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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.
Feminist 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, than 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 tradtional
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 rasing 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) point 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 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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