a woman's asset without paying for it. Implicit in this structure was the assumption that, by marrying her, the man had entered into a contract of continued payment for continued access. Cultural stereotyping demanded that women dissociate themselves from any enjoyment of their own sexuality lest men "stop buying cows, because they could get the milk for free". The sexual repression of the first Victorian age was so complete that it was considered somehow shameful and perverse if a woman actually enjoyed sex instead of "lying back and thinking of England" so she could somehow endure the shame and degradation of it all. Sex was primarily for the production of children, and the satisfaction of men's "bestial" urges, and the ideal was to get it over with as quickly as possible in order to minimize the shame and degradation of it all.
The quotes at the beginning of this essay reflect a return to values and cultural attitudes which were far more characteristic of the 1880s than the 1980s. Rene Denfeld has referred to this branch of radical feminism as "The New Victorians" in her book of the same name. The radical rape theorists have somehow managed to pull off a hoax of incredible propotions as they push for reinstatement of total repression and denial of female sexuality while justifying it by claiming it is necessary as a tool to fight the very conditions that it creates as an inevitable result.
The modern day mechanism for this is also identical to the ones historically used: destruction of women's sexuality through a variety of mechanisms and making women fear men because of their bestial and violent inherent natures.
Cultures in Africa and the Middle East take a very straightforward approach to the destruction of female sexuality: they simply chop the genitals off little girls somewhere between the ages of 4 and puberty. Commonly known to western cultures as Female Genital Mutilation, or FGM, these grisly practices are known within the cultures which practice them by the more polite and obscure euphemisms of female circumcision, excision, and infibulation. Western cultures, being on the whole more "civilized", use the more "humane" means of leaving the genitals attached but severing the emotional attachment and ownership, as well as all feeling in them, by the mechanism of shame. The western culture version of FGM is "Female Genital Mindfuck" which confuses and sublimates a woman's real feelings and desires into a form reflecting a prevailing cultural value which serves a social purpose. Women are only allowed to experience pleasure within a highly prescribed and proscribed context. She must be "in love": if she is all things are allowed, up to and including murder, if she isn't nothing is allowed.
This highly scripted social context is just as anti-reality when it comes to the behavior of most women as the characterizations of all sex as a form of violence is regarding the real behavior of men. The cultural mechanism which used to allow women to maintain this fiction and still experience their sexuality was men's fulfillment of their part of the sexual script regarding aggression and initiation. Women could put up "token" resistance secure in the knowledge that men would persist through the 150 rejections required to move the relationship from first eye-contact to sexual intimacy, because that was their role - their "JOB". The inevitable misunderstandings and ambiguities would be excused based on a understanding that the deception involved in the artificial roles made real understanding next to impossible. Women could be sexual without the shame by being "in love", "overcome by passion", "carried away in the heat of the moment", or any one of many other euphemisms for the woman letting the man have her way. Once in a while it got out of hand, and a truly dangerous man would ignore the gatekeeping signals which meant "too far", in which case the man would be convicted of rape. The old code of "chivalry" was sufficient to keep most socialized men in check.
When the public code of chivalry was changed from a woman's privilege to a woman's oppression, the entire system began to break down. Eliminating the distinctions between loving consensual sex and violence, and in fact denying that any such distinctions exist, made it impossible for a woman who was not completely clear on her sexuality (and given the contradictions in the culture on the subject of sex, what woman, or man for that matter, COULD be) to understand the gray areas between her own desires and being exploited by men in purely selfish and self-serving manners. Thus any behavior which fell outside the bounds of "politically correct" orthodoxy came to be criminalized. And since that range was narrow indeed, not to mention anti-reality, almost all sexual actions by men toward women came to be regarded as criminal, or "potentially" criminal (as exemplified by characterizing all men as "potential" rapists). Thus the meaning of the term "rape" has been broadened in its usage to include a vast number of acts that have nothing to do with sexuality, but relate only to the aspect of sex now called by the term "gender". Any time men oppose the desires or actions of a woman; whether it be to grab the moral high ground and maternal power to grant or withhold sex (even after an implicit suggestion that it is to be expected) or simply to impose on men something they have every reason and right to resist; it is now called by some variation of "(modifier) rape".
A female sportswriter, in a often quoted incident which occurred in the locker room of a professional football team several years ago, characterized the male players hostility toward her presence in their locker room, while they were running around in various stages of undress, as "mind rape." No male sportscaster would dream of expecting to be able to hang out in a female athletes' locker room indulging his voyeuristic appetites; but when a woman does and men object - the woman, as always, becomes the victim by screaming RAPE!!!! The very term "mind-rape" should be seen as an oxymoron; and probably would except for the rejection of reason, logic, mind, and intelligence itself as "andro-centric" which radical feminsm has made possible. Rape is being used today in the broadest possible sense to cast the subtle pall of criminal violence on any action of men to assert their own power and right to it. The concept of "equal rights" has been totally lost in the grab for power which feminism has become. Any person in a free society should have the right to deny a person of the opposite sex from leering at them in a semi-private environment. Isn't that the entire foundation under the concept of "sexual harassment". The use of the term "rape" to describe such actions by men illustrates how the meaning has been perverted to the point where the term has no meaning at all any more except to make criminals of men who oppose any action or exercise of power by a woman.
This is not to say that forced criminal sex does not exist, it certainly does and should remain a crime subject to the most severe of punishments. But the destruction and criminalization of the gray areas is most decidedly not to the benefit of either women or men. Kate Fillion, in "Lip Service" describes the experience of a young woman whose interpretation of a sexual encounter changes from the beginnings of a wonderful romance and life together to rape as a result of seeing her lover of the previous night sitting with another girl in the college cafeteria. Many writers, female and male alike, have commented on how this trivialization of the term is incredibly insulting and destructive to those who really have been violated.
The much trumpeted statistic that 1/4 of all women will be rape victims relies on a definition of rape that requires denial of 75% of the women's own interpretations of the experience. Fully 3/4 of the women included in the numbers of "rape victims" themselves characterized the experience as a misunderstanding. Almost half of them went on to sleep with the so-called "perpetrators" again. Under the expanded definition of rape used to create the 1/4 statistic: a man who takes a woman out on that "holy grail" of single womanhood, the "Saturday Night Date", drops a couple of hundred bucks on dinner that includes a bottle or 2 of wine, then they end up doing the horizontal boogie, if she has 2nd thoughts about it later - HE HAS RAPED HER.
The complexity of the conditions for "politically correct sex" have become so prohibitive that failure is inevitable. Perhaps the first area where true equality between the sexes is going to be achieved is by making men as inhibited and ambivalent about sex as the popular stereotype of women portrays women to be. Nothing is so ironic as listening to a woman, who never even took high school psychology, make bitter and scathing authoritative pronouncements about men, their nature, their motivations, and particularly their sexuality; then wonder morosely why none of these exploitive creatures approach her in order to force their unwanted attentions upon her.
Historically, men have shouldered a disproportionate share of the burdens and risks associated with the initiation of potential sexual relationships. They did so both in anticipation of certain rewards, and based upon a certain sense of safety that he would be cut a bit of slack if he failed to do it perfectly elegantly. Assigning the role of the initiator to men and the gatekeeper to women, worked to the general benefit of all. Studies have found that the frequency of sex in lesbian relationships is significantly below that in heterosexual relationships, which is again below that in relationships between gay men. Men initiate, women wait. Theres an old workplace poster that talks about a job that "anybody could have done, but it was really nobody's job, so nobody did it, if somebody had done it, things would have been so much better". Men have been very clearly socialized to understand that the shit work of sexual initiation is "their job." However, when the situation is created where an act is both required AND prohibited, almost everyone will make the choice which carries the lesser sanction. In todays culture that means waiting for the woman to "intiate sex out of her own sincere affection and desire" as Robin Morgan demands to avoid a rape charge. No man goes to prison for the crime of waiting. Men and women alike are waiting for Godot, who never shows up.
The ”dull assumption” to which Norman Mailer refers in “Prisoner of Sex”, ie. that the male sex drive is entirely due to an accident of birth, is more repellant to men today than when Mailer wrote about it in 1971. The fact that it has become so deeply entrenched in the public mind, becoming the 21st century equivalent of the "flat earth" view of the 15th century, has driven all eroticism and joy out of sexual relationships. Erin Pizzey, founder of the first women's shelter in the UK, speaks of the "terrible loss of tenderness and romance which has been leached out of the lives of women." In the gender war, the shared bed has become one of the primary battlegrounds.
The persistence, urgency, and ubiquity of the male sex drive and its power ascribed by the radical rape theorists to all men is a complete fallacy. While the cultural perception remains that men want sex more than women; doctors, counselors, and other helping professionals are increasingly called upon to deal with women trying to adjust to the fact that their chosen partners do not have much, if any, interest in sleeping with them. The sexless marriage is becoming far more common than most people realize. Relying entirely on men's sexual desire to compel them to pursue women and place themselves under the power of women to grant or withhold sex is a strategy that fails somewhere around age 40. Women tend to respond to this loss of power to use their sexuality in a manipulative and exploitive manner in the same ugly fashion as women who never had it in the first place: they bash men for it.
Above quoted journalist Nora Fox says, in the same article "... by the time we (women) reach our sexual peak, men are running on fumes". She goes on to suggest using a man's fear of his loss of sexual potency: "Another useful strategy is the withering glance. Begin with eye contact; move down to the zipper. After making sure no camcorders are present, I often combo this move with a disgusted snort followed by a teeth-clenched snarl."
What this woman is advocating is violence: emotional violence. Violence breeds violence and many a man will react to the long term use of such tactics by becoming emotionally or physically violent themselves. This article perfectly illustrates just about every reason why relationships between men and women are breaking down. How could anyone look at the viciousness inherent in this woman's writing and not realize how it destroys the most fundamental quality necessary for a relationship, i.e. trust?
It also illustrates in elgant shorthand fashion the anwer to Wendy Dennis's question: Why are men not out seeking and loving women? Because they are getting no messages whatsoever that women have any wish for them to. Because doing so is now defined as a criminal act. And because, even if their desire to love a woman is strong enough to overcome these first two hurdles, what they find in the majority of cases is not the loving support and appreciation of their love that they expected; but abuse, hatred, and betrayal of trust.
Simplistic formulations of the complexities of emotions, politics and power, which dominate the sexual exchange, deny the reality of the experiences of most people. Sex is nothing but ambiguities, uncertainties, ambivalences. Today's politicized rape climate reverses the proportions of normal and pathological: making the majority experience pathological and holding up an as-yet unachieved ideal as the prototype of "normality". Demanding that sex be female-initiated in order to avoid criminality, as Robin Morgan does, hardly seems to fit with the observed behaviors of most women.
Still, even this extreme position would be more palatable to men than the current situation. Men are still expected, and under great social pressures, to initiate, but are demanded to do so entirely in accordance with women's specifications, desires, and needs. Failure to meet any of these is punishable by imprisonment. Men as human beings have been completely dropped out of the picture: and the expectation now is that they will function either like flesh and blood vibrators or the hero of some romance novel or chick flick embodying a totally dysfunctional blend of contradictory and mutually exclusive characteristics. Needless to say, not many men are passing romantic muster these days.
The extreme negative stereotyping, combined with the impossibly conflicting demands and expectations, enforced by the power of law enforcement and an increasing body of aggressively punitive laws, have led an ever growing number of men to simply "drop out". Feminst author Wendy Dennis observed several years ago "men had backed off from women in response to the feminst agenda". She also remarked in her book that many men simply avoided romantic relationships except when prompted by a bout of loneliness to make a foray into the singles bars. At one point she wonders why these men are not out seeking, dating, and loving women. While she does an adequate job of acknowledging the beating over the head with feminist demands that they remodel themselves which men have endured for the past 3 decades, she never quite got around to fessing up to the fact that men had been told so many times that doing so was tantamount to rape that they decided it was better to be asexual than a criminal.
Countering the stereotypes on which the radical rape theorists rely to justify their push for lesbianism and elimination of men, are the realities of men who have opted out of the whole game as a means of beating the game of sexual politics. One man I spoke with, now in his mid-40s, gave up sex before the age of 30. He says he barely remembers it, and what he does remember of it was more obnoxious than pleasant or rewarding. In speaking of the reasons for his choice, he refers to the fact that things he shared in an atmosphere of trust were invariably used against him with incredibly malicious intent when the nature of the relationship changed. In his descriptions as well as many other conversations with men on this topic, the word "betrayal" comes up again and again.
Joshua Harris, at age 22 when most young people are almost obsessed with romantic relationships, has written a book called "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" and tours the country speaking to young people encouraging them not to date. In his book, he outlines 7 reasons for not dating. Four of the seven have to do with the misunderstandings that are inevitable given the differing expectations, agendas, and perceptions with which men and women tend to enter potentially sexual relationships.
Men now accept "No" as meaning "no". "Maybe" is also regarded as "no." Since "yes" can never mean really mean yes, any "yes" which is not delivered in writing and notarized is interpreted as a "conditional yes": yes (if there is a commitment forthcoming). The hostility that this breeds in men is illustrated by the man who got the "no, maybe, yes, no, no I mean yes" treatment then pulled away from his "date" and began masturbating. While it is easy to see how this was obviously quite hostile and probably hurt the woman's "delicate" feelings, any empathy for her point of view is tempered by the fact that the political climate makes her ambivalence quite safe while ignoring it has assumed life-changing risks for the man.
The runaway abuse of rape, rape shield, and sexual harassment laws has totally remodeled the landscape of romantic relationships. The mechanisms of attraction buried so deeply in our biology and social customs are not easily redefined. The resulting confusion and misunderstandings has attempted to throw away the old without replacing it with anything new. What is left is a caricature. Women and men fear and distrust each other. If anyone had intentionally chosen an issue which is as cloudy and vague as it is powerful as a means to set one group of people against another, they could not possibly have chosen one more powerful or more vague than sex. Sex is the broadest possible criteria to divide the human race into competing groups in hostile camps, and is so central to survival of the species itself that there has been no alternative to men and women crashing into each other trying to sort it out as they were searching for love.
Individual women and individual women have been defined out of existence by the radical and extreme characterizations of sex and rape. People have been awash in a sea of political orthodoxy as the most outspoken of the architects of the "new world order" have invaded their bedrooms and their very minds with more vigor and contempt than anyone ever thought possible. Before women had any more than a decade to savor their newfound sexual freedom which the pill provided, the very people who most loudly claimed to fighting for their liberation and their rights sought to define away those rights and institute an era of sexual repression which would make the Victorian era look like an orgy of unrestrained libido. In the process they sacrificed an entire generation, and broke the fragile thread of the transmission of cultural and social values from parents to children. In the place of parents we now have the falsely benevolent ulitmate parent of government.
By defining this most basic and potentially tender and passionate, but also incredibly powerful and conflicted, experience purely in terms of preferences versus criminality; the stage is set for everyone to lose. Sexuality is clearly one of the most universal and intense of human interactions. There are only about 6 things that we can be relatively certain every human being does or has the desire to do: eat, drink, excrete, sleep, breathe, and have sex. This is why we are so fascinated with it. Public media inundates us with sexual signals: glorifying sex while at the same time waving the pinched-face moralistic finger of shame at any who respond to the signals. Sex, like Christina Hoff-Sommers characterizes feminism in her book "Who Stole Feminism: how women have betrayed women", has been stolen from men and women alike. It has been stolen by fanatics who sold women out by claiming to act in their interests while their true agenda was to shove a new form of political orthodoxy down their throats and into their personal lives. It has been stolen by making women afraid of and hate men.
If women ever decide to reclaim sex from their would-be saviors; if they ever decide to demand the right to say "yes" that Ms Kitty MacKinnon denies them "as a group, because they aren't strong enough to give meaningful consent"; if they ever decide to stop exploiting their sexual powers of withholding and motherhood; they will find lots of loving men ready to join with them.
But women will have to be the ones who reclaim it. For as we all have heard many times: "All men are rapists and that's all they are," -- Marilyn French Author, "The Women's Room"
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Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
EOTM: Presenting Feminism! A Coming OUT
Feminism: An ideology that advocates political, social and economic equality, empowerment and freedom for women, with full rights, opportunities and responsibilities equal to and non-distinguishable from those of all other members of society. (Or 'men' if you will.)
What's wrong with this?
From all ostensible indications, feminism is wonderful thing. An ideology whose very presence indicates the advancement of the human species and equality for all.
I'm all for this 'feminism'.
My mother is a top class pharmacist and most of my aunts are Managers and Directors in the Banking Industry. None of them would be where they are, using their brains to support themselves and their families without the ground breaking work of Mary Woolstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and the ever radical Susan Brownell Anthony, etc. Add to that distinguished list the Marquis de Condorcet, Mr Mott (Lucretia Mott's husband), John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant and so on. These men were feminists too.
I grew up in an environment in the advent of feminism. It was a fact that I got the most competition in academics from a girl, and the women in my family are all assertive and intelligent women. All these women and all the confident and strong women out there in the world are feminists, so defined because they do not fear going out to face the world and carving a place for themselves in it.
But amazingly only a few American women in the 1990s classify themselves as feminists.
Has the movement fallen into disrepute?
No, because almost a 100% of people, male and female, think that women 'must' and should have rights equal to that of men.
Then why is the term 'feminist' so repulsive?
The vanguard party thus has to be the loudest, most attention grabbing section of the movement. It does not by default mean the most popular or largest section of the movement.
The vanguard party is thus not selected by the movement, it selects itself. The vanguard party, in the public eye, then becomes the movement, its ideals become the movement's ideals, it therefore represents the movement in whatever it does.The movement's image changes only when the vanguard party changes or when there is a change of vanguard parties within the movement.
What is feminism's 'vanguard party'?
In my studies of this, it seems that there are three major ideologies within feminism:
Liberal Feminism, which simply means equal rights and responsibilities for all persons, irregardless of sex/gender as supported by Stanton, Mott and Anthony. Most American women, while most say they are not feminists, strongly advocate this.
Socialist Feminism was popular in the sixties but it has declined since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is basically the same as Liberal Feminism except it is closely tied politically and culturally with Marxism. Lastly comes
Radical Feminism, which as of now is the vanguard party of Feminism. It has the least support and the most opposition among all of them, but it is the loudest and most active. It and its ideologies, varied though they may be, stand virtually unchallenged by the other two (for shame) and thus it is assumed to represent the feminist movement's attitudes, to define the movement and all it stands for.
My interpretation of Radical Feminists has led me to believe that Radical Feminism is a psychological disorder where the female of the human species believes the species evolved incorrectly and that the inherent weakness of her gender is a fluke of nature.
I see merit in Donna Laframboise's self-description of "dissident feminists", which makes it clear which movement currently has the political, economic and social power. However, even this is unsatisfactory in defining RadFem philosophy and dogma, since feminism has built into its name the notion that it is concerned with women's issues. The RadFem is truly less interested in women's issues than she is in vilifying males.
The RadFem blames her GENDERS shortcomings and unhappiness on this deviant evolution and tries to manipulate the natural order of things to suit her - to the direct detriment of all others. RadFems are so narcissistic that they cannot see anything but their immediate actions.
The destructive consequences of their actions are not even remotely contemplated or anticipated - even when it effects them directly. The recent execution by lethal injection of Karla Faye Tucker in the state of Texas is such an example, the RadFems have made such a stink about gender equality that the governor of the state of Texas was left with no alternative but to break a 150 year old tradition.
Another recent example is that of Mary Kay LeTourneau, a former grade-school teacher who was convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old male former student. She was recently arrested for violating the orders of the court by again seeing the child and was subsequently ordered to serve out the remainder of her sentence of 8 years for rape.
The RadFems did not see this, but in this case alone, they FORCED the courts to deal with the issue of RAPE BY A WOMAN. While it is now true that these sorts of cases are few and far between, the fact is that the RadFem agenda has opened the door for other women to be sentenced and treated in the traditional MALE punishment model.
Even scarier, these Radical feminists are winning their propaganda war. Like all propaganda wars, the core of their appeal is based on a thinly veiled pack of lies and semantical manipulations. That and lies, damned lies, and statistics too.
Now to make a clear distinction between these 'vanguard feminists' and true feminists, I would refer to them as RadFems. Because of their powerful position in the movement, any and all feminists are taken to be RadFems.
The RadFems define Modern feminism as "that social movement which has as its goal rights without responsibilities for women, and responsibilities without rights for men, all under the guise of gender equality."
They run the Domestic Violence Programs, make up a large percentage of national women's organizations and run the Women's Studies departments in Universities. Thus the public perception of a feminist is really the public perception of a RadFem.
A feminist is assumed to be:
"a woman who hates men, the patriarchy, and all things male
(and/or)
who prefers her career to her children or for that matter ANY children (abortion by any other name is the destruction of children)
(and/or)
who is anti-family, anti-male, anti-traditional morality
(and/or)
who is a lesbian
(and/or)
who is an atheist or who practices wicca witchcraft
(and/or)
who consistently confuse "assertiveness" with "aggression" (the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference, but the RadFem does not understand this - they only know how to hate)".
What causes these perceptions?
The RadFems themselves, by their (loud) words and deeds. RadFems have reduced feminism in the public eye from a progressive social movement to something resembling a whining hate camp filled with ugly, fat, over educated, boorish and boring, humorless, androids. Their gender confusion alone relegates them to the near psychotics of history.
Their main figures, Marilyn French, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, Robin Morgan, Kate Millett, Susan Faludi, Gloria Steinem, Patricia Ireland and N.O.W., etc are well known for their hate filled diatribes against men. They are misandrists in every sense of the word. Most of them are lesbians as well, which, due to the reverence in which they are held by RadFems confirms but does not necessarily imply the above stereotype. They are also almost universally atheist or devotees of religious philosophies that support witch craft of satanistic theology.
And since they are the representatives of feminism, such an obviously good and progressive social movement, it is not possible to attack their views without being accused of being against women's rights, whether you be male or female, even if you are well known within the movement.
This has frighteningly put them in the very powerful position of being able to dictate their agendas without allowing the opposition to present their views. If indeed opposition dared speak out, they are vilified by the RadFems, who because they exist in the name of feminism can claim a higher moral ground (political correctness).
The targets or the chosen 'bogey man' of the RadFems are men as a whole, and heterosexual men in particular. This same 'them and us' tactic is reminiscent of Nazi Germany, 'them' being the Jews and 'us' being the Germans. As one writer said after reading Susan Brownmiller's 'Against Our Will':
"I've read Mein Kampf and in my mind it's a toss up between them." All you need do to 'Against Our Will' is to substitute the word woman for German and man for Jew and the two books will basically say the same thing, broadcasting their hate to one and all.
The most dangerous aspect of this new feminism is how it continues to demonize men in every way one can possibly think of and the fact that they do it without concern for the people they are defaming as individuals and the effect of their hate filled propaganda on society.
RadFems continuously and religiously spout facts about how men as a whole oppress women. In the work place, in the home, in everything under the sun.The fact is that this is simply not true. Consider these facts:
If men are supposed to be ruling the world in some system of misogynous patriarchy then how come we let the 'terrible tragedy' of above happen?
Why did the all male government of years back give women the right to vote?
Why did the men of those times allow women the choice to go out and work if they so wished?
Why did we extend rights once only reserved for men to women?
Is it all part of some cunning plan?
RadFems like Susan Faludi would have you think it is. A thorough examination of the facts would show that the foundations of the RadFems agenda are lies. The RadFems think that the whole world - including the majority of women - are fools.
Here are a few historical dates that in their entirety make the existence of a patriarchal oppressive state a complete fallacy:
The fact is that we, as a society evolved. We took a major leap forward the day men realized that women were our partners, different yet equal, despite our deep seated and well-meaning cultural dogmas. The truth is that men 'and women' in the past honestly believed women were not suited for life outside the domestic sphere. Of course, these same beliefs also condoned slavery. Tradition and everything else dictated what they did. And tradition would have been incomplete without the role of everyone within the society being specified. This didn't mean that the men hated the women, or consciously sat down and said or though,
"Who shall we oppress now?
How about women?"
They simply didn't know any better. And to be perfectly honest, women also took part in the creations of those traditions. In many ancient Western societies, women, despite their limited role in the external domains of the community were held in elevated positions in society, thus the codes of chivalry and gallantry that governed men's behavior towards women.
In Victorian England, woman were considered the moral guardians of society. A protective paternalistic attitude towards women was the norm, from which came the famous "Women and children first!" call. The resistance the first feminists encountered was typical of how members of a society (men and women in this case) would resist change, should it seem threatening to the way of life they were used to. Consider the Luddites, for example.
To look at it objectively, one would see that pre-feminist traditions were based on the simple logical division of labor, severely limited though they were, not oppression. To actually have some RadFem coming up to tell me that I should feel guilty because a few centuries or even decades ago a man was politically and culturally superior to a woman in society is ludicrous. No doubt it was wrong, and there are still problems that women face today (not necessarily caused by men), but we have progressed since then and it's time we solved these problems (and men's problems) together, as partners and equals, just like the founding mothers and fathers of feminism wished.
But RadFems don't like that idea. RadFems insist that man's oppression of women is the governing principle of human societal life. Men are intrinsically bad, women are good. Men are oppressors and the cause of all evil, women are only their helpless victims. They see everything through this simple convoluted lens. This misandrous attitude pervades their thinking, their writings, their speeches and their demands. These notions are seen throughout RadFem 'scholarship'.
The following obviously misandrous quotes are from the leading icons of RadFems, from their mouths and their writings. And every RadFem believes these statements as if they were the gospel.
"One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 21.
"The fact is that the process of killing - both rape and battery are steps in that process- is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 22.
"The newest variations on this distressingly ancient theme center on hormones and DNA: men are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into murder and rape," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 114.
"All men benefit from rape, because all men benefit from the fact that women are not free in this society; that women cower; that women are afraid; that women cannot assert the rights that we have, limited as those rights are, because of the ubiquitous presence of rape," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 142.
"One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available," --Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 145.
"In everything men make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, still their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 214.
"Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 265.
In fucking, as in reproduction, sex and economics are inextricably joined. In male-supremacist cultures, women are believed to embody carnality; women are sex. A man wants what a woman has--sex. He can steal it [prostitution], lease it over the long term marriage [marriage in the United States], or own it outright [marriage in most societies]. A man can do some or all of the above, over and over again. -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone
"Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks," -- Andrea Dworkin in the Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 1995.
"Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies." "Rape is the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating. Rape is the primary emblem of romantic love. Rape is the means by which a woman is initiated into her womanhood as it is defined by men....Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake--it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. -- Andrea Dworkin - The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door
"Rape is the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating. Rape is the primary emblem of romantic love. Rape is the means by which a woman is initiated into her womanhood as it is defined by men. -- Andrea Dworkin
"Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership." -- Andrea Dworkin
"Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire, and the first crude stone axe," -- Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, p. 5.
"[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" -- Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, P.6
"Our culture is depicting sex as rape so that men and women will become interested in it," -- Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 138.
"Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete," -- Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 55.
"AIDS education will not get very far until young men are taught how not to rape young women and how to eroticize trust and consent; and until young women are supported in the way they need to be redefining their desires," -- Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 168.
"The dating system is a mutually exploitative arrangement of sex-role expectations, which limit and direct behavior of both parties and determine the character of the relationship. Built into the concept of dating is the notion that the woman is an object which may be purchased," -- Kurt Weis and Sandra S. Borges, Rape Victimology, p. 112.
"Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home," -- Gloria Steinem in Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, pp. 259-61.
"I call it the Noah Ark Syndrome. The perception lingers that human beings should go two by two. Someone who is not married-either by choice or by chance- is somehow regarded as abnormal," -- Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in Glamour, February 1997.
"All men are rapists and that's all they are," -- Marilyn French Author, "The Women's Room" in People, February 20, 1983.
"My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter." -- Marilyn French, in "The Women's Room"
"Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometime gain from the experience," -- Catherine Comins, Vassar College Assistant Dean of Student Life in Time, June 3, 1991, p. 52.
"We have long known that rape has been a way of terrorizing us and keeping us in subjection. Now we also know that we have participated, although unwittingly, in the rape of our minds," -- Gerda Lerner in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, p. 55.
"If the classroom situation is very heteropatriarchal- a large beginning class of 50 to 60 students say, with few feminist students- I am likely to define my task as largely one of recruitment...of persuading students that women are oppressed," -- Professor Joyce Trebilcot of Washington University in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, p. 92.
"I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them." -- Robin Morgan, (current editor of MS magazine)
"Sexism is NOT the fault of women--kill your fathers, not your mothers." -- Robin Morgan, (current editor of MS magazine)
"The phallic malady is epidemic and systemic... each individual male in the patriarchy is aware of his relative power in the scheme of things.... He knows that his actions are supported by the twin pillars of the State of man - the brotherhood ritual of political exigency and the brotherhood ritual of a sexual thrill in dominance. As a devotee of Thanatos, he is one with the practitioner of sado-masochistic "play" between "consenting adults," as he is one with the rapist." -- Robin Morgan (current editor of MS magazine) "The Demon Lover" p. 138-9
"My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others' agony." -- Robin Morgan (current editor of MS magazine) "The Demon Lover" p. 224
"Sex to this point in my life has been trivial, at best a gesture of tenderness, at worst a chore. I couldn't understand the furor about it." -- Robin Morgan (current editor of MS magazine) "The Demon Lover" p. 229
"Did she die of the disease called "family" or the disease called "rehabilitation", of poverty or drugs or pornography, of economics or sexual slavery or a broken body?" -- Robin Morgan (current editor of MS magazine) "The Demon Lover" p. 316
"I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." -- Robin Morgan, in 1974
"...rape is the perfected act of male sexuality in a patriarchal culture-- it is the ultimate metaphor for domination, violence, subjugation, and possession." -- Robin Morgan
"I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white hetero- sexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary- vested-interest-power. But then, I have great difficulty examining what men in general could possibly do about all this. In addition to doing the shitwork that women have been doing for generations, possibly not exist? No, I really don't mean that. Yes, I really do." -- Robin Morgan
"And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism--the lie that there can be such a thing as 'men's liberation groups.' Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a 'threatening' characteristic shared by the latter group--skin color or sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters (racism hurts whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not OPPRESSED. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism--the oppressed have no alternative--for they have no power--but to fight. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men--but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is NOT the fault of women--kill your fathers, not your mothers." -- Robin Morgan
"I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." -- Robin Morgan, "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape" in "Going to Far," 1974.
"And in the spectrum of male bahavior, rape, the perfect combination of sex and violence, is the penultimate (sic) act. Erotic pleasure cannot be separated from culture, and in our culture male eroticism is wedded to power." -- Susan Griffin Rape: The Politics of Consciousness
"And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual [male], it may be mainly a quantitative difference." -- Susan Griffin "Rape: The All-American Crime"
When asked: "You [Greer] were once quoted as saying your idea of the ideal man is a woman with a dick. Are you still that way inclined?"
Dr Greer (denying that she said it): "I have a great deal of difficulty with the idea of the ideal man. As far as I'm concerned, men are the product of a damanged gene. They pretend to be normal but what they're doing sitting there with benign smiles on their faces is they're manufacturing sperm. They do it all the time. They never stop.
"I mean, we women are more reasonable. We pop one follicle every 28 days, whereas they are producing 400 million sperm for each ejaculation, most of which don't take place anywhere near an ovum. I don't know that the ecosphere can tolerate it." -- Germaine Greer, at a Hilton Hotel literary lunch, promoting her book "The Change-- Women, Aging and the Menopause". From a newsreport dated 14/11/91.
"The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist" -- Ti-Grace Atkinson "Amazon Odyssey" (p. 86)
"When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression..." -- Sheila Jeffrys
"Number 10: Regularly beat him on the head with your shoe."
"The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men." -- Sharon Stone On David Letterman presenting a top ten list of ways to keep your man.
"Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive...women didn't go to Vietnam and blow up things up. They are not Rambo," -- Jodie Foster in The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 1991, p. 19.
"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent," -- Catherine MacKinnon in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies, p. 129.
"Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. You might think thats too broad. I'm not talking about sending all of you men to jail for that." -- Catherine MacKinnon "A Rally Against Rape" Feminism Unmodified
"I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which a man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it." -- Former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan
MALE: ... represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. 'The first males were mutants... the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female.'
MAN: ... an obsolete life form... an ordinary creature who needs to be watched ... a contradictory baby-man ...
TESTOSTERONE POISONING: ... 'Until now it has been though that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from "testosterone poisoning."' -- from A Feminist Dictionary", ed. Kramarae and Treichler, Pandora Press, 1985
"To Proud Feminist, (Herald-Sun, 7 February). Your last paragraph is shocking language from a feminist. You use the entrenched, revolting male stereotypes of women and rationalise your existence by saying you are neither "ugly" nor "manless", as though either of these male-oriented judgments matter.
"Clearly you are not yet a free-thinking feminist but rather one of those women who bounce off the male-dominated, male-controlled social structures.
"Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is, if you don't like it, bad luck - and if you get in my way I'll run you down." -- Signed: Liberated Women, Boronia - Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia - 9 February 1996
---
The belief that married-couple families are superior is probably the most pervasive prejudice in the Western world. -- Judith Stacey
The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. "Only with the occasional celebrity crime do we allow ourselves to think the nearly unthinkable: that the family may not be the ideal and perfect living arrangement after all -- that it can be a nest of pathology and a cradle of gruesome violence," she writes. "Even in the ostensibly 'functional,' nonviolent family, where no one is killed or maimed, feelings are routinely bruised and often twisted out of shape. There is the slap or the put-down that violates a child's shaky sense of self, the cold, distracted stare that drives a spouse to tears, the little digs and rivalries." -- Barbara Ehrenreich, as quoted by Stephen Chapman, from Time
"long and honorable tradition of 'anti-family' thought," waxing nostalgic for those early feminists who regarded marriage as just another version of prostitution. This deeply defective institution "can hardly be the moral foundation of everything else," she argues, pining for the day when "someone invents a sustainable alternative." -- Barbara Ehrenreich, as quoted by Stephen Chapman, from Time
"The nuclear family is a hotbed of violence and depravity." -- Gordon Fitch
"How will the family unit be destroyed? ... the demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare." -- From Female Liberation by Roxanne Dunbar.
"Feminists have long criticized marriage as a place of oppression, danger, and drudgery for women." -- From article, "Is Marriage the Answer?" by Barbara Findlen, Ms magazine, May-June, 1995
"The Feminists -v- The Marriage License Bureau of the State of New York...All the discriminatory practices against women are patterned and rationalized by this slavery-like practice. We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage." -- From Sisterhood Is Powerful, Morgan (ed), 1970 p. 537.
"...I submit that any sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or controls is rape." -- Alice Walker in "Embracing the Dark and the Light," Essence, July 1982. As cited in Andrea Dworkin's "Right-Wing Women"
The context of the quote in RWW makes it clear that marriage is such a form of control.
"Our research and most other studies show that wife-battering occurs in 50 percent of families throughout the nation." -- Lenore Walker, speaking at a Laguna Beach conference, as reported in the SF Chronicle
The SF Chronicle comments, "Only the most crazed man-hater could believe that."
Lenore Walker, after visiting one of the early shelters for battered women, wrote "I was struck by what a beneficial alternative to the nuclear family this arrangement [communal housing and child raising] was for these women and children." -- Lenore Walker. The Battered Woman , p.195
"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together. ... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process. ... "Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests. ... -- Functions of the Family, Linda Gordon, WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969.
"Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role. ... No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her speical responsibilities to her children. ... Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people's needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all." -- Functions of the Family, Linda Gordon, WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969.
"And in the spectrum of male behavior, rape, the perfect combination of sex and violence, is the penultimate (sic) act. Erotic pleasure cannot be separated from culture, and in our culture male eroticism is wedded to power." -- Rape: The Politics of Consciousness
These and many other such like statements are what have given the term feminist its present reputation. RadFems would go to any length to protect these 'holy' doctrines, shunning any woman that refuses to to etheir party line. And together with the current 'Politically Correct' movement with its emphasis on group rights and group offences which conveniently gives 'victims' adequate reasons to attack their 'oppressors' without letting the so called oppressors defend themselves, the RadFem's can spread their misandrous beliefs without the inconvenience of their claims being subjected to scrutiny, in spite of the fact that today's argument is may be inconsistent with tomorrow's. In fact, any man who objects is called a 'typical male' misogynist (for opposing misandry, no less) and any woman who does is either 'too oppressed to see' or a 'traitor'. A proper 'feminist' (RadFem definition) would never criticize or disagree with another sister 'feminist'. No, she would just listen to it and agree, no matter how wrong she knows her 'sister' is. Luckily, very few women accept this.
The anti-male venom inherent in all RadFem writings and speeches are supported by half truths and outright lies presented as evidence to prove that there is a 'war against women' being waged by men everyday of a woman's life. The men include your father, brother, husband, lover, son, friend or even just the man walking across the street. Not some men, ALL men. These are some of their 'facts' that support their beliefs that ALL men are in some conspiracy to subjugate and oppress women:
RadFem fact: 4,000 women are killed by their husbands and boyfriends each year.
Truth: The actual number of people killed by lovers is around 1,200-1,500 each year. These types of murders accounted for only 4.9% of all murders in 1992 while 53% of murder victims were killed by strangers. The number of people killed by strangers has reached a historical high.
RadFem fact: Men commit 90% of all spousal murders.
Truth: Women represent 41% of spousal murderers. Among black married couples, wives were 47% of the spousal murderers.
RadFem fact: Fathers are more likely to kill their children.
Truth: When a child is killed by a parent, 55% of the time the mother murdered the child. This does not include the 35 million abortions in the United States in the last 25 years.
RadFem fact: Female children are being killed at a rate more than male children, which proves that there is a war against women.
Truth: Males account for 54% of murder victims aged 12 and younger. Every year more baby boys are born than baby girls, by age 10-12 (racial differences eixist) girls outnumber girls. They never look back. 67% of all citizens over the age of 65 are female. 85% of all citizens over age 85 are female.
RadFem fact: Fathers generally abuse their children.
Truth: According to the Child Protective Service's 1994 survey, physical abuse represented 21% of confirmed cases, sexual abuse 11%, neglect 49%, emotional maltreatment 3% and other forms of maltreatment 16%. Women/mothers account for substantially more than half of all the above categories except for sexual abuse. And here, only about 2% of molesters are the biological fathers. For girls, the greatest risks are live-in boyfriends, stepfathers, and the corresponding absence of the biological father. The biological father is 5 times less likely to sexually abuse their own progeny than ALL other males.
RadFem fact: Domestic violence against women is rising.
Truth: Wife abuse declined 21.8% from 1975 to 1985 and has been on the decrease since then.
RadFem fact: Nationally, 50% of all homeless women and children are on the streets because of violence in the home.
Truth: The source of this myth is Senator Biden, who has shown no study that proves this as fact. Further, 85% of the homeless are men and a significant percentage are military veterans.
RadFem fact: Women who kill their batterers receive longer prison sentences than men who kill their partners.
Truth: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Violence Between Intimates (November 1994), the average prison sentence for men who killed their wives is 17.5 years; the average sentence for women convicted of killing their husband was 6.2 years.
RadFem fact: Family violence has killed more women in the last five years than the total number of Americans who were killed in the Vietnam War.
Truth: This "fact" is often said by Dr. Robert McAfee, past president of the American Medical Association. There were about 58,000 American casualties in the Vietnam War. According to the FBI, Uniform Crime Statistics, about 1,500 women are killed by their husbands or boyfriends each year. The total number of women homicide victims each year is 5,000. Thus, in 5 years, even if every woman who was killed was killed by a family member, the total would still be one-half the number of American casualties in Vietnam.
RadFem fact: Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15-44 in the US- more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined.
Truth: The original source of this statement goes back to two papers by Evan Stark and Ann Flitcraft. First, the actual research the 'fact' is based on is a rather small survey of one emergency room. Second, in the original articles, they said that domestic violence may be a more common cause of emergency room visits than car accidents, muggings, and rape combined.
RadFem fact: 85% of women will be the victims of sexual harassment.
Truth: (This will be explained below.)
RadFem fact: Four million women are beaten and abused by their husbands and lovers each year.
Truth: The latest US National surveys put the number of abused women at around 1.8 to 2 million. And abused men at 2.1 million.
RadFem fact: 25% i.e. 1 in 4 of all women will be the victims of rape, or attempted rape in their lifetimes.
Truth: This came from RadFem Mary Koss, who took it upon herself to decide for the 'victims' that they had been raped. Nationally, 72 out of 100,000 (0.00072%) women are raped every year. It is extremely sad even if it was only 1 in a million but exaggerating so as to defame men is criminal.
RadFem fact: Women receive lower wages than men for equal work; 59 or 72 (take your pick) cents for each male dollar.
Truth: Experience and average hours per week working also play a crucial role in explaining the gap. Over their lifetimes, women tend to work total fewer hours than men do. This is because women are more likely to take time off for family matters and interrupt their careers than men are. Women who are single and without children tend to equal what their male counterparts make, but women who are married and/or have children tend to take more time off for family matters which hurts their experience and shows up in significantly lower earnings.
RadFem fact: Girls in junior high suffer a dramatic and unique loss in self-esteem due to the 'fact' that the school system is designed by the patriarchy to promote male success and discourage female children.
Truth: When 55% of all university graduates are women, how can this be true?
All of the above RadFem facts are either hugely exaggerated or just outright lies. However, any attempt to challenge these statements result in a severe reprisal from the politically correct movement and whoever it was that challenged the above 'facts' is branded a 'pro-rape' misogynist.
Why would a man get upset about RadFem propaganda statistics?
What's so very wrong with these lies, and their perpetuation?
If they incite people to action, so much the better, right?
Wrong!
Apart from the RadFem intent of demonizing men, the true horrors of domestic violence, rape, and all other such crimes stand, unfortunately, on their own merit, without the need for false statistics. Because the more the validity of something is found wanting, the less it is taken notice of. It is an insult to actual victims of these evils because it trivializes them.
So what are the RadFem's solutions to these problems?
These 'solutions', would of course have to be consistent with their agendas. Which show the true nature of the new face of Feminism. Take note of the very discriminatory 'Take Our Daughters To Work' day. Why not 'Take Our CHILDREN To Work' day? Do boys need less encouragement than girls?
(Link now defunct) Another Australian woman, Bettina Arndt protests this RadFem ideological fixation on defaming anything male and their effects on men in this classic essay:
As the essay above states, men have found themselves under attack, on the personal and political level, and any protest would result in a massive backlash.
They call themselves 'male feminists' and echo everything the RadFems tell them. Whenever you read some of their literature, you get a feeling that these men have so much self-hatred, so deeply ingrained into them that they will actually one day cut their penises off.
A man, I think he's a professor, is on the net putting up refutations of the RadFem rape statistics on his website. A 'male feminist' sent this priceless gem protesting that discrediting RadFem statistics is 'insensitive' and amounts to 'supporting rape' and 'blaming the victim'. He ended it with this...
"Why is it that we men consistently hurt ourselves, each other, women, and the environment so friggin much? What is at the core of all this anger and frustration we feel? Why do I compulsively reach for more and more power over other people, even my friends and "lovers"? Why is it that even after fucking my girlfriend I'm still so fucking alone? Go to the men's and women's studies section of your library or bookstore, and read about yourselves. Then go out and BE a just person."
The self-hatred here is so apparent it's alarming. I took particular note of his advice that men should go to the 'women studies' sections and read about themselves.
Whose writings are in these 'women's studies' sections?
What's wrong with this?
From all ostensible indications, feminism is wonderful thing. An ideology whose very presence indicates the advancement of the human species and equality for all.
I'm all for this 'feminism'.
My mother is a top class pharmacist and most of my aunts are Managers and Directors in the Banking Industry. None of them would be where they are, using their brains to support themselves and their families without the ground breaking work of Mary Woolstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and the ever radical Susan Brownell Anthony, etc. Add to that distinguished list the Marquis de Condorcet, Mr Mott (Lucretia Mott's husband), John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant and so on. These men were feminists too.
I grew up in an environment in the advent of feminism. It was a fact that I got the most competition in academics from a girl, and the women in my family are all assertive and intelligent women. All these women and all the confident and strong women out there in the world are feminists, so defined because they do not fear going out to face the world and carving a place for themselves in it.
But amazingly only a few American women in the 1990s classify themselves as feminists.
Has the movement fallen into disrepute?
No, because almost a 100% of people, male and female, think that women 'must' and should have rights equal to that of men.
Then why is the term 'feminist' so repulsive?
.
It is said that at the heart of every movement there is always a vanguard party or philosophy that by it's prominence, is representative of its views, and it is that vanguard party that society looks to, to see what the movement represents and stands for.
The vanguard party thus has to be the loudest, most attention grabbing section of the movement. It does not by default mean the most popular or largest section of the movement.
The vanguard party is thus not selected by the movement, it selects itself. The vanguard party, in the public eye, then becomes the movement, its ideals become the movement's ideals, it therefore represents the movement in whatever it does.The movement's image changes only when the vanguard party changes or when there is a change of vanguard parties within the movement.
What is feminism's 'vanguard party'?
In my studies of this, it seems that there are three major ideologies within feminism:
Liberal Feminism, which simply means equal rights and responsibilities for all persons, irregardless of sex/gender as supported by Stanton, Mott and Anthony. Most American women, while most say they are not feminists, strongly advocate this.
Socialist Feminism was popular in the sixties but it has declined since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is basically the same as Liberal Feminism except it is closely tied politically and culturally with Marxism. Lastly comes
Radical Feminism, which as of now is the vanguard party of Feminism. It has the least support and the most opposition among all of them, but it is the loudest and most active. It and its ideologies, varied though they may be, stand virtually unchallenged by the other two (for shame) and thus it is assumed to represent the feminist movement's attitudes, to define the movement and all it stands for.
My interpretation of Radical Feminists has led me to believe that Radical Feminism is a psychological disorder where the female of the human species believes the species evolved incorrectly and that the inherent weakness of her gender is a fluke of nature.
I see merit in Donna Laframboise's self-description of "dissident feminists", which makes it clear which movement currently has the political, economic and social power. However, even this is unsatisfactory in defining RadFem philosophy and dogma, since feminism has built into its name the notion that it is concerned with women's issues. The RadFem is truly less interested in women's issues than she is in vilifying males.
The RadFem blames her GENDERS shortcomings and unhappiness on this deviant evolution and tries to manipulate the natural order of things to suit her - to the direct detriment of all others. RadFems are so narcissistic that they cannot see anything but their immediate actions.
The destructive consequences of their actions are not even remotely contemplated or anticipated - even when it effects them directly. The recent execution by lethal injection of Karla Faye Tucker in the state of Texas is such an example, the RadFems have made such a stink about gender equality that the governor of the state of Texas was left with no alternative but to break a 150 year old tradition.
Another recent example is that of Mary Kay LeTourneau, a former grade-school teacher who was convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old male former student. She was recently arrested for violating the orders of the court by again seeing the child and was subsequently ordered to serve out the remainder of her sentence of 8 years for rape.
The RadFems did not see this, but in this case alone, they FORCED the courts to deal with the issue of RAPE BY A WOMAN. While it is now true that these sorts of cases are few and far between, the fact is that the RadFem agenda has opened the door for other women to be sentenced and treated in the traditional MALE punishment model.
Even scarier, these Radical feminists are winning their propaganda war. Like all propaganda wars, the core of their appeal is based on a thinly veiled pack of lies and semantical manipulations. That and lies, damned lies, and statistics too.
Now to make a clear distinction between these 'vanguard feminists' and true feminists, I would refer to them as RadFems. Because of their powerful position in the movement, any and all feminists are taken to be RadFems.
The RadFems define Modern feminism as "that social movement which has as its goal rights without responsibilities for women, and responsibilities without rights for men, all under the guise of gender equality."
They run the Domestic Violence Programs, make up a large percentage of national women's organizations and run the Women's Studies departments in Universities. Thus the public perception of a feminist is really the public perception of a RadFem.
A feminist is assumed to be:
"a woman who hates men, the patriarchy, and all things male
(and/or)
who prefers her career to her children or for that matter ANY children (abortion by any other name is the destruction of children)
(and/or)
who is anti-family, anti-male, anti-traditional morality
(and/or)
who is a lesbian
(and/or)
who is an atheist or who practices wicca witchcraft
(and/or)
who consistently confuse "assertiveness" with "aggression" (the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference, but the RadFem does not understand this - they only know how to hate)".
What causes these perceptions?
The RadFems themselves, by their (loud) words and deeds. RadFems have reduced feminism in the public eye from a progressive social movement to something resembling a whining hate camp filled with ugly, fat, over educated, boorish and boring, humorless, androids. Their gender confusion alone relegates them to the near psychotics of history.
Their main figures, Marilyn French, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, Robin Morgan, Kate Millett, Susan Faludi, Gloria Steinem, Patricia Ireland and N.O.W., etc are well known for their hate filled diatribes against men. They are misandrists in every sense of the word. Most of them are lesbians as well, which, due to the reverence in which they are held by RadFems confirms but does not necessarily imply the above stereotype. They are also almost universally atheist or devotees of religious philosophies that support witch craft of satanistic theology.
And since they are the representatives of feminism, such an obviously good and progressive social movement, it is not possible to attack their views without being accused of being against women's rights, whether you be male or female, even if you are well known within the movement.
This has frighteningly put them in the very powerful position of being able to dictate their agendas without allowing the opposition to present their views. If indeed opposition dared speak out, they are vilified by the RadFems, who because they exist in the name of feminism can claim a higher moral ground (political correctness).
The targets or the chosen 'bogey man' of the RadFems are men as a whole, and heterosexual men in particular. This same 'them and us' tactic is reminiscent of Nazi Germany, 'them' being the Jews and 'us' being the Germans. As one writer said after reading Susan Brownmiller's 'Against Our Will':
"I've read Mein Kampf and in my mind it's a toss up between them." All you need do to 'Against Our Will' is to substitute the word woman for German and man for Jew and the two books will basically say the same thing, broadcasting their hate to one and all.
The most dangerous aspect of this new feminism is how it continues to demonize men in every way one can possibly think of and the fact that they do it without concern for the people they are defaming as individuals and the effect of their hate filled propaganda on society.
RadFems continuously and religiously spout facts about how men as a whole oppress women. In the work place, in the home, in everything under the sun.The fact is that this is simply not true. Consider these facts:
- Women control 86% of all personal wealth in America.
- 55% of all University graduates are women.
- Women cast the majority of the votes in America (54%).
- They win over 90% of custody disputes.
- 94% of work-related deaths are suffered by men.
- Women are the victims of 35% of violent crimes.
- The remaining 65% are men.
- 75% of murder victims are men.
- 85% of suicide victims are men.
- 24 out of the 25 worst jobs are exclusively male.
- 66% of health care is spent on women, discounting pregnancy related care.
If men are supposed to be ruling the world in some system of misogynous patriarchy then how come we let the 'terrible tragedy' of above happen?
Why did the all male government of years back give women the right to vote?
Why did the men of those times allow women the choice to go out and work if they so wished?
Why did we extend rights once only reserved for men to women?
Is it all part of some cunning plan?
RadFems like Susan Faludi would have you think it is. A thorough examination of the facts would show that the foundations of the RadFems agenda are lies. The RadFems think that the whole world - including the majority of women - are fools.
Here are a few historical dates that in their entirety make the existence of a patriarchal oppressive state a complete fallacy:
- Mary Lyon founded the 1st woman's college in US - Mt. Holyoke College in 1837.
- Antoinette Brown Blackwell was the 1st formally educated woman minister of the Congregationalist Church in 1853.
- Mary Walker was the 1st (and only) woman to receive the US Medal of Honor in 1866. She was a Civil War surgeon.
- Victoria Woodhall was the 1st woman to run for President of the US in 1872.
- Susan Salter was elected the 1st woman US mayor of Argonia, KS in 1887.
- Alice Wells was the 1st policewoman in the US in 1910.
- Jeannette Rankin was the 1st woman elected to US congress in 1916 from Montana. Only legislator to vote against both WW I and WW II.
- Ever hear of prohibition? The 18th Amendment? THE FEMINISTS DID THAT ONE in 1919 to protect "women and children" from drunken men.
- Nellie Taylor Ross was the 1st elected female state governor (of Wyoming) - 1925.
- Ever hear of "illegal" drugs and "controlled" substances? THE FEMINISTS DID THAT ONE in 1937. The entire war on drugs which is crippling our nation TODAY can be traced to racist and sexist ideals fostered by early feminists to protect "women and children" from stoned men. The movie "Reefer Madness" was all about the loosening of female moral virtue with a weed.
The fact is that we, as a society evolved. We took a major leap forward the day men realized that women were our partners, different yet equal, despite our deep seated and well-meaning cultural dogmas. The truth is that men 'and women' in the past honestly believed women were not suited for life outside the domestic sphere. Of course, these same beliefs also condoned slavery. Tradition and everything else dictated what they did. And tradition would have been incomplete without the role of everyone within the society being specified. This didn't mean that the men hated the women, or consciously sat down and said or though,
"Who shall we oppress now?
How about women?"
They simply didn't know any better. And to be perfectly honest, women also took part in the creations of those traditions. In many ancient Western societies, women, despite their limited role in the external domains of the community were held in elevated positions in society, thus the codes of chivalry and gallantry that governed men's behavior towards women.
In Victorian England, woman were considered the moral guardians of society. A protective paternalistic attitude towards women was the norm, from which came the famous "Women and children first!" call. The resistance the first feminists encountered was typical of how members of a society (men and women in this case) would resist change, should it seem threatening to the way of life they were used to. Consider the Luddites, for example.
To look at it objectively, one would see that pre-feminist traditions were based on the simple logical division of labor, severely limited though they were, not oppression. To actually have some RadFem coming up to tell me that I should feel guilty because a few centuries or even decades ago a man was politically and culturally superior to a woman in society is ludicrous. No doubt it was wrong, and there are still problems that women face today (not necessarily caused by men), but we have progressed since then and it's time we solved these problems (and men's problems) together, as partners and equals, just like the founding mothers and fathers of feminism wished.
But RadFems don't like that idea. RadFems insist that man's oppression of women is the governing principle of human societal life. Men are intrinsically bad, women are good. Men are oppressors and the cause of all evil, women are only their helpless victims. They see everything through this simple convoluted lens. This misandrous attitude pervades their thinking, their writings, their speeches and their demands. These notions are seen throughout RadFem 'scholarship'.
The following obviously misandrous quotes are from the leading icons of RadFems, from their mouths and their writings. And every RadFem believes these statements as if they were the gospel.
"One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 21.
"The fact is that the process of killing - both rape and battery are steps in that process- is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 22.
"The newest variations on this distressingly ancient theme center on hormones and DNA: men are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into murder and rape," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 114.
"All men benefit from rape, because all men benefit from the fact that women are not free in this society; that women cower; that women are afraid; that women cannot assert the rights that we have, limited as those rights are, because of the ubiquitous presence of rape," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 142.
"One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available," --Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 145.
"In everything men make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, still their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 214.
"Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire," -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 265.
In fucking, as in reproduction, sex and economics are inextricably joined. In male-supremacist cultures, women are believed to embody carnality; women are sex. A man wants what a woman has--sex. He can steal it [prostitution], lease it over the long term marriage [marriage in the United States], or own it outright [marriage in most societies]. A man can do some or all of the above, over and over again. -- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone
.
"Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman," -- Andrea Dworkin, Liberty, p. 58.
"Romance is rape embellished with meaningful looks," -- Andrea Dworkin in the Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 1995.
"Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies." "Rape is the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating. Rape is the primary emblem of romantic love. Rape is the means by which a woman is initiated into her womanhood as it is defined by men....Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake--it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. -- Andrea Dworkin - The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door
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Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake--it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it." -- Andrea Dworkin - The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door
"Rape is the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating. Rape is the primary emblem of romantic love. Rape is the means by which a woman is initiated into her womanhood as it is defined by men. -- Andrea Dworkin
"Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership." -- Andrea Dworkin
"Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire, and the first crude stone axe," -- Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, p. 5.
"[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" -- Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, P.6
"Our culture is depicting sex as rape so that men and women will become interested in it," -- Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 138.
"Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete," -- Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 55.
"AIDS education will not get very far until young men are taught how not to rape young women and how to eroticize trust and consent; and until young women are supported in the way they need to be redefining their desires," -- Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 168.
"The dating system is a mutually exploitative arrangement of sex-role expectations, which limit and direct behavior of both parties and determine the character of the relationship. Built into the concept of dating is the notion that the woman is an object which may be purchased," -- Kurt Weis and Sandra S. Borges, Rape Victimology, p. 112.
"Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home," -- Gloria Steinem in Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, pp. 259-61.
"I call it the Noah Ark Syndrome. The perception lingers that human beings should go two by two. Someone who is not married-either by choice or by chance- is somehow regarded as abnormal," -- Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in Glamour, February 1997.
"All men are rapists and that's all they are," -- Marilyn French Author, "The Women's Room" in People, February 20, 1983.
"My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter." -- Marilyn French, in "The Women's Room"
"Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometime gain from the experience," -- Catherine Comins, Vassar College Assistant Dean of Student Life in Time, June 3, 1991, p. 52.
"We have long known that rape has been a way of terrorizing us and keeping us in subjection. Now we also know that we have participated, although unwittingly, in the rape of our minds," -- Gerda Lerner in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, p. 55.
"If the classroom situation is very heteropatriarchal- a large beginning class of 50 to 60 students say, with few feminist students- I am likely to define my task as largely one of recruitment...of persuading students that women are oppressed," -- Professor Joyce Trebilcot of Washington University in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women, p. 92.
"I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them." -- Robin Morgan, (current editor of MS magazine)
"Sexism is NOT the fault of women--kill your fathers, not your mothers." -- Robin Morgan, (current editor of MS magazine)
"The phallic malady is epidemic and systemic... each individual male in the patriarchy is aware of his relative power in the scheme of things.... He knows that his actions are supported by the twin pillars of the State of man - the brotherhood ritual of political exigency and the brotherhood ritual of a sexual thrill in dominance. As a devotee of Thanatos, he is one with the practitioner of sado-masochistic "play" between "consenting adults," as he is one with the rapist." -- Robin Morgan (current editor of MS magazine) "The Demon Lover" p. 138-9
"My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others' agony." -- Robin Morgan (current editor of MS magazine) "The Demon Lover" p. 224
"Sex to this point in my life has been trivial, at best a gesture of tenderness, at worst a chore. I couldn't understand the furor about it." -- Robin Morgan (current editor of MS magazine) "The Demon Lover" p. 229
"Did she die of the disease called "family" or the disease called "rehabilitation", of poverty or drugs or pornography, of economics or sexual slavery or a broken body?" -- Robin Morgan (current editor of MS magazine) "The Demon Lover" p. 316
"I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." -- Robin Morgan, in 1974
"...rape is the perfected act of male sexuality in a patriarchal culture-- it is the ultimate metaphor for domination, violence, subjugation, and possession." -- Robin Morgan
"I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white hetero- sexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary- vested-interest-power. But then, I have great difficulty examining what men in general could possibly do about all this. In addition to doing the shitwork that women have been doing for generations, possibly not exist? No, I really don't mean that. Yes, I really do." -- Robin Morgan
"And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism--the lie that there can be such a thing as 'men's liberation groups.' Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a 'threatening' characteristic shared by the latter group--skin color or sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters (racism hurts whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not OPPRESSED. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism--the oppressed have no alternative--for they have no power--but to fight. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men--but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is NOT the fault of women--kill your fathers, not your mothers." -- Robin Morgan
"I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." -- Robin Morgan, "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape" in "Going to Far," 1974.
"And in the spectrum of male bahavior, rape, the perfect combination of sex and violence, is the penultimate (sic) act. Erotic pleasure cannot be separated from culture, and in our culture male eroticism is wedded to power." -- Susan Griffin Rape: The Politics of Consciousness
"And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual [male], it may be mainly a quantitative difference." -- Susan Griffin "Rape: The All-American Crime"
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When asked: "You [Greer] were once quoted as saying your idea of the ideal man is a woman with a dick. Are you still that way inclined?"
Dr Greer (denying that she said it): "I have a great deal of difficulty with the idea of the ideal man. As far as I'm concerned, men are the product of a damanged gene. They pretend to be normal but what they're doing sitting there with benign smiles on their faces is they're manufacturing sperm. They do it all the time. They never stop.
"I mean, we women are more reasonable. We pop one follicle every 28 days, whereas they are producing 400 million sperm for each ejaculation, most of which don't take place anywhere near an ovum. I don't know that the ecosphere can tolerate it." -- Germaine Greer, at a Hilton Hotel literary lunch, promoting her book "The Change-- Women, Aging and the Menopause". From a newsreport dated 14/11/91.
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"The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist" -- Ti-Grace Atkinson "Amazon Odyssey" (p. 86)
"When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression..." -- Sheila Jeffrys
"Number 10: Regularly beat him on the head with your shoe."
"The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men." -- Sharon Stone On David Letterman presenting a top ten list of ways to keep your man.
"Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive...women didn't go to Vietnam and blow up things up. They are not Rambo," -- Jodie Foster in The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 1991, p. 19.
"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent," -- Catherine MacKinnon in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies, p. 129.
"Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. You might think thats too broad. I'm not talking about sending all of you men to jail for that." -- Catherine MacKinnon "A Rally Against Rape" Feminism Unmodified
"I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which a man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it." -- Former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan
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MALE: ... represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. 'The first males were mutants... the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female.'
MAN: ... an obsolete life form... an ordinary creature who needs to be watched ... a contradictory baby-man ...
TESTOSTERONE POISONING: ... 'Until now it has been though that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from "testosterone poisoning."' -- from A Feminist Dictionary", ed. Kramarae and Treichler, Pandora Press, 1985
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Letter to the Editor: "Women's Turn to Dominate"
"To Proud Feminist, (Herald-Sun, 7 February). Your last paragraph is shocking language from a feminist. You use the entrenched, revolting male stereotypes of women and rationalise your existence by saying you are neither "ugly" nor "manless", as though either of these male-oriented judgments matter.
"Clearly you are not yet a free-thinking feminist but rather one of those women who bounce off the male-dominated, male-controlled social structures.
"Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is, if you don't like it, bad luck - and if you get in my way I'll run you down." -- Signed: Liberated Women, Boronia - Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia - 9 February 1996
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Some feminists object to the nuclear family. Some examples
The belief that married-couple families are superior is probably the most pervasive prejudice in the Western world. -- Judith Stacey
The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. "Only with the occasional celebrity crime do we allow ourselves to think the nearly unthinkable: that the family may not be the ideal and perfect living arrangement after all -- that it can be a nest of pathology and a cradle of gruesome violence," she writes. "Even in the ostensibly 'functional,' nonviolent family, where no one is killed or maimed, feelings are routinely bruised and often twisted out of shape. There is the slap or the put-down that violates a child's shaky sense of self, the cold, distracted stare that drives a spouse to tears, the little digs and rivalries." -- Barbara Ehrenreich, as quoted by Stephen Chapman, from Time
"long and honorable tradition of 'anti-family' thought," waxing nostalgic for those early feminists who regarded marriage as just another version of prostitution. This deeply defective institution "can hardly be the moral foundation of everything else," she argues, pining for the day when "someone invents a sustainable alternative." -- Barbara Ehrenreich, as quoted by Stephen Chapman, from Time
"The nuclear family is a hotbed of violence and depravity." -- Gordon Fitch
"How will the family unit be destroyed? ... the demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare." -- From Female Liberation by Roxanne Dunbar.
"Feminists have long criticized marriage as a place of oppression, danger, and drudgery for women." -- From article, "Is Marriage the Answer?" by Barbara Findlen, Ms magazine, May-June, 1995
"The Feminists -v- The Marriage License Bureau of the State of New York...All the discriminatory practices against women are patterned and rationalized by this slavery-like practice. We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage." -- From Sisterhood Is Powerful, Morgan (ed), 1970 p. 537.
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"most mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children." -- From Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness, p. 294
"...I submit that any sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or controls is rape." -- Alice Walker in "Embracing the Dark and the Light," Essence, July 1982. As cited in Andrea Dworkin's "Right-Wing Women"
The context of the quote in RWW makes it clear that marriage is such a form of control.
"Our research and most other studies show that wife-battering occurs in 50 percent of families throughout the nation." -- Lenore Walker, speaking at a Laguna Beach conference, as reported in the SF Chronicle
The SF Chronicle comments, "Only the most crazed man-hater could believe that."
Lenore Walker, after visiting one of the early shelters for battered women, wrote "I was struck by what a beneficial alternative to the nuclear family this arrangement [communal housing and child raising] was for these women and children." -- Lenore Walker. The Battered Woman , p.195
"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together. ... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process. ... "Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests. ... -- Functions of the Family, Linda Gordon, WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969.
"Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role. ... No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her speical responsibilities to her children. ... Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people's needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all." -- Functions of the Family, Linda Gordon, WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969.
"And in the spectrum of male behavior, rape, the perfect combination of sex and violence, is the penultimate (sic) act. Erotic pleasure cannot be separated from culture, and in our culture male eroticism is wedded to power." -- Rape: The Politics of Consciousness
These and many other such like statements are what have given the term feminist its present reputation. RadFems would go to any length to protect these 'holy' doctrines, shunning any woman that refuses to to etheir party line. And together with the current 'Politically Correct' movement with its emphasis on group rights and group offences which conveniently gives 'victims' adequate reasons to attack their 'oppressors' without letting the so called oppressors defend themselves, the RadFem's can spread their misandrous beliefs without the inconvenience of their claims being subjected to scrutiny, in spite of the fact that today's argument is may be inconsistent with tomorrow's. In fact, any man who objects is called a 'typical male' misogynist (for opposing misandry, no less) and any woman who does is either 'too oppressed to see' or a 'traitor'. A proper 'feminist' (RadFem definition) would never criticize or disagree with another sister 'feminist'. No, she would just listen to it and agree, no matter how wrong she knows her 'sister' is. Luckily, very few women accept this.
The anti-male venom inherent in all RadFem writings and speeches are supported by half truths and outright lies presented as evidence to prove that there is a 'war against women' being waged by men everyday of a woman's life. The men include your father, brother, husband, lover, son, friend or even just the man walking across the street. Not some men, ALL men. These are some of their 'facts' that support their beliefs that ALL men are in some conspiracy to subjugate and oppress women:
RadFem fact: 4,000 women are killed by their husbands and boyfriends each year.
Truth: The actual number of people killed by lovers is around 1,200-1,500 each year. These types of murders accounted for only 4.9% of all murders in 1992 while 53% of murder victims were killed by strangers. The number of people killed by strangers has reached a historical high.
RadFem fact: Men commit 90% of all spousal murders.
Truth: Women represent 41% of spousal murderers. Among black married couples, wives were 47% of the spousal murderers.
RadFem fact: Fathers are more likely to kill their children.
Truth: When a child is killed by a parent, 55% of the time the mother murdered the child. This does not include the 35 million abortions in the United States in the last 25 years.
RadFem fact: Female children are being killed at a rate more than male children, which proves that there is a war against women.
Truth: Males account for 54% of murder victims aged 12 and younger. Every year more baby boys are born than baby girls, by age 10-12 (racial differences eixist) girls outnumber girls. They never look back. 67% of all citizens over the age of 65 are female. 85% of all citizens over age 85 are female.
RadFem fact: Fathers generally abuse their children.
Truth: According to the Child Protective Service's 1994 survey, physical abuse represented 21% of confirmed cases, sexual abuse 11%, neglect 49%, emotional maltreatment 3% and other forms of maltreatment 16%. Women/mothers account for substantially more than half of all the above categories except for sexual abuse. And here, only about 2% of molesters are the biological fathers. For girls, the greatest risks are live-in boyfriends, stepfathers, and the corresponding absence of the biological father. The biological father is 5 times less likely to sexually abuse their own progeny than ALL other males.
RadFem fact: Domestic violence against women is rising.
Truth: Wife abuse declined 21.8% from 1975 to 1985 and has been on the decrease since then.
RadFem fact: Nationally, 50% of all homeless women and children are on the streets because of violence in the home.
Truth: The source of this myth is Senator Biden, who has shown no study that proves this as fact. Further, 85% of the homeless are men and a significant percentage are military veterans.
RadFem fact: Women who kill their batterers receive longer prison sentences than men who kill their partners.
Truth: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Violence Between Intimates (November 1994), the average prison sentence for men who killed their wives is 17.5 years; the average sentence for women convicted of killing their husband was 6.2 years.
RadFem fact: Family violence has killed more women in the last five years than the total number of Americans who were killed in the Vietnam War.
Truth: This "fact" is often said by Dr. Robert McAfee, past president of the American Medical Association. There were about 58,000 American casualties in the Vietnam War. According to the FBI, Uniform Crime Statistics, about 1,500 women are killed by their husbands or boyfriends each year. The total number of women homicide victims each year is 5,000. Thus, in 5 years, even if every woman who was killed was killed by a family member, the total would still be one-half the number of American casualties in Vietnam.
RadFem fact: Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15-44 in the US- more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined.
Truth: The original source of this statement goes back to two papers by Evan Stark and Ann Flitcraft. First, the actual research the 'fact' is based on is a rather small survey of one emergency room. Second, in the original articles, they said that domestic violence may be a more common cause of emergency room visits than car accidents, muggings, and rape combined.
RadFem fact: 85% of women will be the victims of sexual harassment.
Truth: (This will be explained below.)
RadFem fact: Four million women are beaten and abused by their husbands and lovers each year.
Truth: The latest US National surveys put the number of abused women at around 1.8 to 2 million. And abused men at 2.1 million.
RadFem fact: 25% i.e. 1 in 4 of all women will be the victims of rape, or attempted rape in their lifetimes.
Truth: This came from RadFem Mary Koss, who took it upon herself to decide for the 'victims' that they had been raped. Nationally, 72 out of 100,000 (0.00072%) women are raped every year. It is extremely sad even if it was only 1 in a million but exaggerating so as to defame men is criminal.
RadFem fact: Women receive lower wages than men for equal work; 59 or 72 (take your pick) cents for each male dollar.
Truth: Experience and average hours per week working also play a crucial role in explaining the gap. Over their lifetimes, women tend to work total fewer hours than men do. This is because women are more likely to take time off for family matters and interrupt their careers than men are. Women who are single and without children tend to equal what their male counterparts make, but women who are married and/or have children tend to take more time off for family matters which hurts their experience and shows up in significantly lower earnings.
RadFem fact: Girls in junior high suffer a dramatic and unique loss in self-esteem due to the 'fact' that the school system is designed by the patriarchy to promote male success and discourage female children.
Truth: When 55% of all university graduates are women, how can this be true?
All of the above RadFem facts are either hugely exaggerated or just outright lies. However, any attempt to challenge these statements result in a severe reprisal from the politically correct movement and whoever it was that challenged the above 'facts' is branded a 'pro-rape' misogynist.
Why would a man get upset about RadFem propaganda statistics?
What's so very wrong with these lies, and their perpetuation?
If they incite people to action, so much the better, right?
Wrong!
Apart from the RadFem intent of demonizing men, the true horrors of domestic violence, rape, and all other such crimes stand, unfortunately, on their own merit, without the need for false statistics. Because the more the validity of something is found wanting, the less it is taken notice of. It is an insult to actual victims of these evils because it trivializes them.
So what are the RadFem's solutions to these problems?
These 'solutions', would of course have to be consistent with their agendas. Which show the true nature of the new face of Feminism. Take note of the very discriminatory 'Take Our Daughters To Work' day. Why not 'Take Our CHILDREN To Work' day? Do boys need less encouragement than girls?
(Link now defunct) Another Australian woman, Bettina Arndt protests this RadFem ideological fixation on defaming anything male and their effects on men in this classic essay:
As the essay above states, men have found themselves under attack, on the personal and political level, and any protest would result in a massive backlash.
.
Most men simply shut up, some protest, but the truly scary thing is that there are others who actually feel guilty for things they are not even responsible for.
They call themselves 'male feminists' and echo everything the RadFems tell them. Whenever you read some of their literature, you get a feeling that these men have so much self-hatred, so deeply ingrained into them that they will actually one day cut their penises off.
.
"I feel so guilty every time I hear of a woman being raped...because I know that I exalt in it as a man, even though I didn't do it...but in a way, I did..." I once read.
A man, I think he's a professor, is on the net putting up refutations of the RadFem rape statistics on his website. A 'male feminist' sent this priceless gem protesting that discrediting RadFem statistics is 'insensitive' and amounts to 'supporting rape' and 'blaming the victim'. He ended it with this...
"Why is it that we men consistently hurt ourselves, each other, women, and the environment so friggin much? What is at the core of all this anger and frustration we feel? Why do I compulsively reach for more and more power over other people, even my friends and "lovers"? Why is it that even after fucking my girlfriend I'm still so fucking alone? Go to the men's and women's studies section of your library or bookstore, and read about yourselves. Then go out and BE a just person."
The self-hatred here is so apparent it's alarming. I took particular note of his advice that men should go to the 'women studies' sections and read about themselves.
Whose writings are in these 'women's studies' sections?
- Andrea Dworkin,
- Robin Morgan,
- Marilyn French,
- Susan Brownmiller etc.
One of the most glaring things about all these writings is the fact that all of them strenuously repeat that men do not and cannot comprehend the true nature of women, but they, the 'enlightened' ones, of course, understand that 'all' men want to rape/hurt/kill/subjugate/dominate everything i.e. women, children, other men, animals, the environment etc. around them.
How do they know?
These attacks on men by the RadFems and the Politically Correct movement as the Bettina Arndt's essay states, have gone far in undermining men's most exclusive, important and beneficial roles in society. Particularly as husband and father.
RadFem attacks on the family are based primarily on the fact that men have a traditional leadership role in it. Now tradition has changed, and women are considered co-heads of the family. But for RadFems, that's not enough, because the MAN is still in it. A husband is by definition a rapist, and a father, according to RadFems is the man who wants to, or is, presently abusing his children.
Here is where I begin to understand why so many people assume that 'feminists' are militant lesbians/virulently anti-heterosexual and anti-family. Inserted into everyone of their misandrous writings is their total disdain for the roles of men in the family and in the lives of women.
Indeed, N.O.W. once released a statement in a memorandum saying...
"Every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist...."
For instance, in the RadFem acclaimed book 'The Courage To Heal' by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, men in the family, particularly fathers, are portrayed as sadists and rapists. The concept of the book is about highly dubious recovered 'repressed memories' of sexual abuse.
The two authors claim that they were both abused by a man in their family when they were children. The whole book is filled with stories from other women who also claim to have been abused , sometimes for many years, by men in their families.
The strange thing about everyone of the cases illustrated in the book is the fact that all the women 'forgot' or 'suppressed' these memories of abuse and suffered unexplained dilemmas in their lives until suddenly the memories were recovered, mostly with the aid of 'abuse' therapists.
The book sold in its thousands, and thousands of women and some few men, given new 'insight' by the book, 'recovered' memories of abuse suffered at the hands of their elder male relatives that they had suppressed.
Other women, who have not even been 'abused' have seen the 'light' and have seen the 'danger' of allowing men, particularly fathers, into their children's lives.
One woman was quoted on an LA newspaper as saying "I chose to be a single mother because I want to raise my son without the negative influence of a man in his life". The article was about single motherhood, which despite claims by RadFems to be 'liberating' is actually becoming a massive social problem.
Amazingly, the two authors who wrote the 'Courage to Heal' have not the credentials needed to write such an authoritative book on the subject. But since the book is under the banner of Women's Studies, such criticism would be dangerous to the reputation and/or career of the critic, as he or she would automatically be 'politically incorrect', which is close to being a heretic in the middle ages.
Apart from the fact that the typical attitude toward fathers in the book is accurately represented by this quote
"I'd watch Perry Mason to get ideas about how to kill my father. It was really the best of times. Every day I would get a new method",
Another scary aspect is the emphasis on distancing one's self from one's family, particularly if the family would challenge the 'victim's' recovered 'memory'. The victim, the woman, is encouraged to think of the all-female 'incest survivor's movement' as her new family. All cults use similar logic to remove the logic that keeps most people sane.
Now, it's been well documented that many of the women who go into these new 'families' come under a great deal of pressure to change their sexual orientation to homosexual, with the obvious reasoning that if a man you're supposed to trust above all else i.e. your father, can molest you, how can you trust or be in a relationship with any man?
This is further accentuated by the fact that on closer inspection almost all the women whose stories are told in the 'Courage To Heal', including the authors, are lesbians.
Even more telling are the recommendations by Bass and Davis for the 'recovering' women, no matter their sexuality, to read 'Lesbian Sex' and it's sequel 'Lesbian Passion: Loving Ourselves and Each Other', which includes chapters for 'incest survivors and their partners', to 'help' them in their 'healing'.
One lesbian therapist took this a step further by sleeping with her female patients, rationalizing this taking advantage of a patients trust as not unethical, because she's a woman. (And of course, she did it for their own good.)
Another avenue, other than the usual demonizing i.e. all men batter, rape etc., that RadFems normally use to convince women about the inadequacy of having men as intimate partners in their lives is the continuously repeated assertion that a man does not have the emotional, sexual or intellectual capacity to be a woman's soul mate that a woman has.
This of course overlooks the fact that lesbians have a break up rate far exceeding that of heterosexual couples.
Another study states that "lesbian couples are less 'sexual' as couples and as individuals than anyone else ...
47% of lesbians in long- term relationships "had sex" once a month or less, while among heterosexual married couples only 15% had sex once a month or less".
And even more disturbing: scientific studies of domestic violence in lesbian couples show violence in the range of 25% to 60% of all lesbian households. The most recent percentage is 33%, taking note of the fact that a lot of states in the US do not term same-sex violence as 'domestic', even if the violence is between intimates. In fact, even the victims sometimes don't term their abuse as domestic violence. Take this woman's words
"I didn't know what it was. I thought it was a real bad relationship."
Her female partner had smashed her head against the dashboard of her car. And another woman, who had a tooth knocked out twice by a female intimate said
"I have an inherent something in me that wants to make it work. There was always the promise that she would change. It was one of those things I thought would never happen to me."
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