EOTM: Philosophy & Theology: The Old Gods

Philosophy was the original science, art, and theology. The word comes from the ancient greek and means "love of wisdom". There is good reason that the highest level of academic accomplishment is called "Ph.D.". Doctor originally meant "teacher", thus a doctor of philosophy is someone who teaches the love of the wisdom of a discipline. Love is the force which also drives the healer, the minister, the scientist and the Artist. Love of life.

This amazing gift and ability of consciousness and self-awareness which man has been so proud of because it distinguishes humanity from the "lower" animals also put on us a terrible burden: the ability to ask and the need to know "Why?". Humanity needs a "because". The history of humanity is the story of searching for "becauses", and the ultimate "because". The ultimate "because" has always been called god.

As humanity's curiousity and need to know yielded results of understanding some of the "why"s, the sciences were born. Astronomy allowed the learned to watch and predict the succession of the seasons, which was essential to the survival of early man. Botany allowed people to predict which foods would taste good and nourish them, and which would kill them. The more that thought took over from instinct in controlling human behavior, the more important science became. And, because the average person was too preoccupied with survival, and had neither the time nor the inclination to delve into the nature of things, those who did understand were recognized for the importance of their knowledge.

Yet as every parent knows, even when the "becauses" are understood (which they often are not, since each "why?" is really at the end of a chain of "why?"s and knowing the answers to all the "why?"s which came before is essential to understanding the answer to the current one), each "because" simply leads to another "why?". Beyond the limits of human knowledge has always existed the unknown and perhaps unknowable, and all the unanswered "why?"s have belonged to god. Theology is therefore the Philosophy of the unknowable.

Everything which has been within man's ability to understand "why", has been developed into a scientific discipline of study. Every 4 years we double the number of "becauses" that we have. The average college prep student knows more science than all the scientists in the world did as recently as 100 years ago. As we have learned to understand what previously only god understood, science and its bastard stepchild, technology have become our new gods. Gradually the question changed. People began to ask "why?" when what they really meant was "How?".

When people began to learn "how" to harness the understanding of "because" to bring about what they wanted, the will to power was born. Thus did humanity attempt to steal the power of god, by saying "MY will be done". Down to the very heart of the atom did we find ways to exert that power. Yet it is always the power of destruction. We "split" the atom, and unleash that awesome power, yet no scientist has ever taken a bunch of parts and "put together" an atom.

And then there are those groups of people whose questions are only "when?" and "why not?". The first aspire to godlike powers over others, the second group is so isolated from reality and the outside world that the only thing they can dwell on is how they want reality to be and how disappointed, angry, and hurt they are that it isn't that way. Their lives are consumed with bitter disappointment over finding out that they are NOT god.

But the "why?" we started out to find has been lost. And it was the second question to be asked anyway. "What?" is the beginning. Without an understanding of what it is, why does not matter. We have turned around begun looking the wrong direction, studying "how" things have been put together, rather than studying the purpose of putting them together. We know how to tear them apart and often when we will be done.

What and Why are still dealt with by philosophy and theology. What is the nature of god, and for what purpose were we created? Just to destroy and consume? Strange notion of god.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Further Reading:

Science & Technology - The New Gods

The Goddess and The God of the Wicca

The God Under Siege

EOTM: This is Zen

This is zen.
.

Like listening for the sound of one hand clapping, looking at this picture for a while will tell you all the essence of zen. It cannot be described, tho much good writing about it exists. Each of us leaves footprints in the sand as we travel through this adventure called life. If we pause for a moment and look back at those footprints, we are struck with their smallness and temporary nature when set against the backdrop of the immense elemental forces of the seashore. The yin & yang of the waves within the larger yin/yang of the tides will wash them away within hours, if the wind does not blow them away within minutes.

I call myself a zen priest, yet that is purely self-appointed. When I was young and full of myself, I wanted to be a zen master and teacher. One day it occurred to me that the road to mastery was to live it every moment. There are far more rewards from living it than from the public recognition of my "mastery". It is a remarkably fulfilling and serene way to view life. I promote it as an answer to the increasingly chaotic world in which we live.

In the best (perhaps only true) zen movie ever made, "Circle of Iron," the protagonist, Cord (that which binds), finds that all answers are found in the mirror. Today, in western culture particularly, all answers seem to lie outside ourselves. We are a culture of reacters, blamers, and victims. There are always buts, whys, and becauses which explain our destructive behavior. None of them make it non-destructive. The destruction and violence will continue until each person begins to stay one's own hand and take complete responsibility for one's own acts.

There are other cosmologies which include this, one in particular called Wicca, and I hope to be able to provide the means to explore them as well on these pages.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
Philosophy and Theology: The Old Gods
Science and Technology: The New Gods
The Goddess and The God of the Wicca
The God
The Goddess

EOTM: The Natural World

z

EOTM: Creating the Future

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

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

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

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page

EOTM: The Environment

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

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

I'm tired of drowning in your shit.

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

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page

EOTM: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page

EOTM: Visual Reality

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

.

Back to “The Eye of the Mind” Main Page

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

The Human Race -

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

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

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”

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

Men's Rights Agency - News & Views

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS ERIN PIZZEY

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

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

Career:

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

Awards:

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

Non fiction:

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

Infernal Child - a memoir - out of print

Slut's Cookbook

Erin Pizzey Collects

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

Fiction:

The Watershed

In The Shadow Of The Castle

The Pleasure Palace

First Lady

The Consul General's Daughter

The Snow Leopard Of Shanghai

Other Lovers

Swimming With Dolphins

For The Love Of A Stranger

Kisses

The Wicked World Of Women

The Fame Game (in progress)

Hugs and Kisses (in progress)

Short Stories:

The Man In The Blue Van

The Frangipani Tree

Addictions

Dancing

Sand

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

Films and documentaries:

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

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

EOTM: Feminism Led to Masculine Rage

September 20, 1999

Feminism led to masculine rage

By JEAN SONMOR

Toronto Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Copyright © 1999, Quebecor New Media Limited Partnership.

EOTM: The War Against Men -- by David Shackleton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

Masculine and Feminine Archetypes 

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

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

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

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

Masculine Feminine

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

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

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

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

The New Theory of Psychohistory 

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

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

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

German Childraising Practice 

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

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

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

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

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

Evil Ideology Defined

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Feminine Archetype 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feminism 

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

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

Feminism is an Evil Ideology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


References --

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 Canadian Supreme Court ÒButlerÓ decision, 1992.

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

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

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