EOTM: The Secret of Life: Shut Up and Shovel the Fuckin' Gravel.

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The entire secret of life, of power, of everything, was taught to me when I was a teenager, by a man, a farmer. And he taught it to me in the way that is so typical of men: three sentences, no more. I contend that the real conflict today is not male versus female, but urban versus agrarian values. When people forget where their food and fiber comes from, when they forget the natural processes and timetables that produce them, when they start looking for someone else to "hand over" what they want and stop taking the responsibility for producing it themselves, when they replace hard work with belligerence and aggression, they lock themselves into downward spirals of helplessness, powerlessness, and anger.

I taught this same lesson to a woman "friend" of mine. It took me two years. During the entire time she was doing her best to manipulate and harass me into a "romantic" relationship that I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in allowing to happen. It took many screaming matches and finally the threat to throw her out of my life for her to "get it", but she finally "got it" and today she credits me with saving her life, her soul, and her sanity, and has become a friend.

The farmer's name was Griff. I was a "townie" (population 300) and made good money for a teenager as a "hired hand". One day when I showed up for work he said "We're going to pick up a new truck." We got in his car and the entire 40 minute ride to the dealer passed without either of us saying a word: One of those easy comfortable silences that men often use to communicate more than words ever can. We picked up a new 4-wheel drive ¾ ton pickup and headed back to the farm. When we got back, he pointed to a large gravel pile by the barn and told me to fill the truck bed with gravel and go fill in a hole in the entrance to one of his fields.

I said "But that gravel will ruin the paint on the bed of this brand new truck." He looked at me silently for about a minute, his expression eloquently saying that I was the worst idiot he'd ever been burdened with having to tolerate in his life. Without saying another word he picked up the shovel and, with a swing that would be the envy of every major league baseball hitter, he swung it around and smacked the side of the truck sending paint chips flying in every direction and leaving a huge dent. He looked at me again with that same "I can't believe you are such an idiot" look and said: "City boy this is a FARM truck. I didn't buy it to look pretty, I bought it to DO WORK, same reason I'm payin' you. Now it ain't new no more, so shut up and shovel the fuckin' gravel." Then he turned around and walked off, leaving me to feel foolish and gain wisdom.

Of course it took the entire context and circumstances for me to understand the full significance of the lesson: not with my head but with my spirit. In the same way, cultures world wide and throughout history have used ritual space to teach the great lessons to the young. Complexity and too many words destroy the lesson, because the very heart and soul of the lesson is that words accomplish nothing. Words do not put in crops. Words do not harvest them or get them to market or prepare them or put them on our plates. No one eats unless someone shuts up and shovels the fuckin' gravel.

The entire secret of male power is that men do, men have, shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel. Men shoveled the gravel that built all the hydroelectric dams which provide the electric power which everyone today takes for granted; some of that "Patriarchal technology" that some women are so fond of sneering at. Men put their sweat and, about 50 of them, their very bodies into Hoover dam. Then they "handed over" the result to women to make their lives more comfortable. The millions of tons of gravel which went in to building the transcontinental railway were shoveled by men. And hundreds of their bodies went into it as well. Women and men living today would have none of the conveniences which make their lives so comfortable if millions of men had not shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel. All the lawsuits and affirmative action programs in the world could not have built them. Those men did not wait for someone to "hand over" those dams or that railroad to them, they shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel and built them. Hoover dam is "male dominated", the transcontinental railroad is "male dominated" because men put their time, their work, their sweat, and their very bodies into building them. Everything that we see in the world today, from business to the military, that is "male dominated" is so because men died to build it.

That is both men's power and their powerlessness.

They shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel.

Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love

EOTM: Life

Human beings are part of the natural world. They are part of a group of a great many things that have a characteristic in common which we call life.

Life is a chain - an endless cycle of birth, growth, and death. Every individual living thing is part of a long genetic heritage and the purpose if it's life is to carry on that heritage, lest the species vanish from the earth. The purpose of an individual's life is create more life.

Life is not a static "thing" to be acquired in quantity, but an experience to be lived. That means living through all the cycles - birth, growth, and death. Each living thing has a cycle unique to its species.

Because the individual survival takes a back seat to species survival, the drive to reproduce supercedes all other drives. A great many species only mate once at the end of their lifecycle: salmon, moths and butterflies, and a great many insect species. All crops and fruits have a one year life cycle.

Those who see humans as apart from the natural world, cannot see the how the manifestations of the daily business of carrying on life fit into broad patterns. For those who do see these broad patterns, all of life makes perfect sense. It may not always be exactly the way we like it, but it makes sense.

I don't know whether humans can learn to adapt to a totally un-natural world. Sense gets surrendered to force of will or of argument. Without sense, the world turns into a very hostile place.

I don't know whether an understanding of the natural basis of life will be useful or adaptive in the future. Perhaps science will erase the distinction between humanity and machines. Perhaps people will get to design their own children.

I don't like the idea, but tides have a way of overcoming all resistance. Humanity more than ever before has the ability to choose its own future. I hope that wise choices get made. I am not optimistic.

Personally, I am glad that I lived in a time when neither air nor water could kill you. I am glad to have walked in a forest and seen different forms of life everywhere I looked and know that every one of them was a close cousin. We all had the same needs - food, shelter, the company of others of our kind. I am glad to have been able to tune in to a forest and understand it as a form of life that lives in very slooooowwwww time. A forest may take 200 years to twitch its finger, but it is every bit as much a living entity as a human being or a butterfly.

I hope that humanity does not lose track of what it is to be alive.

He who dies with the most toys - still dies.

There is far more to life than how many sport-utility vehicles you can buy - how much stuff you have. Humans are consuming the earth with how much stuff they have. We are stamping out other species at the rate of 17,000/yr in our relentless pursuit of stuff. As a culture, we are obese, addicted to television and the stuff it sells us, and glued to the couch. Life in a box.

The fracture between men and women is a war over stuff, over competition for the financial power to buy stuff. The fundamental cooperation between men and women to accomplish the tasks of staying alive and raising more of their kind, has been severed. I believe this is because humans have forgotten that they are alive and their role in the continuation of life.

As humans move into ever more un-natural and artificially constructed worlds, they may indeed diverge from other forms of life and cease to have anything in common with them. I see humanity becoming more like the borg every year.

What used to be thought of as family and community has been replaced by the marketplace. Both families and communities have been destroyed and the functions they formerly served have been "outsourced" at less cost. The family has succumbed to the market pressures of competition.

It will be some time before we really know whether modern technological civilization is a viable adaptation or not. I don't think it's going to be. There are simply too many people consuming too much. At some point we have to run out of things to consume. When that happens, life will change drastically.

But the fascinating thing about life is that it always does go on. Young people today are trying to sort out new roles for men and women from the rubble of the old roles which the boomers left as their legacy. Roles which were appropriate in a pre-technical agrarian environment are no longer appropriate in a marketplace dominated urban environment. Children, who used to be considered assets, are now an expense item. The duties to the children for the first 25 years or so have become so onerous that men and women are at each other's throats over who is going to carry the load. In a pre-techical society, kids began to contribute directly to the household before age 7. Now they tend to be a drain on their parents for at least 3X that long, often longer. The entire meaning of kids has changed. Now everything in the world is "for the children." Only, we now have a whole lot of children that nobody wants.

In her wonderful series about pre-technical culture, Jean Auel in "The Mammoth Hunters", has an old shaman saying that you can learn everything you need to know about life by observing for one year. Anyone with an agricultural background will understand that completely. The basic life cycle of nature is one year. Everything blooms about the same time every year, and everything gets harvested at the same time, year after year. There are some great patterns and timetables which dictate people's actions and choices. It takes a woman nine months to have a baby. You cannot get nine women together and get it done in one month.

I am not at all sure that humanity can long survive the generalized loss of this knowledge, because subjective fundamentalism always substitutes ego and the will to power for understanding and getting in line with natural processes and timetables.

I agree with the shaman that one can learn everything one NEEDS to know about life by watching a field of corn, for example, for one year and understanding the analogues of each part of the corn's life cycle in the human experience.

In the spring, the farmer tills and prepares the ground, the substrate from which the nourishment for the crop comes. This is analogous to the community, the values and skills of the parents, their choice of where to live and what it provides, and their social networks. A child will only grow well when planted in fertile ground.

Next the farmer plants the seed. You know what the analogue of that is.

The young plant sprouts, and sends its roots into the ground to draw nourishment. The plant becomes an analogue of the marriage, which has a male part, the tassel, and a female part, the ear and silks. But notice that the marriage is also an entity of itself. IT is what sinks the roots, not the male or female parts by themselves. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in "The Divorce Culture", speaks of the loss of "social capital" as social networks are torn apart by divorce. If the plant stays rooted in its initial spot, the roots grow deep and strong. If it is ripped out, chances are it will never grow enough of a root system to produce healthy fruit. Prior to a high level of geographic mobility, a child would have social networks built over many generations to draw upon as it started life. In many communities, the folk would help the marriage get a quick start on its root system by building the newlyweds a house and barn. More young men starting their "careers" have gotten a boost from old established friends of their parents and grandparents than have not.

Except in the cases of the very wealthy, geographic mobility severs the connection to long standing social networks. Divorce virtually always destroys access to half of the potential social capital of one of the social networks, almost always the father's.

Once the plant has a strong root system, it begins to bear fruit. The ripening of the female part, the ear and silks, brings out the male part, the tassel, with a fervor to fertilize that defines its very existence. For a few days it sheds massive amounts of pollen ( sperm ), on the order of millions of pollen grains per potential kernel of corn ( ova ), in an attempt to achieve its ONLY purpose - fertilization.

Once the sexual phase of the plant ( marriage ) has passed, all nutrition coming from the root system ( community ) is shunted to the offspring ( ear of corn kernels ) to make them as strong and vital as possible for their job next year of producing the next generation. The plant itself ( the marriage ) outlives the male and female parts, but not by much. All those parts are programmed to die once their job of carrying on the chain of life unbroken is done.
Next year, the cycle begins anew.

The modern world has nothing of the natural world in it. An understanding of life is only necessary to people for the purpose of understanding themselves. They no longer need to understand where their food and fiber comes from - there are people who specialize in bringing it to them and that is all they really need to know. More and more of what they need is being produced in factories anyway. Everything is highly processed these days. That is the only way the economy has been able to expand the numbers of jobs while the numbers it takes to produce most things have been falling for years.

As young people try to figure out new gender roles, economics takes precedence over life in the decision making. This has the makings of a very hard new world.

It makes me want to admonish people - remember, you are alive.

Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love

EOTM: The Warning Label: 90 degrees from everywhere and the language ain't pretty.

The gender dialogue has been entirely unbalanced since the 1960s. Men have been demonized, hated, and told to eradicate themselves. Opportunists of both sexes have jumped on the bandwagon of anti-male sentiment and misandry and have been incessant and extreme in their demands that men remodel themselves according to a new social ideal which amounts to nothing more than personal biases and self-centered ideology. Culturally, we have suffered greatly from a glut of worthless opinions and a severe shortage of worthwhile efforts.

Elsewhere on the web, you can find a site entitled "All Men Must Die". There is no link to it from here because I refuse to gratify this immature little harridan's ego any further by boosting the traffic to her site which promotes arrogant hatred and sexism. Nor will you find links to sites talking about the inevitability of "patriarchy", celebrating misogyny, or calling for the repeal of women's right to vote.

What you will find here is intense criticisms of a wide variety of ideologies which underlie the conflicts which have now been elevated to the status of war. You will find contrarian opinions which do my level best to make hamburger out of the sacred cows of both the Right and the Left. If I don't manage to seriously piss off at least one conservative and one liberal each day, I consider the day a total waste. On a good day I also manage to chap the asses of a moderate or two.

My language is plain spoken, blunt, and often profane. If that offends you, don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. A site called "All Men Must Die" is clearly a hate-motivated site, but is allowed to continue to promote its message of hate. I claim the same right to publicize my hatred of stupidity.

Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love

EOTM: Gender War, Sexuality, and Love - Overview

With all the thousands of books published on the topic of relationships, trying to say something meaningful, and hopefully new, about the topic in the context of the gender war seems nearly impossible. And trying to say it briefly or concisely or succinctly seems even more impossible. However, it is even still more impossible to sit idly by and say or do nothing.

As the 20th century draws to a close, it is hard to imagine a time when relationships between men and women have ever been worse. Sandy Close, writing for the Pacific News Service, quotes a veteran teacher in her article, "Gender War Among Youth -- At the Heart of America's Calamity", that among young people today - "Male-female relations these days aren't love-hate. They're pure hate."

Like World War I, which the naively optimistic called "The War to End ALL Wars", the gender war has become a trench war with the various sides dug in and surrounded by barbed wire. And, like that war, the frontier has moved very little in the past few years. (During the entire first World War, the frontier never advanced or retreated more than 7 miles.) But, unlike that war, this one has dragged on for 35 years. Two generations have been born, grown up, gone to college, and entered the cold hard world of adulthood while the war has dragged on. One almost has to wonder whether this gender war is going to become the "Hundred Years Gender War."

Like the American Civil War, and I suppose really like ALL civil wars, this one is tearing apart families, turning former friends and allies (like spouses) into bitter enemies, consuming a huge portion of the available resources, time, and energy of the citizens, and leaving nothing but bitter destruction and scorched earth in its wake. Marriages are more likely to fail than to succeed. Both sexes are talking about "reproductive independence" from the other. Young people of both sexes hate the other sex.

This isn't about equality. Equality has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Equality never has had anything to do with it.

It is about the intrusion of marketplace values into personal relationships, the purchase of love, and the devastating effects of inflation as the "price of love" has spiraled upward out of control. It is about how sex, love, and people have been turned into commodities and objects. And it is about the clash between socialism and capitalism in the realm of personal relationships.

And it is about hate.

It is about a small group of mentally and emotionally ill women who have been able to sell their personal hate-filled pathology as a universal cultural condition. It is about making women fear and distrust men and men fear and distrust women, more than they already had reason to.

It is about denial of real biological differences which do exist, at the same time it is about denial of the real nature of those differences.

It is about turning would-be allies into enemies, and majoring in minors to turn petty differences into war.

It is about a bunch of disgruntled would-be princesses throwing a fit because life isn't carrying them around on a satin pillow. And it is about men getting sick of dying and being sacrificed for trying to satisfy the aspiring princesses that these men are trying to love.

It is about distorting the entirety of human history which was not particularly kind to anyone, and was full of challenges to survival, and painting the strategies used to insure the survival of the greatest number of people in the revisionist light of victimism.

It is about insanity being sold as sanity.

It IS insanity.

eye of the mind [EOTM] is a male friendly, feminidiocy unfriendly, site dedicated to a real and constructive approaches to bringing an end to the gender war.

In the end, the future will boil down to the answers to two questions:

1) Just how much hate do women expect to be able to dump on men without men beginning to hate back - bitterly?

2) Are there enough women willing to stop hating, and start cooperating with men and taking a realistic look at the actions of women and how they directly contribute to the creation and perpetuation of the complaints of feminism, to turn back the tide of hate and make a difference?

You tell me.

EOTM: Gender War, Sexuality, and Love

Gender War
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Say the words "gender war"to someone these days and likely you will get one of two reactions. Either they will look at you like you have just said something totally incomprehensible, as most people would have before the 1990s, or they will launch into a personal perspective on the battle lines, battlegrounds, and battle tactics which they have observed from personal experience. With each passing day, more people move from the first category into the second as they somehow become a casualty of this incomprehensible war.

And war it certainly has become.The older term for the essential conflicts between the interests and needs of men and women - the more benign "Battle of the Sexes" - has taken a mean and ugly turn. A wedge has been driven right down the middle of the human race which deprives the combatants of the only solace available to them in all other wars: respite from hostilities in the presence, or the arms, of someone they love.

As with any war, propaganda is being used to demonize the enemy. Men and women, who should be the most natural of allies because they have so much to offer each other that they both need, are instead seeing their interests as being mutually exclusive, not interdependent and complementary. The tragedy of this is beyond words.The tragedy is human loneliness, and the scope is almost universal.

Men, in general, have been slow to respond to all the terrible charges leveled against them. There have been many reasons for this. Foremost among these has been the difficulty which men have had in believing that so much of womankind would turn so thoroughly and viciously against them. Twenty-five years ago, no one could have predicted that the entirety of human history would be completely re-written by the time that the newborns of the day graduated from college. Or that the actions and lives of so many men, great and obscure, would be stripped of every shred of human decency and generosity and distorted into a world-wide and history long conspiracy of and by men to do nasty things to women - called "Patriarchy."

Like observers of the events leading up to each of the world wars, there were many of us who expected sanity to re-enter the dialogue at any time and the hostility and hatred to cease rather than continue to grow. In the end, we turned out to be just as foolish and naïve as those who put off joining the world wars until forced to do so. By the time we realized that THEY had declared war on US, it was too late to avoid it and we were left with no choice but to fight for the basic rights and freedoms in which we believed.

This "barely civil" civil-war has fragmented our culture and balkanized interest groups in a way that will take years for us to recover - if we can recover at all. As soldiers who fought the Japanese in the early 1940s had a very difficult time later adjusting to the idea of Asians as friends and neighbors, those of us who have lived out our entire adult lives in the midst of this war will likely not be able to heal from the wounds it has caused and be able to see our former enemies as anything other than enemies.

Overview

The Warning Label: 90 degrees from everywhere and the language ain’t pretty.

Life

The Secret of Life: Shut Up and Shovel the Fuckin’ Gravel.

A Simple, Brief, Rationalist Alternative to Feminist Theory

The Nature of Things

In a Male Voice

Feminism Deconstructed – Nothing But a Hate Movement

Hard Analysis

Toward a Culture of Singleness

Confronting Matriarchy

How It All Fell Apart

Equal Time: Tales of Offensive and Obnoxious Women

The Lies: Propaganda Used to Demonize a Non-Existent “Enemy”

The Rocky Road to True Equality

Double-THINK, Double, Triple and Quadruple Messages

”Can’t We All Just Get Along?” “Can’t We Just Go On A Date?”

Boycott Man-Bashers

Male Anger

The Chain of Violence

Rape and Sexual Harassment: The Pearl Harbor of the Gender War

The Sexual Harassment Battlefield

Fair Fighting

Masculism, Not Me-Too-ism

The Opening Shot: The S.C.U.M. Manifesto

The Hate Mongers

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Presenting Feminism! A Coming Out

!!!!!!!!!!RAPE!!!!!!!!!!...

THE BITCH

Man Hating and Man Bashing

Radical Notions

The Feralization of Culture – Building Better Predators

Men, Are You Sick of It?

An Open Letter to Women

Turning Away from Women: Fish without Bicycles

Hate Bounces

Feminism Deconstructed - A Vast Social Deconstruction (Demolition) Project

False Premises, False Promises

The Ultimate Hypocrisy: An Alleged Movement for “Gender Equality” with a Gendered Name

The Nightmare of Feminism

Feminism in the Context of U.S. Social History, 1890-1999

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Sexuality and Relationships

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We live under many illusions about the nature of the world and relationships. There are a great many "shoulds" that many feel compelled to live up to. There is much made of the NEED for dishonesty and lies. All this is sadly untrue.

There are very few forums for a sane and healthy approach to sexuality. This wonderful net is filled with the commercial exploitation of unfilled sexual need. Anyone who stood back,without value judgements, and looked at the sheer volume of activity and $$$ spent would see the vast volume of it. Yet all that is "sold" here is the objectification of human beings. It is this objectification which is the disease of the industrial consuming society. Everything works best when everyone is an identical producing consuming consumed unit. Yet without individuality there is no passion.

Sexual Psychology – Part One – Working Class Heroes - Puberty

Sexual Psychology – Part Two – Puberty to 40

Sexual Psychology – Part Three – 40 to Closing Time

The Socio-Cultural Context of Sexuality and Marriage

The Biological Foundations of Sexuality

The Biological Context of Sexuality and Mating

Male Sexuality

The Nitty Gritty of Male Sexuality

Why Men Go For “The Look”

Female Sexuality

The Destruction of Little Girls’ Sexuality

Escape from the Dating Trap

The Rules are for Fools

Healing Men

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Love
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The question of love has been much discussed throughout history. Several of the viewpoints I express will, no doubt, offend some people. Yet, no matter how much one hears or reads about love, it is only in the actual loving that one gets love's rewards.Many think that they want to be loved, but being loved is something that happens from the outside. It can't be felt, so the lovee still feels empty.Love is really a verb, not a noun. The lover is filled with love. All major religions have this somewhere in their teachings. Sexuality is NOT love. Sexuality is sexuality. It is mother nature's little trick for making surethere are more little species running around. Sexuality is a need, a drive,a hunger, and as such is not under conscious control. Loving well is the achievement of a mature spirit, and while it may have its elements of lust (from luster - to shine), passion, it is always creative, never destructive. Being destructive in the name of love is sacriledge which merits burning at the stake.

Tribute to My Mother

Romantic Nonsense

Love, the real kind

The Art of Loving

The Law of Thelema

EOTM: The Goddess

The Goddess represents all that women are, might be, and hope to become: as the God represents the same things for men. When there were many gods and goddesses, each of them represented a separate face of what we have now come to call "the human condition". There was one for each of the best and worst, and the sometimes simply mundane, characteristics of women and men.

The many faces and incarnations of these beings, as well as the ease with which they could change shape or name, testified to a deep intuitive understanding of human nature which was passed from generation to generation by the oral tradition of myth and legend. Within each person lies the potential to be creative or destructive, as well as the potential to understand which of their acts contribute to creation and which to destruction. The process of social maturation is the gradual development of these abilities and the increasingly conscious choice applied to selecting one's own actions based on the probable consquences of that act.

For the past several hundred years the Goddess has been under siege. The empire that the Romans began and eventually spread to span the entire globe under the reign of their students, the British, set out to destroy her because she interfered with empire building. Now the the god, too, is under siege: for the same reasons and in the same manner.

In every woman dwells some of the goddess, as in every man dwells some of the god. As each child makes the torturous journey from helplessness and dependency to the responsibilities and freedoms of adulthood, the god and the goddess represent the collected wisdom gained by thousands of generations of observation of how people can and do act. In the stories called myth and legend are the lessons learned regarding how each action we choose affects the lives of others, what its consequences will likely be. Using these lessons we can apply the force of consciousness to creating the world we desire by selecting our acts based on what we wish to create.

Most religions of the common era have lost sight of this. As humanity has become more densely packed and often cannot tolerate the slow process of maturation, guidelines for action have become externalized in the form of rules or commandments. Over time, people stopped teaching the understanding of why one "should" or "should not" do a particular thing and substituted compliance for understanding. The goddess and the god were moved outside of each person. Without internalizing the divine, both the sacred and the profane aspects of it, humans remain eternal children: forever dependant on the understanding of others to inform their actions. Yet, when those they look to have not internalized it either, they place themselves in slavery to the power of other unmatured children who will pass along their own helplessness and dependency, but call it wisdom.

In the dark ages before the Renaissance, compliance was enforced by a reign of terror called "The Inquisition". Dark and angry children in grown-up bodies tortured and killed all who did not bow to their so-called "wisdom". Learning itself was considered dangerous and vigorous attempts were made to stamp it out. Heirs of an empire begun hundreds of years before sought to consolidate their power, all power, by destroying all who opposed it. Because their one and only god was male, they attempted to destroy and discredit the idea of the divine feminine. Millions died for refusing to accept the moral authority of these self-appointed masters.

Much of the world today still lives in the shadow of those murderous times. Colonialism spread across the globe, confiscating ancestral lands, destroying entire cultures, and wiping out entire peoples. By first separating themselves from the divine then claiming to understand and represent it exclusively, these empire builders have set themselves against life and become a cult which worships death. In their view there is no meaning in life except to prepare for death and what happens afterward. They worship death, not life.

The Goddess was gravely injured, but she did not die. Deep within millions of women she waited out the dark times until her wisdom was again needed to heal the world. The God, as well, came close to death because the divine was confiscated from all human beings to be placed in the hands of a parental figure. No human was allowed to look inside for answers. All answers were to come from outside ourselves: from the empire builders, the enslavers. Now those answers are failing completely, and women and men are turning back to the Goddess and God within themselves.

Marianne Williamson speaks of "glorious Queens" as opposed to "slave girls" in "A Woman's Worth" and Robert Bly speaks of the need to find and reclaim the "inner King" in "Iron John". The King and The Queen are the earthly manifestations of God and Goddess. They represent the highest level of spiritual achievement available to us mere mortals. Most people tend to think of kings and queens in terms of the power that they have over the "common folk". Those who think of it in those terms have it backwards. The only power a true king or queen has is the power of self-mastery and the realization that we all serve a power greater than ourselves. Whether this power be called by the name of some particular god or goddess, or simply by the name "life", only those who dedicate their lives to its service will be able to find meaning, and unity, and purpose in their lives. Those who master this find people compellingly drawn to them. Which is why those people make them into kings and queens.

Many current worshipers of the goddess have fallen into the same pattern as the old Inquisitors. Dark, angry, and twisted children; they hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him. Under the lie of "equality", they seek superiority, power, and mastery of everything except themselves. They have come to worship only one face of the goddess: the dark and destructive face of Kali: the destroying face of ”The Bitch”. Men, having lost the god within themselves, no longer understand how Shiva uses his own power to balance the power of Kali. Instead, they cave in and supplicate to her. As a result, all that is good in them gets burned away and they become empty of all goodness, all godness, within. Some come to worship the dark power as well, and resort to violence to save themselves.

These men, as well as the men who hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him, are fools: dangerous fools. As the goddess must remain strong to balance the destructive power of the dark faces of the god, so must the god remain strong to balance the dark and destructive faces of the goddess. When either grows too powerful, many die and are lost.

George Lucas gave us a modern day version of the myth about this eternal struggle. Luke-who-walks-the-sky battles Darth Vader: literally "Dark Father". Rage and hatred are very powerful forces. Women's claim that "women+rage = power" is the cry of wounded and angry children lost in the dark. Anything + rage = power: rage = power. But it is a destructive power, not a creative one. The hate-intoxicated zealots who worship the dark and destructive face of the goddess are as much to blame for her loss of respect as those who hate all her faces. Men and women alike need to reclaim the light faces of the goddess and the god as well as the dark: if we, their children are ever to be freed from the darkness to walk again in the light of love for each other.

The best all round site I know for the many aspects of the goddess is:

http://www.yoni.com/

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Further Reading:

The God

Male Sexuality

EOTM: The God

The god is under siege in most cultures around the world, particularly western culture. Fundamentalism, mistaking the finger for the stars that the finger is pointing to, mistaking the messenger for the message, has impoverished most religions. Now they function more as social controls than as a way of providing spiritual meaning to the day to day lives of human beings.

Humanity has been divided against sacredness, and against itself. People see themselves as separate from any sort of divinity, anything sacred. They are also totally estranged from nature. They see themselves as un-natural beings and, to a large extent, have become unnatural.

The penalty for this is that the ecosystem is being depleted and destroyed. We have been playing like spoiled children on this paradise planet that the creator has provided for us. We have been so ego-centric in our view of the creator that we regarded ourselves as the ultimate creation and aspired to be as gods ourselves. We believed that we were destined to have dominion over this earth and eventually control the very forces that create matter from energy. We have done all this, yet the cockroach will certainly outlive us as a species.

Every religion believes that it understands and worships a power that is above all other powers. This "above" includes the petty distinctions of the name to use and the method of worship. Yet they so humble their gods that they believe such a powerful being could care about such a small thing.

The sad truth is that "worship" or "faith" are used like "love" to cover up and justify unspeakable acts. One tribe who slaughters another to fulfill the will of their god apparently thinks their god is so puny that an earthquake or storm or plague or simple starvation is beyond their god's power.

No, unfortunately the truth is that often religion is simply one more power group competing for market share of the faithful and their tithes. All the dire consequences of not following the vocal messiah's preferred path are to intimidate people into compliance.

Modern Wicca has done much to salvage the concept of the sacred feminine. We all owe a major debt of gratitude to all the witches who burned and died, as well as those who survived to keep the traditions from being exterminated.

Yet we are still lacking in a deep understanding of the sacred masculine.

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Further Reading:

The Goddess

Male Sexuality

EOTM: The Goddess and The God of the Wicca

Each of the major religions of the world recognizes a duality in the divine. Dividing the darkness from the light of the judeo/christian bible, the yin & yang of eastern philosophies, many other examples. Because there is an inherent duality in humanity based on gender, it is easy and tempting to think of that divine duality as being male or female. Even more so, people tend to want to divide another duality, good vs evil, along gender lines. Thus we have seen created theologies in which the SACRED is either male or female, and the PROFANE is the other.

Wiccan theology recognizes that the sacred and the profane exist in everyone. There are dark and light sides to both male and female, just as there is to duct tape. How those dark and light sides get expressed is the work of the individual soul to decide. If you believe in Kharma, then you see that each soul gets to keep doing it wrong until it gets it right.

Unlike the arid theologies of the single male god at the top of a hierarchy, generated in the deserts of the middle east and carried worldwide by the european empire builders, pantheistic earth-based religions have always cast their deities in both genders. Mark Twain said it: "God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor." Since we cannot really imagine the infinite, we turn to what we know for an understanding. We turn to humans. All myths, all legends, have their roots in fact. The personalities these gods and near-gods (heros) exhibit are based on real people who at some point in history exhibited this personality. Humans still do today.

What Wicca offers is sacredness for both genders. There is a sacred masculine and a sacred feminine. Because they are both sacred, sexuality between them cannot be anything but sacred. It is the joining of these two energies which creates life. That's what we all worship: the creative force.

Of course, both genders also have a profane side, a destructive side. In myth and legend we have the stories of how this side has been expressed. When one gender demonizes the other they provide the perfect smokescreen for evil. Since they are good and the other bad, all their acts are "good" or justified. Thus real evil comes to be called by the name of good. A perfect example is the incredibly destructive things done by parents to children and lovers to each other in the name of love. As Luke Skywalker had to struggle with the dark side of the force, so must we all.

Inherent in the spiritual foundation of wicca is an equality between the genders. This is what has made it so attractive to feminists and those influenced by them. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to follow the trends set by worshippers of dead jews and elevate the sacred feminine above the sacred masculine or forget about the sacred masculine altogether.

Wicca is also known as the way of the wise. It is in this sense that I use it here. In that light there is no difference from the way of zen, which you will find elsewhere on these pages.

There is an old zen koan about the teacher who points to the stars and the student fixes on the finger. The teacher slaps him.

Often ritual, which is designed as grand theatre for the subconscious and intended to facilitate a spiritual experience, becomes bogged down in details and loses its meaning in the trappings. The colors of the altar candles become more important than the acts of the particpants before or after.

Let us focus back on the stars. Let us change our sense of time so that we begin thinking in terms of "deadlines" of a year and a day. Let us see the year as we now see 2 weeks and see that it certainly looks like "magic".

Let us all reclaim the sacredness of ourselves and all others.

Blessed be.

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Further Reading:

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The God

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The Goddess

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Male Sexuality

EOTM: Science & Technology: The New Gods

In their quest for power, humans have come to love technology and worship the god science. Science has given us the microwave, the micro-chip, and the micro-computer, courtesy of which you are now reading this.

However there are those of us who must ask whether all this worship of science and technology has enriched the lives of humanity or done anything to move us in the direction that the old gods created us to follow. We have stolen much power from the gods, and they are much the poorer and weaker for it. As humanity sought to become as gods through the application of technology, it forgot the most important power of the god: the power to create.

The major question for people to face themselves with today is whether they are willing to invest technology completely with godlike powers and let it dictate to them what they must do and be like. At its greatest extent of power technology cannot create life, the best it can do is copy it. And copy is what "society" seems determined to do. Change everyone into copies of everyone else.

Technology makes as bad a master as it does good a servant. The challenge of the 3rd millenium ce will be whether humanity surrenders and submits to the dominion of technology, thus creating the dead end for humanity and the thing we all cherish so much, our "intelligence", which is used to mean our consciousness and self-awareness.

We claim to be "intelligent" life, yet we let machines and their rigid inflexible needs dictate the leading of our lives. We have even "split" the nucleus of the nuclear family by destroying the male/female pair bond and the mechanics of attraction which bring them together.

Bad idea.

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Further Reading:

Philosophy & Theology: The Old Gods

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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.

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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.
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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.
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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

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EOTM: Creating the Future

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

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

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

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

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EOTM: The Environment

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

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

I'm tired of drowning in your shit.

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

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EOTM: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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

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EOTM: Visual Reality

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

The Human Race -

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

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

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

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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
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