User:Zdcma16

Anti-Feminism The way Things Don't Work Out as intended

1.Women normally intuit, or find out, that men won’t make good pets. They don’t want to, and can’t anyway. Their motivations are all wrong. They positively must regard themselves as necessary. This is especially true for strong and able men. Such men must believe, and be fooled into believing if necessary, that they are essential.

2.Men that are not essential are not much of anything worth mentioning. They don’t develop properly. They don’t persevere. They lose interest. They don’t invest their energy in families and communities. They wander. They will be absent in some sense. When they have nowhere geographical to go, the matter gets worse. They remain and dissipate. They cause trouble. Disenfranchised men are marauders; they tear things down.

3.Every society has had to solve the problem of having men around. Before communities could develop, the energies of men had to be harnassed. So long ago that only myth remembers, woman made herself an object of her man's territoiality, and he went to work on her behalf. Unless men regard society's welfare as their own, they invent roles debilitating to society.

4.To induce men to accept ownership in society, each known culture has reserved essential roles for them. Women did not compete with men in the roles reserved for them, and societies made a large investment in maintaining separate gender roles. Social taboos forbade blurring of the roles, and women and men united to punish transgressors. Members of the culture came to genuinely believe that each gender was unsuited to assume the roles of the other.

5.Men are inclined, perhaps biologically programmed, to shun feminine praxis. Because of this, an uncontested sphere of feminine influence is assured. By contrast, a sphere for male social influence had to be both granted and protected. As part of the bargain, the man’s role in most societies entailed socializing males to be expendable. If foreign marauders threatened the group, these expendable men were trained to hurl themselves against the invaders as a determined and lethal defense. Their role as protectors of the home became a fundamental part of how these men defined themselves. Their personalities were distinctively marked by the expectation of sacrifice that they internalized.

6.Men and women internalized different and symmetrical expectations. Specialization of labor according to gender has been universal. Organically evolving civil societies learned though experience to avoid placing women and men in face-to-face competition. Women and men lived in separate worlds and held different aspirations.

7.Organically evolved civil societies rigorously pressed individuals into sometimes ill-fitting roles. Individual liberties were sacrificed as men and women were trained into complementary roles, so that when they came together a space was created where children could be nurtured and civilization could be born. Boys and girls were in training to grow up and become husbands and wives, which was never an easy or natural discipline.

8.Billions of people in millions of insular communities over hundreds of generations have tried, and re-tried, every conceivable form of social organization and relationship. Some ideas were tried repeatedly and failed each time they were tested. People have never ceased testing limits and pushing against strictures. Societies have always experimented with equalizing and freeing the genders. None of the older experiments with gender equality was successful enough, or lasted long enough, to leave us a record. Contemporary experiments, for which we do have a record, are discouraging.

9.The Soviet Union’s legal structure militated against organically evolved civil society and especially the role of males. Families and other traditional structures were damaged. Following the collapse of the Soviet hierarchy, communities that had evolved successfully for millennia were challenged to survive. In the aftermath men have tended to be ineffectual providers. They invent self-destructive roles for themselves outside of society and die early. Women are at risk and impoverished. Progress to rebuild viable and successful institutions has been spotty, and slower than anyone predicted.

10.In the United States, the second half of the 20th century saw well-intended factions use governmental powers to eliminate the role of men in the civil society for most of Black America. Men lost interest and wandered away. The sons of these disenfranchised men are now a hugely disproportionate source of hooliganism and crime in America.

11.The 16th to 19th centuries saw Europe’s technology and conquest render male roles obsolete in many conquered cultures. Although many tried to adopt or adapt the institutions of the conquerors, essentialness was elusive. Reviewing the experience of aboriginal peoples suggests that they have fared the worst. Men have since contributed little to some of these societies, where male behavior has been marked by dissipation and malaise.

12.In parts of the American southwest, some of the aboriginal cultures were matriarchal and matrilineal. Women owned approximately all the community’s property, and women held political sway. A husband could be sent away at the whim of his wife, and dared not return home. The socialization of males was decidedly different here. These societies may have been threatened less by foreign marauders, and men may have been less trouble.

13.Some of these cultures reserved spiritual and healing roles for men. Women did not compete with men in invoking rain or praying for crops. Neither did men compete in women’s roles. These men held an essential place in community life, and contributed to their society. These were truly men, and they were not kept as pets.

14.The Anasazi was a people of this region that disappeared -went extinct- several centuries before the Europeans arrived. They once had an organized and successful civilization. The reason for their disappearance has been a declared mystery, however the mystery is readily explained:

15.Although Anasazi women witnessed the public rituals and ceremonies, much ancient lore and technique was hidden from them. Men met away from the women to fast and purify themselves, and to prepare for performance of the rites. Men kept their sacred knowledge carefully, and observed the ancient taboos against telling the secrets to women.

16.Women were more than a little curious, and envious too. Women pushed against this social stricture, of course, and women have ways of finding out secrets. She would ply her lover for secrets and decry his lack of trust – she would vow to keep his secret faithfully. From time to time a woman would find an initiate who was less resolute than amenable, and she would learn a bit of lore. And women would remember.

17.They would quietly compare their findings, and in time they accumulated a considerable part of the magical lore. They surreptitiously followed the men and learned to collect the sacred medicinal plants and artifacts. They conducted clandestine experiments and learned that they, too, could make the magic work to some degree. Children often healed in response to their ministrations.

18.A generation of children, especially girls, grew up with the realization that women, too, could make magic. As their ability increased, women were more open about their magical interventions. They would openly deride the man who considered himself the carrier of sacred power. With the violation of ancient promises and taboos, sacred arts lost their potency.

19.The prowess of the men declined and the gap between men and women narrowed. Young men formed into gangs and committed atrocities, as they sought violently for new magic that would regain a role for them in society. Some of the young men dissociated themselves from the others in disgust, and older men would have no part of these new ways. Dedication to a common purpose was shattered, and men no longer met as a body or apart from the women.

20.Disaffected men wandered away from the community, and did not return. When a husband left the community, the young wife would often fetch the baby up on her hip, and go off following her husband. The children trailed behind, the eldest helping the toddler, as they headed off to join or begin a new society. The society they left ebbed away.

21.In time there was only a circle of sad old women gathered around the fire, complaining bitterly about how unfair life was. And in time the old women died out, of course, and that was the end of the Anasazi.

Chris Choat 2003

End Notes

Paragraph 1: All people need to be essential to the projects they devote themselves to.

• a. Ronald S. Immerman “Perspectives on human attachment (pair bonding): Eve’s unique legacy of a canine analogue” Evolutionary Psychology 2003.1: 138 ISSN 1474-7049
• b. Amy R. McCready “The ethical individual: an historical alternative to contemporary conceptions of the self” American Political Science Review March 1996 v90 n1 p90
• c. Tina Ottman (interviewing David Bramburg) “Gendertalk: Masculinity in Transit” http://members.at irfoseek.co.jp/gender_lang_ed/articles/gendertalk.html (Mar. 18, 2004)
• d. Simon Baron-Cohen The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain (ISBN:0738208442 Perseus Books, June 2003.)
• e. Louise B. Silverstein and Carl F. Auerbach “Deconstructing the Essential Father” American Psychologist 1999 Vol 54, No 6, 397-407

Paragraph 2:

• a. William Golding Lord of the Flies (Perigee Book, 1954) ISBN: 0399501487
• b. Maggie Gallagher “Fatherless Boys Grow Up Into Dangerous Men” Wall Street Journal. Dec. 1, 1998 A22
• c. Wade F. Horn “Boys to Men: Add a Dose of Masculinity” http://www.dadi.org/wh_b2men.htm (Dec 24, 2003)
• d. Karl Zinsmeister “Fatherhood is not for Whimps” in American Enterprise magazine (Sept. 1999)

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2185/5_10/55683245/p1/article.jhtml?term=fatherhood. (Sept 24, 2003)

• e. Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally “Crisis in Masculinity”. Boston Globe May 2, 1999 E01.

Paragraph 3:

• a. N. Shapely. “Masculinity in Crisis.” July 2, 2000. http://unquietmind.com/masculine.html (Mar. 16, 2004.)
• b. Hara Marano, “The New Sex Scorecard” Psychology Today, Aug. 2003
• c. Deborah Blum Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women. 1997 Penguin Putnam, New York. ISBN 0140263489
• d. Margaret Mead “Human Fatherhood is a Social Invention” in Stevi Jackson (ed.) Women’s Studies Essential Readings (ISBN: 0814742157 New York University Press 1993, p.79)
• e. David C. Geary Male, Female; The Evolution of Human sex differences

(ASIN: 1557985278 Permagon 1998)

• f. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (ISBN: 0679442650 1999 Pantheon Books)

Paragraph 4: Different Projects: Men could not serve as merely convenient adjuncts to the affairs of women:

• a. Jessie L. Krienert “Masculinity and Crime: A Quantitative Exploration of Messerschmidt’s Hypothesis” Electronic Journal of Sociology 2003 ISSN: 11983655 [1] (Mar. 25, 2005)
• b. David Blankenhorn “The Good Family Man” November 1991 [2] (Mar. 25, 2005)

Paragraph 5: The purposes and aims of masculine performance are either (the same =Null) or (not the same) as those for feminine performance. A great lot of gender study has presumed the null hypothesis and is defective when it is rejected.

• a. Nancy Chodorow “Family Structures and Feminine Personality” [3] (Mar. 25, 2005)
• b. Karl Zinsmeister “Fathers: Who Needs Them?” http://mywebpages.comcasr.net/ssewell38/father.htm (Mar. 16, 2004)
• c. David R. Hibbard, Duane Buhrmester “The role of peers in the socialization of gender-related social interaction stiles” Aug. 1998 Sex Roles: A Journal of Research [4] (Mar.25, 2005)

Paragraph 7: General and feminist scholarship appears now to show that the principal human genders are inescapably different ‘cultures,’ and that gender is basic to the building of a human Self. This article explores the notion that societies form around a cultural pact that enables inter-dependence between men and women. That pact is the result of bargaining between conflicting interests, and is a compromise that satisfies no one’s interests perfectly. It is always subject to repudiation by the parties, and where repudiation becomes fashionable society disorganizes until a new pact evolves. Society is very much in the business of discouraging repudiation by individuals. Individuals are inclined to repudiate a cultural pact unless it enhances their inclusive fitness. Reservation of gendered roles has been a universal feature of very different pacts allowing inter-dependence between masculine and feminine projects.

• a. Eleanor Maccoby The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together ISBN: 0674914813 Harvard 1998 p. 52, 156, 163

Paragraph 9:

• a. Sarah Ashwin (ed.) Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, London and New York. 2000)
• b. Research project proposal, Principal researcher Rebecca Kay, Jan. 15, 2002 “Understanding Men, Masculinity and Identity in Post-soviet Russia. Dept. of Central and East European Studies. University of Glasgow http://www.gla.ac.uk/icees/leverhulme.html (Mar. 16, 2004.)
• c. Sergei Kukhterin “Fathers and Patriarchs in Soviet and Post Soviet Russia: Preliminary Research results.” 1999 Educational Centre of the Institute of Sociology. Russian Sociological Forum Electronic Journal of Sociology http://www.sociology.ru/forum/99-1Kukhterin-an.html (Dec 24, 2003)

Paragraph 10:

• a. Paul C. Vitz “Family decline: The findings of Social Science” [5](Mar 25, 2005)
• b. Katherine Boo “The Black Gender Gap” in “The Real State of the Union” The Atlantic Monthly Jan/Feb 2003
• c. Fielding Greaves “Black- On- Black Crime” [6] (Mar. 16, 2004.)

Paragraph 11: Many ills attributed to post-colonial effects are better ascribed to disenfranchisement of indigenous males.

• a. Colin M. Turnbull The Mountain People 1972 p. 133, 289 ISBN 0-671-64098-4

Paragraph 14: The following paragraphs are the best account we have(as of this writing)for the disappearance of the Anasazi civilization, in that it “explains” the known facts. Here it is given as parable - no conclusion provided. This is one of many civilizations that have disappeared in pre-history, apparently due to social upheaval or collapse. We don’t know anyone who was actually there —all are mysteries.

• a. George Johnson “Social Strife may Have Exiled Ancient Indians”. New York Times: Aug 20, 1996 p. C1 available at http://www.santafe.edu