Posted on 04/05/2004 5:27:51 PM PDT by Archangelsk
Driving Down Unknown RoadsThe Feminization Of America
March 29, 2004
In the United States women are, I think for the first time in history, gaining real power. Often nations have had queens, heiresses, and female aristocrats. These do not amount to much. Today women occupy positions of genuine authority in fields that matter, as for example publishing, journalism, and academia. They control education through high school. Politicians scramble for their votes. They control the divorce courts and usually get their way with things that matter to them.
If this is not unprecedented, I do not know of the precedent. What will be the consequences?
Men have controlled the world through most of history so we know what they do: build things, break things, invent things, compete with each other fiercely and often pointlessly, and fight endless wars that seem to them justifiable at the time but that, seen from afar, are just what males do. The unanswered question is what women would, or will, do. How will their increasing influence reshape the polity?
Women and men want very different things and therefore very different worlds. Men want sex, freedom, and adventure; women want security, pleasantness, and someone to care about (or for)them. Both like power. Men use it to conquer their neighbors whether in business or war, women to impose security and pleasantness.
I do not suggest that the instinctive behavior of women is necessarily bad, nor that of men necessarily good. I do suggest that that the effects will be profound, probably irreversible, and not necessarily entirely to the liking of either sex. The question may be whether one fears most being conquered or being nicened to death.
Consider what is called the Nanny State by men, who feel smothered by it, but is accepted if not supported by women, who see it as protective and caring. (Yes, I know that there are exceptions and degrees in all of this, and no, I don’t have polling data.) Note that women are much more concerned than are men about health and well-being. Women worry about second-hand smoke, outlawing guns, lowering the allowable blood-alcohol levels for drivers, making little boys wear helmets while riding bicycles, and outlawing such forms of violence as dodge ball or the use of plastic ray guns. Much of this is demonstrably irrational, but that is the nature of instincts. (Neither is the male tendency to form armed bands and attack anyone within reach a pinnacle of reason.)
The implications of female influence for freedom, at least as men understand the word, are not good. Women will accept restrictions on their behavior if in doing so they feel more secure. They have less need of freedom, which is not particularly important in living a secure, orderly, routine, and comfortable life. They tend not to see political correctness as irritating, but as keeping people from saying unpleasant things.
The growing feminizaton accounts for much of the decline in the schools. The hostility to competition of any sort is an expression of the female desire for pleasantness; competition is a mild form of combat, by which men are attracted and women repelled. The emphasis on how children feel about each other instead of on what they learn is profoundly female (as for that matter is the associated fascination with psychotherapy). The drugging of male schoolchildren into passivity is the imposition of pleasantness by chemical means. Little boys are not nice, but fidgety wild men writ small who, bored out of their skulls, tend to rowdiness. They are also hard for the average woman to control and, since male teachers are absent, gelded, or terrified of litigious parents, expulsion and resort to the police fill the void. The oft-repeated suspension of boys for drawing soldiers or playing space war is, methinks, a quietly hysterical attempt to assuage formless insecurity.
The change in marriage and the deterioration of the family are likewise the results of the growth of political power of women. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen, but it is assuredly happening. Divorce became common because women wanted to get out of unsatisfactory marriages. In divorce women usually want the children, and have the clout to get them. But someone has to feed the young. Thus the vindictive pursuit of divorced fathers who won’t or can’t pay child support. And thus the rise of the government as de facto father to provide welfare, tax breaks, daycare, and otherwise behave as a virtual husband.
When women entered a male workplace, they found that they didn’t much like it. Men told off-color jokes, looked at protuberant body parts, engaged in rough verbal sparring as a form of social interaction, and behaved in accord with rules that women didn’t and don’t understand. Women had the influence to change things, and did. Laws grew like kudzu to ban sexual harassment, whether real or imagined. Affirmative action, in addition to being a naked power grab, avoids competition and therefore making the losers feel bad. It degrades the performance of organizations, sometimes seriously, but performance is a preoccupation of males.
Men are capable of malignant government, whether authoritarian or totalitarian, as witness North Korea or the Russia of Stalin. I don’t know whether women would behave as badly if they had the power. (I’d guess not.) But women have their own totalitarian tendencies. They will if allowed impose a seamless tyranny of suffocating safety, social control, and political propriety. Men are happy for men to be men and women to be women; women want us all to be women.
The United States becomes daily more a woman’s world: comfortable, safe, with few outlets for a man’s desire for risk. The America of wild empty country, of guns and fishing and hunting, of physical labor and hot rods and schoolyard fights, has turned gradually into a land of shopping malls and sensible cars and bureaucracy. Risk is now mostly artificial and not very risky. There is skydiving and scuba and you can still find places to go fast on motorcycles, but it gets harder. Jobs increasingly require the feminine virtues of patience, accommodation to routine, and subordination of performance to civility. Just about everything that once defined masculinity is now denounced as “macho,” a hostile word embodying the female incomprehension of men.
A case can be made that a feminized world would (or will) be preferable to a masculine. Perhaps. It is males who bomb cities and shoot people in Seven-Elevens. Yet the experiment has not been made. I suspect we will have the worst of both worlds: a nation in which men at the top engage in the usual wars and, a step below, women impose inutterable boredom.
Not quite. A circle is a womens hierarchy which can be just as rigid as a male hierarchy. Rather than having decisions being made by whoever has the best track-record, decisions are made by whoever has the temperment to argue, and argue, and argue, until everyone else gives in. This gives women a big advantage. (I work in an environment where I can observe this close up)
We're guilty of doing this with our sons as well. We take them to military re-enactments,teach them about family members who have served in the military, keep plastic swords in the house, and provide them with toy soldiers and an ample supply of Captain Underpants books. Lately they've been enjoying watching the Horatio Hornblower series. They tune out the occasional mushy stuff in order to enjoy the sea battles. Our boys' friends have learned that our back yard has a stream, trees, pond, and lots of mud and rocks. Many boys have had the opportunity to get good and dirty here!
I still struggle with the balance between protecting our sons and challenging them. I guess that's the nature of motherhood. I'm glad I'm not raising them alone.
In my state of Wisconsin they keep adding divisions to the high-school sports teams so, as in the words of the female member of WISA, the org that runs the scholastic athletic programs, "more students can have a positive state tournament experience". This woman, and people like her, saw how happy many of the people whose teams went to the state tournament were, so of course! (the lightbulb went on in their heads), "why not make it possible for many more students to be happy by going to a state tourney" they thought to themselves. I believe these people are also responsible for the self-esteem movement which believes in rewarding people just for participating regardless of how they perform either athletically or scholastically. There is no thought given to the idea that the only things worth experiencing pride over are the ones achieved through hard work and sacrifice.
They can't understand. Women are more motivated by relationships and being close. Achievement and status are primarily male drives.
It's got a lot to do with biology: in the past, high-status males got their pick of the women, and could have lots of mates. Actually, it's still true today, with wealthy guys being able to have a succession of "trophy wives", and older-but-rich celebrities marrying young women (Billy Joel recently married a 22-year-old -- he's older than his new father-in-law)
Biologicly, physical beauty is the main advantage of females in the competition for the most desirable mates, while for men it's status, power, and wealth. Hence the tendency for boys to get into competitive games from childhood
I also had the chance to see this up close. I was at IBM's Defense marketing division (FSD) in LA when the whole defense market collapsed, after the Berlin Wall did. We were all told to find jobs in other divisions, or take our severances and walk. As an option to stay in LA, I evaluated working with a technical writing group that shared our building, all women - about 15 total. Sounds like a frat boy's dream? Nope.
My first interesting experience was participating in naming that particular group. After a very tedious and roundabout discussion, they settled on Technical Writers And Trainers. They were all very irritated with me when I spoke up and said "I don't...think that would be good." "Why NOT?!", they chorused. "Think of the acronym", I said, to a much quieter chorus of "Oh."(I am not making this up)
Moving on, I noticed this very rigid consensus process, where the merit of the ideas submitted had less importance than the WAY they were presented. When I suggested an idea, it was initially well received and adopted. Later on, when the same subject came back up (for no apparent reason - nothing ever seemed to be settled), it was not well received - and they went on to discuss the whole subject all over again.
I decided I couldn't deal with this, quit IBM, and became a beach bum playing schlock-rock in Manhattan Beach. This is all very anecdotal, and not necessarily proving of anything, but it was an eye-opener for me, to see the world of difference between male-dominated versus female-dominated decision-making.
I'd hardly call a prescription based entirely on the various adaptations and repackagings of a Josh McDowell sermon from the 1970s, responsible. I have great respect for Christianity and those that practice it, but not when those practitioners subordinate the manifestly obvious to quasi-Scriptural formulae on par with the "name it, and claim it" nostrums of the recent past.
It is, of course, your choice to entertain "magical thinking" fairytales that men bear responsibility for our erroding moral position. But in the face of an identifiable "feminine" mindset where men have no more political "pull" than women, and demonstrably fewer mechanisms for enforcing their wishes, I'd say you are guilty of the same myopia Ezekiel preached against when he gave a word against those who blamed their troubles on "the sins of the father's being visited on the children."
Women in this country are free moral agents, not the subordinates of past social hierarchies. As such, blamining men for our current society is like blaming horses for our current traffic problems.
Rush: "Those who know what's best for us, must rise and save us from ourselves" - from the song Witch Hunt
Where I work, I frequently find myself the lone guy in a meeting with several women. One book that I've found very useful in getting me to understand how women interact with each other is "In the Company of Women" by Pat Heim, Susan, Ph.D. Murphy, Susan K. Golant
Women, especially women in groups, seem to like consensus-based solutions, where everybody has a chance to talk about what she thinks about it, and especially how she feels about it. Solutions where somebody says "Lets do A", and the women can't come up with a rational objection to A, may be adopted without visible dissent, but there will be some disgruntlement with the process. If the women manage to do a lot of back and forth and discussion until nobody can remember who originally brought A up, they're much happier.
One woman has this thing about "unilateral decision-making" -- she fins it most objectionable when I just do things without talking it over first with the group.
Women supplied the vote margin for the Dem men who built the welfare state.
I honestly do appreciate your points. But the whole thing is kind of academic, really, because it ain't going to last. And when the whole structure collapses, they will see a ridiculously brutal structure we will all hate.
It's already started. Where I work, the practice is increasingly for us guys to figure things out among ourselves, and work around the women as much as possible
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