Time to Scale Back the Pedestal?

Has the pedestal has gone the way of the bustle, the bobbie sock, and the beehive hairdo?

It's a question that liberals instantly dismiss -- after all, we're all supposed to be absolutely equal. And conservative men shrink from serious discussion of the issue, preferring to seek refuge in their chivalrous instincts.

I'm more than happy to hold the door open for a lady or tote a doddering grandma's bag. And last I checked, no one is talking about dispatching a squadron of rosy-cheeked G.I. Janes to root out the Iraqi insurgents. So let's take that off the table.

Some will recall that back in October 1971, the House of Representatives approved the Equal Rights Amendment, which passed by an overwhelming 354-24 margin. Everyone knew it was just a matter of months until the necessary 38 states came on board.

But four months later, Phyllis Schlafly penned her history-altering essay, "What's Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?" Schlafly pointed out that American women are the most privileged of all classes of people that ever lived: "We have the most rights and rewards, and the fewest duties."

Schlafly then posed the question, "Why should we lower ourselves to 'equal rights' when we already have the status of special privilege?" That one sentence spelled the demise of the ERA. In the end, it was wrath of millions of American women who, fearing the loss of that special privilege, brought down the Equal Rights Amendment.

After the ERA heaved its last breath in 1979, feminists bitterly accused Mrs. Schlafly of "hating" women. But in truth the bra-burners took their next cue from the conservative icon.

This was their ploy: Instead of striving for mere equality, why not seek to expand women's special privileges - all the while claiming to be working for equality? And that proved to be the winning formula.

Over the next 25 years, the fems engineered the passage of a series of laws and programs that afforded ever-expanding legal rights and services to women. Those laws included the Violence Against Women Act, the Women's Educational Equity Act, women's health programs, the 1996 welfare reform, and many more.

How did the Girls of Guile get away with their equality ruse, when in fact they were duplicitously scheming behind the scenes to foist a hierarchical society on the rest of us?

First, they relentlessly shaded the truth - consider Hillary Clinton's laughable canards that women suffer from wage discrimination, were routinely excluded from medical research, are more likely to be the victims of war, and so on.

Before long the liberal media, beholden to the mantra of victim-journalism, became a shill for feminist ideology. And the conservative media, reflexively bound to the chivalrous ideal and emasculated by the ideological assault, never arose to challenge the falsehoods.

The real target of this blitz, though, was the traditional family. Women were hectored into thinking motherhood is unfulfilling and were rooted out of their homes to ascend the corporate ladder. Babes still in diapers were shunted off to day care.

Fathers were told they were superfluous and made to feel guilty for wanting to protect and provide for their families.

Then a stunning series of legal developments steadily eroded men's roles in their families. In 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court decreed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that a wife didn't need to inform her husband of an impending abortion. Domestic violence laws allowed women to send men packing without any proof of abuse. And divorced dads were reduced to mere visitors in their children's lives.

Three years ago Rutgers University conducted a national survey of our nation's most eligible bachelors -- single, heterosexual men ages 24-35. The researchers were in for a shock: 53% of men said they were not interested in getting married anytime soon, and 22% declared they had no intention of ever tying the knot.

Marriage rates began to plummet. For the first time in our nation's history, single-adult households now outnumber traditional dad-and-mom families.

So let's revisit our modest proposal -- is it time to scale back the formidable pedestal that the rad-fems have foisted on us in recent years?

Chivalry certainly has its place, and yes, women sometimes need special protections. But taken too far, chivalry can weaken the bedrock institutions of free societies and leave supposedly "liberated" women dependent on the neo-paternalism of the Nanny State.

Men and women need to band together in common defense of the family. Time is running short.

Jill,

I’m guessing you are female so I’ll take time to answer. Because I have a real problem with the sudden “freedoms” normally veery nice conservative males feel free to take now that the woman’s movement is past its prime and now belongs to our lesbian sisters. Heh.

I take great exception to references to a female as only a human being with private parts upon which we must gaze or indulge ourselves. I mean, putting a woman on a pedastal to gaze up her dress....that is just so unclassy.

Further, if one should dare mention it....well I’ll tell you now what the response from normally “nice” conservative males will be. Stay with me here because it’ll happen.

...they post a picture of an ugly female, implicating that you must be like the female in the picture because you object to women being denigrated to sex objects.

....they will DEFINITELy, take it to the bank, post one of Rush’s so-called “rules-of-life” that stipulates that should a female dare to object to such degrading treatment than but OF COURSE she must be a fat ugly bitch.

.....naturally there will be plenty of allusions to myself as a woman who obviously cannot get a man so I want to deny men to other, less prudish and more attractive women than myself.

.....sometimes they post a picture of me,....yes they do. An action that’s beyond contempt.

I agree, for the most part, with the sentiment of the writer on this matter. The women’s movement in this country, well there were some issues that once upon a time needed addressing but they have been lo many, many years ago. Beyond that, the nonsense about women being equal to men is just that....mostly nonsense. Males and females are different....duh.

But I don’t think our conservative brothers should take this factoid as an invitation to be crude and rude and oh, Jill, they do. It’s kind of sad and frankly it’s encouraged by none other than mighty Rush Limbaugh. Here’s a fellow who’s hardly anybody’s best source for advice on relating to the opposite sex.

You just watch. They love to take a female who dares to suggest that crude suggestions such as looking up a woman’s dress might be improper and beat her up.

Hang in there. A fine demonstration yet to come.

I’m documenting it all. Because this kind of childish crude behavior simply proves what the feminazis have been saying all along about conservative males.

It’s hard to understand any situation until you know what you’re dealing with, especially when the situation has several levels of complexity, each with their own rules. For this reason, I think it is best to examine sexual relationships from “the bottom up”. This gives you understanding of where we are, and where we can be.

To start with, there is basic biology. The “sexual revolution” was based on the idea that only basic biology matters, as everything added to it was superfluous at best, and unnatural and destructive at worst. But this “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” approach has still to realize that not everything people do beyond basic biology is either superfluous or destructive, and often has some very good and tangible reasons behind it.

In any event, basic biology, the lowest level, deals with only reproduction. Males, and not just human males, want to spread around their DNA for diversity in the species; whereas females want only the best male DNA for their offspring, howsoever they determine what the “best” is.

Not only do they do this consciously, but their bodies are physiologically designed to do this. For example, some women are actually able to “choose” which sperm, among several, they will allow to fertilize their egg; and male sperm are specialized to fight off other male’s sperm.

Again, while males and females have their prerogatives, females also have a second prerogative, that males don’t have. Not just to get the best DNA, but also to get a male to help their raise their offspring. Unfortunately, when there are a large number of males, the one with the best DNA may not be the one who would be best for raising children, and this creates an obvious problem.

To address that problem, if not to solve it, mankind developed the idea of marriage. It is a contract, of sorts, between a female and a male, which offers both them, and their children, advantages over ordinary reproduction.

In marriage, the male is promised by the female that their offspring are his; the female is promised that the male will help her raise her offspring. And their children get a better upbringing. But the contract only works if it is enforced, and outsiders are prohibited from sexually involving themselves with either partner. It is the reasoned origin to monogamy. Since in modern times, there is far less enforcement of marriage, the law has intervened to try and reconstruct some of its advantages, through such mechanisms as child support.

But in turn, marriage creates a biological problem. There are a goodly number of people who are losers when it comes to marriage. Either they are defective, or not desirable, or are not “good enough” for reproduction, biologically. It is easy to imagine this if you look at a wolf pack, where only the alpha pair of wolves are permitted to mate. The rest of the pack just isn’t up for it, so they have other roles to fulfill.

Unlike wolves, however, people can be very dangerous when they are not permitted to at least try and mate. This might be why such a thing as prostitution exists—as an outlet for those who cannot marry and reproduce. And there are also “lone wolves”, who travel to try and reproduce elsewhere. They might not be up to standards among their own, but would be with another group of people.

There are lots of other biology based relationships between males and females, such as the common male overreaction when he perceives that a woman is in danger, male competition for female attention, and females desiring male attention through exhibition. And often these evolve social labels to put a more civilized face on what is a biological impulse.

But people are able to a great extent to both transcend their basic biology, sometimes wisely and sometimes not, and also to augment it in foolish and outright bizarre ways.

One of the most difficult concepts to appreciate about sexuality is that sexual energy is supposed to be used for reproduction. People like sex, but they are designed to use that energy both for reproduction and the raising of offspring. And while it is pleasurable, if sexual energy is squandered on libertine pleasure, not reproduction, then offspring may be more difficult to produce, or may not get the upbringing they need.

And again, this hits close to home to a lot of people who want to use their energy for pleasure *and* reproduction, but to society as a whole it can explain while we generally regard sexual excess (and prostitution, again) as social ills to be discouraged.

Finally there are the purely social aspects to male and female relationships that complicate things. Many are niceties that make long term relationships more pleasant. Some are contrived for other reasons, and even imposed from outsiders to the relationship for their own reasons.

This can include chivalry, arranged marriage, dowry, and all sorts of other things, many of which ended up creating the reaction against all social conventions in relationships.

In the final analysis, though, basic biology through elaborate and extended social relationships matter as far as men and women relate to each other, and their children. All evolved for strong underlying purposes, and cannot be casually ignored by those hoping to change the nature of the relationship, without courting disaster.

Those whose experiments have resulted in disaster still often think that their theories are correct, that the failure was in the execution of their schemes, not in its underlying axioms about sexuality. They are mistaken.

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