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.

By turning our boys over to the sole care of selfish women via divorce, single motherhood, and the feminized public school systems, we have committed cultural suicide. By the time men as a social force realize that "enough is enough," there will be too few of us left to do anything but slink into mountain caves to wait for civilization to destroy itself.

When men are raised by the single women they often turn more aggressive and too masculine. The crime rate grows and on the higher level the dictatorial male personalities take over the power in society(Adolf Hitler did not have father around to set the limits).

The nature has its ways.

The aesthetic and behavioral paradigms started by Playboy have had a rippling, cascade effect which has swamped prior sexual morality

Sorry, I just think that blaming a magazine for these events is silly, and confuses the disease with one of its symptoms. There were pin-ups in Police Gazette at the turn of the 20th century. I remember a gag (that I didn't 'get' but understood to be one of those mysterious adult jokes) on a TV sitcom that revolved around the pictures in Esquire. I don't think Playboy even existed then.

I submit that this stuff was already on its way for other reasons, and that Hefner just happened to be the guy who showed up at the right time to make money from it. That makes him a visible target for critics, but to attribute a sea change in public morality to some pipe-smoking libertine in Chicago is giving him too much credit. The country was ready for Hefner when he showed up. Had he come by with the same magazine a decade earlier, no one today would even know his name; he'd be a blip in the Cook County bankruptcy records.

SpyderTim: "I'm interested in what evidence Harrison Bergeron (who I am suspicious may also be known as The Giant Apricots) might produce that "the Marxist gender-feminist anarchist" women actually burned their bras."

Harrison Bergeron: "If you were of age to watch the news on TV in the early 1970's. you would have seen your share of this silly form of protest. It was a takeoff on the leftist draftcard burnings of the 1960's. As for the crack about double identities, Jim Robinson runs a clean, organized, and well moderated site here... those kind of shenanigans don't float."

And yes, the radical brands of feminism are deeply rooted in the Marxist model of a capitalistic oppressor class (men) and a victim class (women) seeking redistribution of said oppressor class's wealth. So far, feminism has been the most successful Marxist graft over the American body politic, moreso than unionism or pacifism or even the anti-private property factions of environmentalism.

SpyderTim: "Finally, I'd be interested if posters would share their definitions of the term "feminism." I think that should sufficiently stimulate further debate.

Harrison Bergeron: You'll have to do your own research. Do seperate google searches on "gender-feminism" and "equity-feminism." Check out the Independent Women's Forum for some good material.

SpyderTim Reply:

1. You provided no evidence. Only your word.

2. I asked posters for their own definitions of feminism, not for suggestions for where I can conduct research.

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.

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Nobody's forcing you or anybody else to go to another site to read material. It isn't changing Freerepublic if I post material at another site. If this place bores you then you can stop coming here. I doubt that you will be missed.

I'm beginning to wonder whether you even wrote that stuff. One would think that the author of that material would be able to defend it. I would expect you to have quotations off the top of your head to answer almost any criticism. With 1200 pre-written pages to draw from, you should be the master of defending your ideas.

But that is not what we see. Your answer to almost any comment about this material is an incoherent, angry outburst, usually accompanied by denigrating comments concerning the author's mental faculties.

My observation is that most authors relish an opportunity to defend their work. But you don't, and you can't. All you can tell us is how much you got paid for it, and how frequently it is read by mental health professionals.

I don't think this discussion is what it seems, and I'm going to pass on any more of it.

I understand where your question is coming from now. After an intensive google search of my own, it appears that "credentialed" feminists are doing their absolute best to claim that "bra burning" never took place, despite the fact that we all saw it on the news and in newspaper picture in the late 60's and early 70's. Snopes debunks it, but all of their sources are notoriously mendacious feminists, so I had to look further:
"She is however relatively tame compared to Andrea Dworkin or Susan Brownmiller, who published tracts on the male culture of rape. Activist events such as bra burning are remembered easily, but more serious intellectual feminism also started to make inroads into academia."
From The Rewriting of Sexual History
Here's an actual picture, albeit small and hard to see - it links to a blurb on the subject at The Learning Channel:
If you follow the link, pay close attention to the caption.
Anybody who lived through the period got to see at least one bra burning on TV or in the paper. It could very well be that the "legend" became fact when small groups of campus feminists realized they could get reporters to show up at their events. Regardless, it happened, depite efforts to by mainstream feminists say it didn't.

Consider the female Army officer who complained that morning runs were demeaning to women

I found myself agreeing with this article until I came to this line. The author has taken this out of context and provides no source. I am quite sure that the author is refering to cadences which are demeaning to women, not the act of running. I know of no female officer (or other soldier) who has ever publicly complained about the physical aspect of morning runs. I may be wrong though.

Why are you bending over backwards to justify and explain yourself to someone you consider an "intellectually pornographic" lightweight?

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That's the first decent question you have asked, and a good one. I'm aware of a pattern in myself. I too often attempt to deal people who have little capacity or personal integrity as if they had capacity and personal integrity. It's a bad habit I acquired in younger years when I was at the mercy of such people and was put in a position of still trying to reason with them because there was no alternative. The world still abounds with such people, that's why we got the Clintons in the White House. That's also why I get people such as you and this other idiot following me around and attempting to ridicule me. You know both you and that other bird aren't worth a damn and will never be worth a damn. Still, against better judgement and evidence I treat the two of you as if you had a spark of sincerity or redemption, hoping to find it. At this point it I think it is certain such hope is unwarrented.

In other cases I am looking for clinical patterns to write up.

Having said this, go %@#$%%* yourself.

Anybody who lived through the period got to see at least one bra burning on TV or in the paper.

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My impulse is to say the same thing you purposely used to irritate me and say there are insufficient footnotes here to support your assertion. However, there are occurrances so obvious and valid that they should be accepted by people of healthy mind and good will in much the same way that one need not document the phenomenon that the sun rises in the East every morning.

In the case of bra-burning it was a weekly occurrance at various demonstrations in the late 60s and early 70s much as was draft card burning in other movements. The shock and efficacy of the act rapidly declined with repetition. At the same time bralessness becam a public fashion for a period. The movement then developed other thrusts in its direction. Some of these were intellectualized interpretations such as the assertion that any sex with a man was rape, and declarations of "I can have my own orgasm" which appeared in some movies. ...and, no, I don't have a list of movies.

I might add that bra-burning and public bralessnes was not the only phenomenon. I graduated from the University of Iowa, which has been as radical as Berkeley. I visited the place in about 68 or 69. I went to the student union. There, "seated" at one of the table was a female student with no underpants. She had one foot on the floor while her other leg was up on the table with her dress pulled up, defiantly exposing her private parts to the world in liberation. She was a true brunette. By then the atmosphere was such that nobody dared say a word.

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