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Empowering
Men:
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Sex, Lies & Feminism
by Peter Zohrab
Chapter 10: The Equality Lie
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1999 Version
1 Introduction
One of the biggest Feminist lies is the lie that Feminism is
about sexual/gender equality. When I was asked by Feminist radio
interviewer Kim Hill1
to define Feminism, for example, she was suprised that I didn't
accept that equality was a central concern of Feminism. I had
to explain to her that Feminists pick off individual issues and
define what they mean by "equality" with respect to those issues
in isolation from the total picture.
So even those Feminists who most people think of as working
towards sexual equality are actually working for selective
gender equality -- they themselves select the issues where they
think more sex equality is needed, and they also define what "equality"
would mean as far as those issues are concerned.
"Equality" is just a propaganda slogan for them. If they were
genuine about seeking equality, they would ask Masculist groups
to join in the process of deciding what "equality" would mean
for a particular issue. Then Masculists and Feminists together
could look at the whole of Society and draw up a master plan for
achieving sexual equality across the board.
Feminists play around quite a bit with words like "equity"
and "equality", but they seldom use them with any precise meaning.
What Feminists really think about the relative worth of men and
women only becomes clear when you catch them off-guard -- when
they think they are talking about something completely different.
Fran Wilde, a former Mayor of Wellington, New Zealand, is a
Feminist. In her mayoral election campaign, she even went so far
as to hold a public meeting on what it would mean to turn Wellington
into a Feminist city. On the morning after Anzac Day 1993, a public
holiday which is meant to honour New Zealand's war dead, she was
reported in the Dominion newspaper as follows:
"'Remembering men who died in war was important but it
was EQUALLY (my emphasis) important to recognise the
often-overlooked sacrifices and experiences of women,' Wellington
Mayor Fran Wilde said at yesterday's Anzac Day Service of Commemoration
at Wellington Cenotaph."
Her use of the word "equally" is astonishing, because about
1000 New Zealand men were killed in the Second World War, about
3000 were wounded, and about 2,000 were taken prisoner. We can
add to this number the thousands of men who were killed, wounded
or captured in the Boer War, the First World War, the Korean War,
the Vietnam War, and various United Nations peacekeeping operations.
To Fran Wilde, what these thousands of men went through was
"equally" balanced by a group of fifty nurses who went to serve
in the Middle East in the First World War -- plus one individual
woman who set up canteens and clubs for troops, and worked to
prevent venereal disease amongst the troops. The total number
of these 51 women who were captured, wounded or killed is precisely
zero.
I don't know much about mathematics, but I gather you are not
supposed to try to divide by zero. However, I assume that several
tens of thousands, divided by zero, is an even greater number
than several tens of thousands, divided by one. Therefore, in
Feminist Fran Wilde's view, one woman is equal in value or worth
to more than several tens of thousands of mere men. There you
have it: the Feminist view of sexual "equality" in a mathematical
formula.
1 woman > x,000 mere men
Any Masculist who is aware of Feminist oppression of men will
no doubt see that as a gross underestimate of the callousness
of Feminists towards the rights, interests and sufferings of men
-- but at least it gives some idea of the scale of the problem!
2 Liberal Masculism
The consequence of this Equality Lie is that sexual equality
has been going downhill fast. There is a huge Feminist research
and propaganda industry in western countries and in the United
Nations that has been unilaterally selecting issues, unilaterally
defining what they want done about them (often using "equality"
as a smokescreen), and then pushing these issues through to the
"solutions" that they desire. It is absolutely obvious to anyone
who spends any time thinking about this political process that
men, whose pressure groups have almost no input into it, are bound
to suffer an erosion of their rights across the board.
Some writers, such as Christina Hoff Sommers (1994: "Who
Stole Feminism ?" Simon and Schuster), make a distinction
between Feminists who are concerned with equality/equity and those
who aren't, but I think this is a somewhat artificial distinction.
In terms of their political tactics in democratic societies, Feminists
of whatever kind find it useful to invoke the words "equality"
and "equity". No Feminist, in my view, is actually committed
to producing overall sexual equality as an outcome.
A fair amount of confusion surrounds the words "equality" and
"equity" in the political arena. The word "equity" means something
like "fairness", and everyone is, or says they are, in favour
of fairness. The problem, in political theory, is deciding how
to decide what is fair or equitable.
That is where the word "equality" comes in. The idea here,
of course (in Western political thought) has been that the ultimate,
and possibly only way to be sure of producing
an equitable state of affairs is to produce an
equal state of affairs between the parties that
are involved in the political situation that you're discussing.
Gail Tulloch (1989: "Mill and Sexual Equality" Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf) draws attention to the difficulty
of being clear about what we mean by "equality":
"Equality itself ... is an incomplete predicate....equality
is a relational concept and must be based on a common attribute.
A plank may be larger than a piece of cake. A dog and a cat
are different, but not thereby unequal. It is hard even to pose
the question whether a cat and a rose bush are equal. The only
kind of sense that could be given to such a speculation is to
imagine a situation where my cat is persistently using my prize
rose bush as a scratching-post and progressively ring-barking
it in the process. But here I am not really asking whether the
two are equal, and trying to decide the issue that way; rather,
I am sorting out my priorities, in terms of the relative importance
to me of the two items, on a scale of belovedeness -- perhaps
to decide which stays and which goes." (op.cit.,181).
"A plank may be larger than a piece of cake" she writes, but
(she implies) we never ask if a plank and a piece of cake are
EQUAL. WHY don't we ever ask whether a plank and a piece of cake
are equal ? Tulloch obviously implies that the reason for this
is that they don't share any common attribute. Equality is a relationship
between two or more entities, and there is no relevant attribute
or parameter (Tulloch believes), in respect of which a plank and
a piece of cake enter into any sort of relationship.
But is this actually true ? Well, no ! In terms of PRICE, for
example, we can sensibly ask whether the price of a plank is equal
to, greater than, or less than the price of a piece of cake. Economics
is a great leveller. And likewise for the parameters of length,
height, weight, volume, mass, weight, density, sugar-content,
combustibility, buoyancy, rigidity, conductivity, and so on and
so forth. We can quite sensibly ask if a plank and a piece of
cake are equal with respect to these criteria.
However, we still have to explain why Tulloch chose a plank
and a piece of cake, however wrongly, as as an example of non-comparable
items. The likelihood is that Tulloch -- like most people, no
doubt -- sees the FUNCTIONS of a piece of cake and a plank in
human society as so distinct that the idea that they had any common
attributes did not even occur to her.
So here's the point: politically speaking, we only think of
raising the issue of EQUALITY when the functions of the entities
to be compared are sufficiently similar. So, if we want to compare
men and women, as Feminists always do, then we FIRST have to ask
whether the functions of men and women are sufficiently similar
for this to be a relevant exercise. I am not saying that it would
be impossible to compare them if their functions were too dissimilar.
But, as with the plank and the piece of cake, the point is that
it would not be particularly relevant to compare them if their
functions were too dissimilar.
This is actually the core of the "paradigm-shift" that Feminism
has meant for human history: The pre-Feminist or non-Feminist
position is/was, on the whole, that the functions of men and women
are and should be distinct, so that the question of equality is
not really relevant. The Feminist position, of course, has always
been that the functions of men and women should be more or less
identical, and that they should be treated equally while carrying
out these identical functions.
This explains the paradox of the wartime strength of the Feminist
movement. I personally would have expected that the much greater
dangers and sufferings that men (as opposed to women) experienced
in wartime would weaken the moral position of Feminists seeking
"equality". In reality, the fact that women are called on to assume
the occupational roles vacated by male military conscripts or
volunteers makes the functions of men and women in society seem
(however temporarily) much more similar, and so the notion of
equality becomes more apparently relevant.
So the core question is whether the functions of women and
men in Society can ever be identical, so that true equality between
men and women can really be established. I think some Feminists
are actually trying to bring about that identity of roles, by
trying to produce unisex, or multi-gender societies. Liberal Masculism
would be in general agreement with the motives underlying this
agenda -- if (and this is a big "if") men were
given equal input into the processes of sexual politics. Otherwise,
men and women would end up with identical roles -- except that
men's roles would be allowed to retain some intrinsic burdens
which women didn't want to take on.
3 Conservative Masculism
Here is a contrasting view of sexual equality:
"... courts cannot treat women in the same way that they
do racial minorities. ... government may not provide different
treatment or facilities to the races.... No such rule can be
framed with respect to men and women, because our society feels
very strongly that relevant differences exist and should be
respected by government. To take the most obvious examples,
no city could constitutionally provide separate toilet facilities
for whites and blacks but certainly may do so for men and women.
Similarly, the armed forces could not exempt one racial group
from combat duty but surely may keep women from combat"
(Bork 1990, 329).
The relationship between the sexes is significantly different
from the relationship between the various social and racial groups
that the model of "equality" was first applied to, in campaigns
to end slavery, for example: men and women, after all, enter into
the one and only primary relationship that is essential to the
preservation of our species. There is mutual dependency involved
in this relationship. In addition, there are physical differences
between men and women, which make their sexual roles different,
and which impact on laws relating to such issues as rape.
One of the chief goals of any society is to ensure its own
future survival through successful procreation and upbringing
of offspring. This is usually achieved through cooperation and
interdependence between the sexes. Medical technology will perhaps
eventually change this scenario significantly, but it is perhaps
too soon to speculate on the exact ramifications of such a change.
This interdependence complicates the attempt by Feminists to apply
the "equality" model to male-female relationships. If two people,
or groups of people, are cooperating and have complementary (rather
than identical) roles, is equality necessarily meaningful -- let
alone appropriate or desirable? In that case, shouldn't
societies try to work out some criterion of equity
that was not based on equality ?
Moral pressure is often exerted on women by Feminists, in order
to make them feel that they OUGHT to want to match men in their
traditional roles. This goes under the euphemistic name of Consciousness-Raising.
Women are encouraged to enter traditionally male-only occupations,
for example -- even when these occupations are manual, low-status,
and lowly-paid! Many men do, of course, think that their
traditional role of breadwinner is somehow more important (to
them, anyway) than women's traditional role. Men are also taught
("brainwashed", if you like) to believe this from the cradle,
because the male role involves certain sacrifices and disadavantages
(e.g. lower life expectancy, risk-taking, machismo, chivalry,
liability to be conscripted in wartime) that men might not be
willing to agree to if there were no compensations in the form
of higher status -- or apparently higher status.
Women, conversely, have a traditionally quiet(er) sense of
their own superiority to men, and this ideology enables them to
face the different sacrifices and disadvantages that the woman's
traditional role demands. Feminists have adopted the male ideology
as "God's Truth", and this role-confusion, or penis-envy, perhaps,
is the true cause and origin of Feminism. Many of the main Feminist
writers have been practising Lesbians or bisexuals, so this may
explain the role-confusion.
However, this does not prove that Feminists were necessarily
wrong to make this switch. Objective factors, such as improved
contraception and labour-saving devices in the home, have meant
that it now made more sense for parts of the traditional male
role to be made available to women than it did previously.
Sexual dimorphism (males having different physical characteristics
from females) is very common in living organisms that reproduce
sexually. Sometimes dimorphism is supplemented or replaced by
non-visual cues, such as smell, etc., or by gender-specific behaviours.
Obviously, it would be very inefficient, from the point of view
of the survival of a given species, if the members of the species
found it hard to tell apart the males from the females.
It seems that gender roles, in humans, help to distinguish
men from women. This is not to say that the species would entirely
fail to reproduce if male and female roles became identical, of
course, as long as other cues, including clothing, cosmetics,
hair-styles, voice-pitch, etc. still carried out that role. And
there may even be people who are so worried by over-population
as to propose to limit human reproduction by such social engineering
methods as encouraging unisex clothing, unisex occupations, and
so on. Feminists, however, seem to think it sufficient to state
that male and female roles COULD be made identical. They then
go on to write/talk as if the fact that they could be made identical
proves that they SHOULD be made identical. Again, the hidden assumption
seems to be that men's and women's roles could not be equal unless
they were identical.
For Alexander, the key issue seems to be freedom of choice:
"... women's place in life has in the past limited their
opportunities for achievement, both intellectually and creatively.
Responsibility for childbearing and household management left
little time for most women to fulfil their intellectual and
creative urges. And if civilization has been poorer because
of this, it has also been poorer because men, too, have been
forced to play a stereotyped role that leaves part of their
humanity undeveloped." (Alexander: "A Woman's Place?" Hove:Wayland,
1983, p.17)
As usual, there are many unexplained assumptions hidden in
this typical piece of Feminist complaining. What proportion of
the female population, in fact, normally experiences strong "intellectual
and creative urges" ? I would think that this is an issue only
for a small, but articulate, proportion of the middle class.
And do the types of responsibilities that men traditionally
shoulder give them more time than women to fulfil any intellectual
or creative urges that they might have ? In truth, many women,
including Feminist writers, have the time to become writers, or
whatever, PRECISELY BECAUSE they have relatively undemanding,
even parasitic housewife-roles which, thanks to labour-saving
devices, leave them plenty of time for activities which their
exploited husbands, caught in the rat-race, could not afford to
indulge in to anything near the same extent. If these women had
full-time jobs, they might not have the time to write books about
how sorry they felt for themselves.
It is not at all obvious that civilisation has suffered at
all from the fact that many women have been cooking, cleaning,
and caring for children, when they might have been down the coal-mines
getting dirty faces with the men. The Feminist reasoning here
is (as usual) very unclear. Does civilization benefit more from
coal-mining than from child-rearing ? That would be a very difficult
question to resolve, one way or the other !
And if more men, instead of women, were doing the domestic
chores and raising children, wouldn't this also "deprive" civilization
of these men's creative and intellectual talents ? And if this
allowed these men to "develop part of their humanity" that would
otherwise be undeveloped, wouldn't this also mean that the women
who had replaced them in the workforce were now thereby deprived
of this valuable part of their humanity ? Anyone who was convinced
by these sorts of Feminist arguments would have to be extremely
gullible -- or extremely henpecked. Unfortunately, many men are
both gullible and henpecked.
There are definite differences between men and women, as Tiger
(1970) points out, which will probably never disappear naturally.
For example, the New Zealand Police Force (like many others, no
doubt) has long had physical standards which prospective recruits
have had to measure up to. Female recruits are not compelled to
meet the high physical standards that men do -- yet there has
been no outcry from Feminists demanding equality in this area
!
The Police even went to the lengths of camouflaging this sexual
discrimination, in order to comply with the letter -- rather than
the spirit -- of Human Rights legislation. Basing the pass-marks
of male and female recruits directly on their performances in
physical tests would have involved separate standards for men
and women, in order to make sure that at least some women passed.
So the pass-marks were based on the same number of points for
both men and women -- but women had to meet lower standards to
achieve a given number of points than men did ! This is double-talk
of Orwellian proportions.
Then there are the sexual hormones, such as testosterone, which
causes assertiveness and aggression in both primates and humans.
Even before puberty, boys have more testosterone then girls --
but after puberty the difference in testosterone levels between
the sexes is dramatic.
Furthermore, there are the different average rates of maturation
between girls and boys -- in both humans and primates. Indeed,
some male primates take twice as long to reach maturity as do
females of the same species. These differences in human maturity
are measurable, and they are constant across human cultures.
In addition, there is objective evidence that women smile more
than men. Sex differences of this kind appear even in infants
as young as two days old. Some scholars take smiling to be a sign
of submissiveness. They therefore conclude that women are genetically
programmed to defer to men. Whether or not this is true, it does
not make the female role inferior: if avoidance of confrontation
is one reason that women live longer than men, then it should
perhaps be considered to be a superior strategy.
Finally, there is menstruation, which Feminists try to gloss
over as much as possible. Reporting on the research of Katherina
Dalton, Tiger (1970, p. 212) writes:
"...roughly 40 per cent of women suffer from a variety
of distressing symptoms during the final week or so of the menstrual
cycle (other researchers see a higher figure).... 46 per cent
of the female admissions (to mental hospital) occured during
the seven or eight days preceding and during menstruation; at
this time, too, 53 per cent of attempted suicides by females
occurred.... 45 per cent of industrial employees who reported
sick did so during this period; 49 per cent of crimes committed
by women prisoners happened at this time and so did 45 per cent
of the punishments meted out to schoolgirls.... schoolgirls
who were prefects and monitors doled out significantly greater
numbers of punishments to others during the menstrual period,
and she raises the question of whether or not this is also true
of women magistrates, teachers and other figures in authority."
It is evident that men and women are not identical. Therefore
we can not measure in any straightforward way whether or not they
are "equal" to each other at any given time and place. A value-judgement
must be made by Society as to the appropriate equivalences between
men and women in those areas where men and women differ most fundamentally.
In other words, we must strive for equity, instead of for equality.
A certain amount of complementarity of roles between the sexes
must inevitably be accepted.
4. Conclusion
The Men's Movement requires that this issue be discussed in
the open. Sweeping it under the carpet allows the Feminists, who
largely control the Sex War agenda, to switch between various
implicit notions of equality, according to what best suits their
political purpose at any given time. And this is often to the
detriment of men, children, and Society.
A Sexual Contract needs to be negotiated between Masculists
and Feminists, as a part of which a notion of "equity" would have
to be agreed to. This might or might not be based on an actual
"equality" between men and women, though the factors listed above
make that unlikely. In the absence of actual equality and identity
between the roles of men and women, there would have to be trade-offs
between the relative advantages of the male and female roles --
as used to exist in Western societies in the past, and as still
exist in many parts of the world even now.
2002 Version
CHAPTER 9
THE EQUALITY LIE
Introduction
One of the biggest lies of the Feminists is that they stand
for equality. So successful have they been, and so widely accepted
is this lie, that they are shocked whenever anybody defies the
conventional wisdom to point out that their too-loud declaration
is as naked of truth as the emperor who had no clothes.
When Feminist radio interviewer Kim Hill asked me to define
Feminism, for instance, she was surprised when I stated that equality
is not one of their central concerns: they take individual issues
and define what they mean by "equality" with respect
to those issues in isolation from everything else.1
For example, as we have seen, Feminists demand the same amount
of prize-money for women tennis players as men get, all the while
ignoring how women already make more per game than men. Or, for
that matter, how tennis should be integrated the same way other
fields are. Let's put an end to this "separate but equal
except when it suits us" nonsense. Another example is how
women got the privilege of voting without the obligation of conscription
into the armed forces. Or how Feminists got the abortion laws
liberalised, but only for mothers. Fathers have no choice, just
the obligation to pay child-support for non-aborted children !
So what Feminists are really working toward is selective gender
equality – they select the issues, define what "equality"
means then dictate the agenda. What this proves is that "equality"
is little more than a buzzword for them: a banner under which
they rally the troops and baffle their quarry. Were they genuinely
concerned about it, they would invite Masculist groups to join
them in a coalition to choose the issues, determine the standards
and work together to establish real gender equality.
The equality lie
Feminist play fast and loose with words like "equity"
and "equality," but seldom with precise meaning. What
they really think about the relative worth of men and women only
becomes clear when you catch them off-guard – when they
think they are talking about something else.
Fran Wilde, a former Mayor of Wellington, New Zealand, is a
Feminist. In her mayoral election campaign she even went so far
as to hold a public meeting on what it would mean to turn Wellington
into a Feminist city. According to a report in the Dominion newspaper,
at the Anzac Day Service of Commemoration (a public holiday intended
to honour New Zealand's war dead) held at the Wellington Cenotaph,
she said:
“Remembering men who died in war was important but it
was equally (my emphasis) important to recognise the often-overlooked
sacrifices and experiences of women.”
Her use of the word "equally" is astonishing, because
about 1000 New Zealand men were killed in the Second World War,
about 3000 were wounded, and about 2,000 were taken prisoner.
We can add to this number the thousands of men who were killed,
wounded or captured in the Boer War, the First World War, the
Korean War, the Vietnam War, and various United Nations peacekeeping
operations. To Fran Wilde, what these thousands of men went through
was "equally" balanced by a group of fifty nurses who
went to serve in the Middle East in the First World War –
plus one woman who set up canteens and clubs for troops and worked
to prevent venereal disease amongst the troops. The total number
of these 51 New Zealand women who were captured, wounded or killed
is precisely zero. In addition, most of the men involved were
conscripted against their will by governments that had been elected
by a female-majority electorate !
Admirable though the women's work was, most of us would agree
zero women dead is a smaller number than several thousand men
dead. Evidently, however, Feminist maths disagrees. In their ideology,
the work of 51 women is worth as much as work and deaths of thousands
of men. And there you have the Feminist view of sexual "equality"
in a mathematical formula:
The deaths of thousands of men equal a mere lifestyle inconvenience
to 51 women.
Any Masculist who is aware of Feminist oppression of men will
no doubt see this as a gross underestimate of Feminist disregard
for the rights, interests and sacrifices of men – but at
least it gives us some idea of the scale of the problem!
One long-term result of Fran Wilde's meeting on making Wellington
a Feminist city, by the way, seems to have been the subsequent
implementation of penis-envy as civic policy: male-only and female-only
toilets were abolished, in favour of unisex ones. The Feminists
behind this move appear to hate urinals, because women have no
use for them, and because they are a solid reminder of men's and
women's undeniable anatomical difference, which flies in the face
of the Lesbian Feminist drive to make everyone as unisex and androgynous
as possible. Feminists in Sweden have been mounting an explicit
campaign against urinals, whereas in Wellington one can only speculate
as to the underlying agenda behind an otherwise inexplicable change.
Liberal Masculism
There is a huge Feminist research and propaganda industry in western
countries and the United Nations (e.g., Women's Studies departments,
Ministries of Women's Affairs, the American Association of University
Women, the National Organization for Women, Ms. magazine, etc.),
which, under the deceptively appealing cloak of "equality"
has flooded the political landscape with issues they have unilaterally
selected, defined and "solved." Because they allow men's
pressure groups no input into this political process, men's rights
are eroding. For example:
1.men's rights in the family (divorce, separation, custody,
access, matrimonial property, paternity, etc.);
2.men's rights in the workplace (sexual harassment, equal employment
opportunities, affirmative action, etc.);
3.men's right to life and health (longevity, spending on men's
health, circumcision, conscription, etc.);
4.men's legal rights (the invention of still more male-only crimes
and still more female-only excuses – "syndromes"
– for crimes, the decriminalisation of any predominantly
female crimes, and increases in the present penalties for male-only
crimes).
The sky is the limit, as far as Feminist-inspired change is
concerned. The only real limit is the inventiveness of Feminist
researchers. It could get even worse, which is why I am happy
when we manage to slow down or stop the Feminist juggernaut -
never mind turning it around !
On the health front, New Zealand government funding is provided
for cervical cancer screening and breast cancer screening, but
not for prostate cancer screening (or testicular cancer screening,
for that matter). The excuse given for this apparent discrimination
is that prostate cancer screening is less reliable, but scandals
about errors in cervical cancer and breast cancer screening keep
cropping up, so it's obvious that those procedures are not reliable,
either. Waiting-lists for surgery for male diseases are probably
allowed to grow longer than those for female diseases. For example,
General Practitioner Russell Pridgeon was quoted in the Dominion
newspaper of 20 April 2001 as saying that:
“...18-month waiting lists for men needing prostate surgery
at Invercargill's Southland Hospital in 1991 would never have
been allowed to occur if the patients had been women.”
Some writers, such as Christina Hoff Sommers (1994: Who Stole
Feminism?, Simon and Schuster), make a distinction between Feminists
who are concerned with equality/equity and those who aren't, but
I think this is an artificial distinction. In terms of their political
tactics in democratic societies, Feminists of whatever kind find
it useful to invoke the words "equality" and "equity."
No Feminist, in practice, is actually aiming to producing overall
sexual equality.
By this I mean that no Feminist has ever proposed convening
a conference of men's activists and women's activists for the
stated purpose of hearing all points of view and arriving at a
solution which would provide equality across the board from everyone's
point of view. For example, at a New Zealand law conference Canadian
law professor Sheilah Martin proposed there should be a treaty
between men and women. Via email I suggested to her that Men's
Rights groups should be represented at any such conference. She
sidestepped the issue, saying what she had in mind were treaties
like countries such as Canada and New Zealand have with their
pre-European minorities, with women playing the role of minority
class.
Such treaties typically involve the government (which the minority
help elect) on one side and the designated minority on the other.
In Martin's proposal, this would take the form of a treaty between
the government (elected mostly by the female majority) on the
one side and Feminist groups on the other, with no representation
for men's or fathers' groups. In other words, the constitutional
equivalent of a kangaroo court, as are most bodies that are set
up at the instigation of Feminists.
A fair amount of confusion surrounds the words "equality"
and "equity" in the political arena. The word "equity"
means something like "fairness," and everyone is or
says they are in favour of fairness. The problem, in political
theory, is choosing the standard by which we decide what is fair
or equitable. That is where the word "equality" comes
in. The idea in western political thought is that the ultimate
and possibly only way to be sure of producing an equitable state
of affairs is to produce an equal state of affairs between all
parties involved. Gail Tulloch (1989: Mill and Sexual Equality,
Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf) draws attention to the
difficulty of being clear about what we mean by "equality":
"Equality itself ... is an incomplete predicate....equality
is a relational concept and must be based on a common attribute.
A plank may be larger than a piece of cake. A dog and a cat are
different, but not thereby unequal. It is hard even to pose the
question whether a cat and a rose bush are equal. The only kind
of sense that could be given to such a speculation is to imagine
a situation where my cat is persistently using my prize rose bush
as a scratching-post and progressively ring-barking it in the
process. But here I am not really asking whether the two are equal,
and trying to decide the issue that way; rather, I am sorting
out my priorities, in terms of the relative importance to me of
the two items, on a scale of belovedeness – perhaps to decide
which stays and which goes." (op.cit.,181).
"A plank may be larger than a piece of cake" she writes,
but (she implies) we never ask if a plank and a piece of cake
are equal. Why? Tulloch implies the reason is they don't share
any common attribute. Equality is a relationship between two or
more entities, and there is no relevant attribute or parameter
(Tulloch believes) in respect to whether a plank and a piece of
cake enter into any sort of relationship. But is this actually
true? No. In terms of price (relative value), for example, we
can sensibly ask whether the price of a plank is equal to, greater
than, or less than the price of a piece of cake. Economics is
a great leveler. Likewise for the parameters of length, height,
weight, volume, mass, density, sugar-content, combustibility,
buoyancy, rigidity, conductivity, and so on. We can quite sensibly
ask if a plank and a piece of cake are equal with respect to these
criteria.
However, we still have to explain why Tulloch chose a plank
and a piece of cake, no matter how incorrectly, as an example
of non-comparable items. The likelihood is Tulloch – like
most people, no doubt – sees the functions of a piece of
cake and a plank in human society as so distinct that the idea
they have any common attributes did not occur to her. The political
point is, the issue of equality is relevant only when the functions
of what we are comparing are similar. If we want to compare men
and women, as Feminists always do, then the first thing we have
to ask is whether the functions of men and women are sufficiently
similar. I am not suggesting it would be impossible to compare
them if their functions were too dissimilar. But, as with the
plank and the piece of cake, it would not be particularly relevant
to compare them if their functions were too dissimilar.
This is the core of the paradigm shift Feminism has meant to
human history: the pre-Feminist or non-Feminist position was that,
on the whole, the functions of men and women are and should be
distinct, hence the question of equality is irrelevant. The Feminist
position, of course, has always been that the functions of men
and women should be more or less identical and they should be
treated equally while carrying out these identical functions.
This explains the paradox of the wartime strength of the Feminist
movement. The fact that society called upon women to assume the
occupational roles vacated by male military conscripts or volunteers
makes the functions of men and women in society seem (however
temporarily) much more similar, hence the notion of equality becomes
more apparently relevant. This despite the fact that virtually
only men were having to sacrifice their lives in the front-line
!
So the core question is whether the functions of women and men
in society can ever be identical, such that true equality between
men and women can be established. Some Feminists are striving
toward this goal by trying to produce unisex, or multi-gendered
societies. Liberal Masculism would be in general agreement with
the motives underlying this agenda if (and this is a big "if")
men were given equal input into the processes of sexual politics.
Otherwise, men and women will end up with identical roles -- except
that men's roles would retain those burdens which women don't
want.
Conservative Masculism
While Conservative Masculists do not flatly reject the idea of
equality, they give higher priority to equity, because the relationship
between the sexes is significantly different from the relationship
between the various social and racial groups that the model of
"equality" was first applied to:
"(C)ourts cannot treat women in the same way that they
do racial minorities. ... government may not provide different
treatment or facilities to the races.... No such rule can be framed
with respect to men and women, because our society feels very
strongly that relevant differences exist and should be respected
by government. To take the most obvious examples, no city could
constitutionally provide separate toilet facilities for whites
and blacks but certainly may do so for men and women. Similarly,
the armed forces could not exempt one racial group from combat
duty but surely may keep women from combat." (Bork 1990,329)
Men and women, after all, enter into the one and only primary
relationship that is essential to the preservation of our species.
It is a mutually dependent relationship. In addition, there are
physical differences between men and women which make their sexual
roles different, and which impact laws on such issues as rape
(see the chapter on rape).
One of the chief goals of any society is to assure its own survival
through successful procreation and upbringing of offspring. This
is usually achieved through cooperation and interdependence of
the sexes. Medical technology will eventually offer other significant
options, but it is perhaps too soon to speculate on the exact
ramifications of such changes.
Technological options notwithstanding, this interdependence
complicates the Feminist attempt to apply their "equality"
model to male-female relationships. Simply put, if distinct groups
must cooperate and by nature have complementary (rather than identical)
roles, is equality necessarily meaningful – let alone appropriate
or desirable? If not, should we work out some criterion of equity
based on something other than equality – such as "equivalent
rights and responsibilities"? (Van Mechelen, 1993, www.backlash.com/book/light.html)
Sexual dimorphism
Feminists often pressure women by telling them they ought to want
to supersede traditional female roles. This consciousness-raising
takes place at/in Feminist meetings and women's studies courses,
movies and television shows, and magazine and newspaper editorials.
They encourage women to enter traditionally male-only occupations,
even when these occupations are manual and low pay and status.
Many men, of course, agree that the work formerly reserved for
men is somehow more important than women's. Indeed, many men are
taught (brainwashed?) to believe this from the cradle, because
many aspects of the male role involve certain sacrifices and disadvantages
(e.g., lower life expectancy, risk-taking, machismo, chivalry,
military conscription) that men might not be willing to accept
were there no compensations in the form of (apparently) higher
status.
Traditionally, women had a quieter sense of their own superiority
to men which enabled them to face the different sacrifices and
disadvantages their traditional role demands. Feminists, however,
seem to believe women's traditional role is inferior, and this
role-confusion (penis envy?) is the true cause and origin of Feminism.
Many of their foremost writers, beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft,
have been practising lesbians or bisexuals, so this may explain
the role-confusion. (Camille Paglia, a prominent bisexual anti-Feminist
may be the exception that proves the rule. She may call herself
a "Feminist", but that is almost compulsory for American
women nowadays, and doesn't actually mean anything.)
This does not prove Feminists were necessarily wrong; since
objective factors, such as improved contraception and labour-saving
devices in the home, have meant that it now makes sense for women
to assume parts of the traditional male role. But how far should
this blurring of the boundaries between gender roles go? Sexual
dimorphism may provide the answer.
Sexual dimorphism (males having different physical characteristics
from females) is common among living organisms that reproduce
sexually. Sometimes dimorphism is supplemented or replaced by
non-visual cues, such as smell, etc., or by gender-specific behaviours.
Obviously, it would be very inefficient, from the point of view
of the survival of a given species, if members of a species found
it difficult to distinguish the males from the females.
Among humans, gender roles help distinguish men from women.
I do not mean to suggest we would become extinct if male and female
roles became identical, as long as other cues, such as clothing,
cosmetics, hair-styles, voice-pitch, etc., remained. Ironically,
some people are so worried by over-population they might advocate
discarding all gender distinctions as a means for limiting human
reproduction. Feminists, however, seem to think it sufficient
to state that male and female roles could be made identical. They
then write/talk as if the fact that they could be made identical
proves we should make them identical. Again, their hidden assumption
seems to be that men's and women's roles could not be equal unless
they were identical. For Alexander, the key issue is freedom of
choice:
"(W)omen's place in life has in the past limited their
opportunities for achievement, both intellectually and creatively.
Responsibility for childbearing and household management left
little time for most women to fulfill their intellectual and creative
urges. And if civilization has been poorer because of this, it
has also been poorer because men, too, have been forced to play
a stereotyped role that leaves part of their humanity undeveloped."
(Alexander: A Woman's Place?, Hove:Wayland, 1983, p.17)
As usual, there are many hidden assumptions in this typical
piece of Feminist complaining. What proportion of the female population
normally experiences strong "intellectual and creative urges"?
I would think this an issue only for a small but articulate proportion
of the middle class.
Moreover, do the types of responsibilities men traditionally
shoulder give them more time than women to fulfill any intellectual
or creative urges? In truth, many women, including Feminist writers,
have the time to fulfill their dreams precisely because they have
relatively undemanding, sometimes even parasitic housewife-roles
which, thanks to labour-saving devices, the Pill and working husbands,
leave them plenty of time for activities which their exploited
husbands, caught in the rat-race, cannot afford to indulge in.
If these women had demanding full-time jobs, how much time would
they have to write books about how sorry they feel for themselves?
Feminist laments, such as Betty Friedan's "The Feminine
Mystique", which complains about the problems of being a
suburban housewife, are comparable to the whining of a spoiled
child. Particularly when compared to what men have endured in
two World Wars and other regional and civil wars. Feminism epitomizes
the generalisation that people who rise up in revolt are often
already very privileged! Female TV news anchors, for example,
frequently gloss over fatal male casualties in theatres of war
to concentrate on what to them are the much more horrific cases
of non-fatal rape that occur in such environments. When conflict
is reported in news broadcasts, there is usually some reference
to how many women and children were among the casualties. Why
should women be singled out – are their lives worth more
than those of men ?
Women in the West complain about how "oppressed" they
are, blithely dismiss any problems men may encounter, and expect
us to care? Why should we? How has civilisation suffered from
the fact that many women have been cooking, cleaning, and caring
for children when they might have been in coal-mines getting dirty
faces with the men ? Feminists have no compelling answers. Does
civilization benefit more from coal-mining than from child-rearing?
Do Feminists really care? Is their agenda really about what's
ultimately better for society, or is there something else?
Usually the Feminists' focus is on making women independent
of men through jobs and child care. Why would they want to make
women independent of men? The typical response of extreme Feminists
is that men rape and abuse their wives and girlfriends. But this
is not supported by the facts, as I explain in other chapters.
So what is the real reason? Feminist ideologues have not liked
men at the personal, or sexual level, and all their hate-propaganda
is merely a projection of their psycho-sexual orientation.
Feminist misandry aside, if more men were doing the domestic
chores and raising children, wouldn't civilization be "poorer"
for being deprived of men's creative and intellectual talents?
And if this allowed these men to "develop part of their humanity"
that would otherwise be undeveloped, wouldn't this also mean the
women who replace them in the workforce would then be deprived
of this valuable part of their humanity? Any man who is persuaded
by such Feminist arguments would have to be extremely gullible,
henpecked or sexually needy. Unfortunately, many men are all three.
Women tend to try to "marry up" (in socio-economic
terms). But because so many women now have good jobs, they are
finding it harder to find a man to marry up to. That is, the demand
for relatively high-status, high-income men is outstripping supply.
When the demand for a thing goes up relative to supply, the price
per unit of that thing follows. In the context of sex, this means
women try harder to make themselves ever more sexually appealing
to get the attention of the men they deem desirable. As sexual
competition between women for this scarce resource escalates,
the emotional and physical consequences to women can be considerable,
making Naomi Wolf's dire warnings in The Beauty Myth pale by comparison.
There are definite differences between men and women, as Tiger
(1970) point out, which will probably never disappear naturally.
Sex hormones, for example, such as testosterone, which causes
assertiveness, a heightened sex-drive and aggression in both primates
and humans. Even before puberty, boys have more testosterone then
girls – but after puberty the difference in testosterone
levels between the sexes is dramatic.
Then there are the different average rates of maturation between
girls and boys – in both humans and primates. Indeed, some
male primates take twice as long to reach maturity as do females
of the same species. These differences in human maturity are measurable,
and they are constant across human cultures. It is not necessarily
a bad thing to mature slowly, since immature creatures learn faster
than mature ones. So men may actually learn more than women, because
they mature later. And this may tie in with the greater size of
men's brains, compared to women's brains. This sex-linked difference
is not caused by men's greater over-all size, since big men don't
have bigger brains than small men, and big women don't have bigger
brains than small women. It would be impossible to get research
funds to investigate this question in a Western university, I
suspect, since the Feminists would be afraid that the conclusions
would not be to their liking !
Additionally, there is objective evidence that women smile more
than men. Sex differences of this kind appear even in infants
as young as two days old. Some scholars take smiling to be a sign
of submissiveness. They therefore conclude that women are genetically
programmed to defer to men. Whether or not this is true, it does
not make the female role inferior: if avoidance of confrontation
is one reason women live longer than men, then perhaps we should
consider it a superior strategy.
Finally, there is menstruation, which Feminists try to gloss
over as much as possible. Reporting on the research of Katherina
Dalton, Tiger (1970, p. 212) writes:
"(R)oughly 40 per cent of women suffer from a variety of
distressing symptoms during the final week or so of the menstrual
cycle (other researchers see a higher figure).... 46 per cent
of the female admissions (to mental hospital) occurred during
the seven or eight days preceding and during menstruation; at
this time, too, 53 per cent of attempted suicides by females occurred....
45 per cent of industrial employees who reported sick did so during
this period; 49 per cent of crimes committed by women prisoners
happened at this time and so did 45 per cent of the punishments
meted out to schoolgirls.... who were prefects and monitors doled
out significantly greater numbers of punishments to others during
the menstrual period, and she raises the question of whether or
not this is also true of women magistrates, teachers and other
figures in authority."
Clearly, men and women are not identical. Therefore we can not
measure in any straightforward way whether or not they are "equal"
to each other at any given time and place. As a society we must
determine the appropriate equivalencies between men and women
in those areas where we differ most fundamentally. That is, we
must strive for equity rather than equality.
A certain degree of complementarity of roles between the sexes
must inevitably be accepted. It is contrary to natural justice
for us to judge women and men by separate yardsticks only when
it prevents women from being shut out of certain occupations (e.g.,
the police and professional sports). Therefore, we must either
use separate yardsticks that benefit men as well, or abolish all
such yardsticks.
Conclusion
We have now put to rest the lie that Feminism is about sexual/gender
equality. The Men's Movement requires that we bring this into
the open. Sweeping it under the carpet allows the Feminists, who
largely control the Sex War agenda, to switch between various
implicit notions of equality according to what best suits their
political purpose at any given time. And this is often to the
detriment of men, children and society.
We need to negotiate a Sexual Contract between Masculists and
Feminists which will include a notion of equity/equality that
we all agree on. This might or might not be based on actual "equality"
between men and women, though the factors listed above make that
unlikely. In the absence of actual equality and identity between
the roles of men and women, there would have to be trade-offs
between the relative advantages of the male and female roles,
as there were in the Western past, and as still exist in many
parts of the world. This trade-off would outline a path for the
future development of western societies. At this point, you may
be asking yourself:
1. Which path?
2. Why?
3. Where would it lead us?
4. Why would that be a good destination?
I do not attempt to answer these questions, here. There is a
range of possible answers which others have already proposed.
I may write about my own suggestions in a future book, but for
the time being I suggest we leave the matter for negotiation between
men's and fathers' groups on the one side, and women's groups
on the other.
In this connection, it is heartening to see that in March 2001
Austria, in a World First, has created a department for Men's
Issues, in the Section on Youth, Men, and Special Family Issues
of the Ministry for Social Security and Generations.
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15 August 2015 |
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