Sex, Equality, And Kidding Ourselves (Should Men put their foot down and say enough is enough??)

Men of today's older generation grew up in the chivalric miasma of their time, which held that women were morally superior to men, and that civilized men protected women against any available vicissitude. A corollary was that women needed protecting. So common has this understanding been throughout history that one may suspect it of being based in ancient instinct: In a less hospitable world, if men didn't protect women, something disagreeable would eat them, and then there would be no more people. So men did. And do.

Instincts have consequences, particularly when the circumstances requiring them cease to exist.

Because women were until recently subordinate, and in large part played the role of gentility assigned to them, men didn't recognize that they could be dangerous, selfish, or sometimes outright vipers. They were no worse than men, but neither were they better. Men believed, as did women, that women were tender creatures, caring, kind, and suited to be mothers. Males deferred to women in many things, which didn't matter because the things women wanted were not important.

When women came into a degree of power, it turned out that they were as immoral, or amoral, as men, probably more self-centered, and out for what they could get. Not all were, of course, as neither were all men, but suddenly this became the central current. This too followed lines of instinctual plausibility: Women took care of children and themselves, and men took care of women. It made sense that they should be self-centered.

These newly empowered women knew, as women have always known, how to wield charm, and they quickly learned to enjoy power. The men of the old school didn't notice in time. They deferred, and they were blind-sided. They gave gentlemanly agreement to one-sided laws hostile to men.

Political deference became a pattern. It remains a pattern. It probably springs in part from the male's instinctive recognition that, by giving women what they want, he gets laid. Between individuals this worked tolerably well, but less so when applied to abstract groups.

When women said they wanted protection against dead-beat dads, the old school fell for it. They were attuned to saving maidens and the sheltering from life's storms of white Christian motherhood. "Dead-beat dads" was of course that sure-fire political winner -- an alliterative slogan of few words that embodied a conclusion but no analysis. So sure were men that women were the kinder gentler sex that they never bothered to look at the statistics on abuse of children, or the track records of the sexes in raising children.

The romantic elderly male believed -- believes -- that women were the natural proprietors of the young. This led to laws virtually denying a divorced father's interest in his children, though not the requirement that he pay for their upkeep. The pattern holds today. Male judges in family law defer to women, almost any women no matter how unfit, and female judges side with their own. The demonstrable fact that women can and do abuse and neglect children, that a female executive clawing her way up the hierarchy may have the maternal instincts of a rattlesnake, that children need their fathers -- all of this has been forgotten.

The reflexive deference continued. Feminists wanted congress to pass a vast program of funding for every left-wing cause that incited enthusiasm in the sterile nests of NOW. They called it the Violence Against Women Act, and men deferentially gave it to them. Of course to vote against it, no matter what it actually said -- and almost no one knew -- would have been to seem to favor violence against women. A law to exterminate orphans, if called the Domestic Violence Prevention Act, would pass without demur.

There followed yet more male deference to female desires. When women wanted to go into the military to have babies, or a Soldier Experience, men couldn't bring themselves to say no.

When the women couldn't perform as soldiers, men graciously lowered standards so they could appear to. It was the equivalent of helping a woman over a log in the park, the legal and institutional parallel of murmuring, "Don't worry your pretty little head about a thing."

On and on it went. The aggregate effect has been that women have gained real power, while (or by) managing in large part to continue to exact deference and, crucially, to avoid the accountability that should come with power. A minor example is women who want the preferential treatment that women now enjoy, and yet expect men to pay for their dates. In today's circumstances, this is simple parasitism.

Today men are accountable for their behavior. Women are not. The lack of accountability, seldom clearly recognized, is the bedrock of much of today's feminist misbehavior, influence, and politics. Its pervasiveness is worth pondering.

A man who sires children and leaves is called a dead-beat dad, and persecuted. A woman who has seven children out of wedlock and no capacity to raise them is not a criminal, but a victim. He is accountable for his misbehavior, but she is not for hers. It is often thus.

Consider the female Army officer who complained that morning runs were demeaning to women. A man who thus sniveled would be disciplined, ridiculed, and perhaps thumped. Yet the Army fell over itself to apologize and investigate. Again, men are held accountable for their indiscipline, but women are not. Men expect to adapt themselves to the Army, but women expect the Army to adapt to them. And it does. The male instinct is to keep women happy.

Note that a woman who brings charges of sexual harassment against a man suffers no, or minor, consequences if the charges are found to be unfounded -- i.e., made up. A man who lied about a woman's misbehavior would be sacked. He is accountable. She isn't.

Yes, large numbers of women are responsible, competent, and agreeable. Few engage in the worst abuses, as for example the fabrication of sexual harassment. Yet they can do these things. A man cannot throw a fit and get his way. A woman can. Only a few need misbehave to poison the air and set society on edge. And the many profit by the misbehavior of the few.

People will do what they can get away with. Men assuredly will, and so are restrained by law. Women are not. Here is the root of much evil, for society, children, men and, yes, women.

This is how you associate yourself? And you expect anybody to take your stuff - especially that "playboy philosophy" theory - seriously? Have you no dignity

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I don't agree with the pictures of women on the Grabbe web site and have nothing to do with them. My personal evaluation is that they are cheap and detract from the side. I do not publish on that site. I publish on another site that is purely written material. At the time I made an arrangement with Zola and certain other people several years ago on another site no such photographs appeared on that original site.

I do not agree with everything that is written or appears on these sites. The leadership at these sites were uncomfortable with my critique of liberal sexuality and cut off the last installment in the series. We also disagree on certain aspects of economic analysis. Some of my views have been forbidden on these sites.

There are several distinct groups of readers attening these sites. Some are extremely liberal. Some are extremely conservative. The group that follows my series tends to be conservative, highly educated, medical doctors, psychiatrists, clinical psychologys, conservative clinical social workers, conservative clinical social workers, conservative lawyers, and conservative educators. They asked me to continue publishing at these sites. I have done so. Whether they will be driven off by any evolving collateral atmosphere will remain to be seen.

I am developing my own separate site which will allow me more freedom and will serve as a backup site. Site development requires considerable HTML work and requires time.

I disagree with some of what appears on this site. In your case I consider you to be immature, insincere, and intellectually pornographic. If the Robinsons allow you here, that is their decision. I'm not responsible for what you or they do. In the same way, I'm not responsible for what appears on the Grabbe site and as far as I know my work does not appear there. That directions appear there on how to find my writing is useful to me and to my readers, but does not suggest I support everything that goes on there. Some of the other writers and I at the sites I am paied to write for are bitter enemies. So be it.

If you want to read what I have written with seriousness, so be it. If you don't like what I have to say, tough. It's a cruel world. I wasn't put on this earth to be required to please you or anybody else.

I don't believe you are either inclined or qualified to read my material. You have an agenda of some kind which makes you a gadfly, which I suspect is your mission in life. So be it.

I went out of my way to state in advance that my comments applied to Section 10, and Section 10 alone.

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What I suggest is that you study the work in its entirity and its integration into the whole rather than read a few sentences and rush back here eager to spout off.

Might I also suggest your insistance that I am operating from hypothetical habit or instinct that is convenient for purposes of your argument is quite presumptous. You have no idea what my habits are or ever have been. Your attempts to to be a psychiatrist suggest you shouldn't quit your daytime job.

Zola doesn't have my work reviewed by othere. I do. As far as what other people or quality of work he has there at the sites I write for, I am not responsible and frequently don't even know about it. I often don read the issues that come out unless I have articles in them. I have no interest in some of the other views that are written there just as I have no interest in many of the people or views that occur at this site. To be frank, some of what I see here is disgusting. The same is true elsewhere.

"I consider you to be immature,"

You wouldn't be the first. But then, the first and second defensive weapons in your intellectual arsenal seems to be the ad hominem attack and the temper tantrum.

"insincere,"

Nah... I meant every word.

"and intellectually pornographic."

Interesting concept.

"Some of the other writers and I at the sites I am paied to write for are bitter enemies. So be it."

I'm not your enemy. Just a critic, regardless of your opinion of me.

"If you want to read what I have written with seriousness, so be it. If you don't like what I have to say, tough. It's a cruel world. I wasn't put on this earth to be required to please you or anybody else.

Your temper tantrums belie that statement.

"I don't believe you are either inclined or qualified to read my material."

Wrong. When you first referenced it in this thread, I was quite inclined - else I woudn't have bothered to look it up. Difficult or complicated subject matter doesn't scare me away. But common sense and fifty years of history have pretty put the lie to theories blaming men-behaving-badly or the so-called "playboy philosophy" for the damage done by radical feminism.

"You have an agenda of some kind which makes you a gadfly,

I'll take that as a compliment. In case you haven't figured it out, I take exception to your theory that all men are to blame for all social problems, with women painted as victims even when they're feminizing little boys.

"which I suspect is your mission in life.

No, it's just a passion. My mission is to keep my son out of the hands of those who would do him harm, in particular, feminist ideologues. BTW, your interminable tracts on the "war between the sexes" which places all social ills at the feet of all men would qualify you as one of those feminist ideologues.

Like I said, this is based on believing the Bible...

I'm with you. The writer above seems stuck in 50's provincialism, because the Bible quite frankly depicts women as capable of various evils. The "loose woman" of Proverbs comes to mind, along with the cunning Delilah and the vicious Jezebel. (Oh, almost forgot! The Whore of Babylon!)

God gives us roles to play for a reason (His!) but always Satan, taunting us with our "potential" if we would just ignore God. Are we any happier now, having shirked our God-ordained roles? Not a chance!

Excuse me. My Mother left my Dad to run off with a co-worker (who later became my stepfather). When she came to grief over her mistake she was determined to come back for us (me and my sister) or "die".

My Dad allowed her to have custody because a lawyer at that time said his chances of custody in a court battle were slim. He thought it was best. But I have been through the "feminization" process as a result, and I can tell you first hand that the idea that women are natural born saints is B.S. I've witnessed their equality in action: sexual immorality, domineering attitudes, abortion...you name it.

Today it is all water under the bridge (I have a good relationship with my Mom), but her selfish actions then—when I was two— really rocked my world. Suddenly my Mom disappeared!

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If you had read the God damned series, which you haven't, you would have come to the point where it was said:

"Perhaps the description thus far has made it seem as though women are helpless souls who are preyed upon by men and society. However, they made their own contribution and brought much of it on themselves."

From thence I go into a 50 page critique of contemporary women and the women's movement, including even the move by contempory liberated women psychotherapists to facilitate and support the condition of homosexuality in men to weaken and humiliate men. Do you think I'm too God damned dumb so as not to know men, and now boys, are being psychologically castrated by recent social and political movements?

Feminists hate my guts.

You really out to read what I have written instead of your own premature reactions to part of what I have written.

I shoud probably just tell you to go phssst yourself, but there are other people involved her.

Let me attempt, with some sense of futility, to explain some things. In the early 80s a mag editor who knew my reputation contacted me and asked me to do a short series for them for what would today be $14,000- $18,000. I got into the series. There was an argument at the mag with people quitting and scattered to the winds. The series was cancelled in midstream although I did get paid six or eight thousand dollars for what I had done. Such is the way of the world.

The internet essay mewspaper paper I worked for until recently approached me because of certain material I had written. Several months back there was a bitter desagreement within the organization and a slit in which I was forced to choose between one side or the ither. I went with my editor to the present site at zolatimes2. The old publication owes me a consoderable amount of money and refuses to pay. For this reason, I am reluctant to send people there, although no new work has been, and is being, published there, by anybody. My old material is there. at plain aolatimes.com . You may find the format easier to read and to locate information. I'm in the writer's index. The new site is zolatimes2.com.

You think the vote has power?

You think a social movement that changed the base of the political power structure doesn't? Since women were enfranchised, their influence has been felt not only politically, but in the arts, in the workplace, even in the military. Do you think for a second that would have happened if they had been defeated during suffrage?

You are incredibly naive.

And you are merely pompous.

Kolya Krassotkin was a male, by the way. Anyway, try reading better literature than IronJack.

I'm not sorry I'm not familiar with some obscure Slavic nobody. Nor am I going to get into a competition over literary arcana. Suffice it to say that my erudition in matters political probably matches or exceeds yours, if not in depth, certainly in breadth.

The problem, I think, is that as one reads the material, one infers or understands the following, which is fully articulated later:

"Part of the limits area brings up an underlying issue of emotional depth, depth of values and personal development. There is a funneling of other values and feelings into sex. To put it another way, sex becomes an expression of a person's value systems and an expression of a highly-developed complex relationship between people. The more highly developed and complex the person is, and the more highly developed a system of values a person has, the less dominant sex becomes, even as sex, because it is outweighed in significance by the other parts of that person's personality system and the other values in the complexity of the relationship. These values and complications, and their expression, become prerequisite to a relationship and become prerequisites to sex, placing inherent limits upon sexual activity in developed people. Sexual activity not integrated with the total personality and integrated with values produces feelings of intensified isolation. Consequently, people of emotional depth do not focus on sexual freedom as it is of little interest and has little utility in producing personal satisfaction. Not only is sexual license irrelevant, but it is psychologically isolating and repugnant to them. "

Since this flies in the face of what most people have believed and practiced since puberty, reactions to the series tend to be extreme.

The problem, I think, is that as one reads the material, one infers or understands the following, which is fully articulated later:...

That I agree with 100%. I've posted on that subject myself, and I agree that it has a lot to do with why things seem to be going to Hell.

I tend to view the cause of that problem as a failure by theologians to transmit basic religious truth in a way that people with running water and electricity will universally accept. Religion is the vessel that carries and transmits the ideas that cause "emotional depth, depth of values and personal development." There is an element of faith in all of those things, and faith is the province of religion. It is a critical function in the maintenance of civilized order, and our current lack of it is absolutely at the bottom of what's wrong.

We see too often that people with substantial intelligence and wit, but zero values -- Clinton, to pick one -- rise to great heights in our society and are wildly cheered by millions even as they flout what used to be society's strongest taboos. Here's a middle-aged married man getting blow jobs in the White House from a 20-something intern, and people are cheering about this. "What a delightful rogue he is," chortles the press. "What a thong-flashing seductress she is," say the TV producers. We can only shake our heads in sorrow that it's come to this.

It's easy to condemn the occasional miscreant, but I have trouble condemning tens of millions at a stroke. That to me indicates process failure, and in this case the process that failed was the one that is supposed to transmit the society's values. We had trusted our theologians to build and maintain this process, but they failed us. Too many people see religion as snake oil for an illiterate peasantry of a bygone age, something they can safely ignore now that we scientifically understand thunder and lightning.

Now we're finding out that people can't safely ignore it, it's essential to the maintenance of a civilized order that these values be inculcated in human beings from the ground up. Otherwise the place fills up with people like Clinton, and people who admire Clinton.

I think people are becoming dimly aware of this, but I still don't see the theologians preparing anything for them. To me, this is a serious problem that needs fixing.

What I suggest is that you study the work in its entirity and its integration into the whole rather than read a few sentences and rush back here eager to spout off.

This comes down to the old question of, "What if everybody did that?"

Even Tolstoy managed to cram War and Peace into a mere 692 pages. Couldn't you have gotten an editor or something? Free Republic would be a pretty dead place if everybody kept 1200 pages of stuff on a web site somewhere, and demanded that other people read all of it before they can discuss anything. That's just ridiculous, so stop it.

I did not "psychoanalyze" you. I merely pointed out that your argument in Section 10 is a variation on the age-old White Knight to Queen's Rook gambit, and that it was therefore an example of the very thing you were decrying. I did offer instinct and habit as possible explanations for your behavior, and perhaps that was speculative, but the alternatives appear to be more damning.

I noticed that in another note, you were quick to distance yourself from the Orlin Grabbe site when it was pointed out that the site is currently featuring a photo of some attractive young ladies strutting their stuff. You have nothing to do with that, you don't approve of it, and you don't want to be tarred with it.

Fair enough, but then how do you justify bundling all men into a class associated with Playboy magazine and Hugh Hefner? At its height, Playboy had a circulation of about 7 million, a tiny fraction of the adult male population. Tens of millions of men had nothing to do with Playboy and didn't even know that Hefner was spouting something called "The Playboy Philosphy." I think you're trying to have it both ways here. You want to tie the adult male population to Playboy magazine, but if anyone does the same thing to you, that's an outrage. That act is not real persuasive.

I'm a Bible believing, but not particularly religious, Christian. I'm more interested in morality than theology. There are plenty of Christians who, if I had children, I would not allow my children to associate with. There are plenty of atheists to whom I would entrust my life. One reason why I don't participate in church based activities is that they use religious euphoria as a thought reforming device there: is a pronounced tendency to treat the Bible as a magical text, a series of incantations, if you will. From an anthropological standpoint the Bible has become a totemic device possessing supernatural power in and of itself. In this mental state, it is supposed that to achieve material success, all one has to do is imagine the best of all possible outcomes to establish it in the "spiritual" realm, and then act as if those things have already happened to manifest it in the physical world, all the while repeating Bible verses imagined to support that belief. When religious solutions to financial problems fail to have effect, suddenly we find ourselves in a very malevolent universe that revolves around the impoverished "unspiritual" individual, with no other purpose but to make that person poor while everyone else gets rich. That is insane.

A lot of this has to do with the philosophical environment in which the Church finds itself these days. For a better perspective on that, read Francis Schaeffer, particularly The God Who Is There. Schaeffer understood that the spiritual realm is the here and now. As he put it roughly, there are certain things the Bible tells us not to do. Beyond that, everything else is spiritual. When that's understood, suddenly the pysical world is purged of ghosts and malevolence, and is able to be comprehended fearlessly.

Basically, these days I am not particularly interested in further dissemination of fundamentalist Evangelical religious enthusiasm. I am interested in what Schaeffer called "pre-evangelization," which essentially is getting people to understand that two and two always make four, that fire is hot, water is wet, and that rocks are hard. It involves getting people to understand that existence exists, that words have meaning, and the profoundly negative consequences of believing that such is not the case. He called this "blowing the roof off." Without this, Christianity becomes a word which is able to elicit certain moods and connotations in the individual, and nothing else.

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