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.

BTW, the author is a racist pig who hates women.

I tend to agree. Here's a better take, IMHO, from a reply within Mothers in Combat Boots.

But one must beware of some guy who is intimidated by women unless she's in a subservient or traditional position or some who want to keep women down and out.

Spoken like one who has a true contempt for women and their role as life-bearers and mothers and believes it is somehow "empowering" for women to split themselves in two so as to handle (by half the usual measure) the responsibilities of fulltime career and fulltime mother.

Perhaps it is you who are intimidated by women who aren't "leveled" down to a male-based homogenous form of New Man with the right to be unpregnant at will and a sexual predator (when she's being degraded on prime-time HBO for entertainment purposes or gang-raped, razor-bladed or copulating with animals for some pornographer's Pink Ballet).

Further to the author's quotes about the Socratic observation of human nature which the feminists seek to destroy with their unisex toilets, boys that must drugged until they behave like girls and women who must have every accomodation in order to act like men ...

... Clearly, life-affirmation is one source of gentleness and protectiveness toward women. But woman has another claim to male reverence and self-control -- her beauty. Why? Beauty is an immediately perceptible experience of perfection, of the ideal, of the sacred, therefore of God. Beauty is God's manifestation of His Goodness and perfection in the material world – whether in a sunset or a woman's person.

As Simone Weil aptly put is, "Beauty is eternity here below." this is confirmed by one's typical response to natural beauty, including beautiful women: wonder, awe, even reverent fear akin to "fear of the Lord." Often, too, one experiences a painfully intense tenderness and protectiveness for the beautiful.

Dwelling in an imperfect, often painful world, we need reminders that God exists and that perfection is possible. Beauty is that reminder. It keeps our longing for and awareness of the divine from being worn away by the frustrations and travails of daily life. Beauty affirms that life is good and worth living [AND WORTH FIGHTING FOR]. Beauty, then, is food for the soul – just as vital as food for the body.

When the beautiful is destroyed, damaged or degraded, we are the less for it; our souls have been robbed of an object of one of their deepest needs and yearnings.

Reverence for beauty and reverence for women and indissolubly linked, the first naturally evoking the second, the second a manifestation of the first. Women are indisputably the custodians of much of the world's beauty, certainly of humanity's – and not physical beauty only but a beauty of the soul … in their capacity for love, manifested in gentleness, sweetness, devotion and empathy. Women thus manifest the perfection our souls seek, hence are precious.

It follows that reverence, gallantry and protectiveness are the appropriate response to female beauty and are the women's due.

… Woman's fecundity and beauty, then, have profound significance. In them God's creativity, perfection and goodness are manifest. In them too woman is, properly understood, a bridge to the transcendent; they prompt us to cherish her, and in cherishing her we grow in virtue; as Goethe pointed out in concluding Faust, woman ever draws us higher toward perfection.

Who honors woman, the vessel of life and beauty, honors them and the God who is their author. A life-affirming, beauty-honoring civilization – which is to say a religious one – will honor women and regard chivalry as ideal.

All too clearly, we no longer inhabit such a civilization … If life is not a miraculous divine gift, but something that just happened for no explicable reason or purpose, then it has no intrinsic value. As the bearers and nurturers of life, women are the natural targets of nihilism.

… Misogyny, then, is not merely hatred for women but hatred for that which defines them as women and entitles them to Reverence and Self-Restraint; their beauty and life-bearing … The perfect example of this is the Marquis de Sade …

Long deemed virtuous and passive, women, in the sadist's world, are the appropriate victims. And woman's physical softness, apparent vulnerability, and beauty which in a civilized world inspire protectiveness, reverence and tenderness, in a sadist's inverted world only prompt cruelty.

… Woman thus now lives in a civilization seethingly hostile to life and beauty, her central defining characteristics as woman. She lives too, as the foregoing evidence also shows, in a civilization which is rejecting restraint, including self-control, all across the board, and becoming increasingly savage.

She lives, in short, in a Sadean death culture. And repudiation of beauty, life and restraint leads inexorably to rejection of and cruelty to she who personifies the first two and thereby has a claim on the third.

Like Sade, Romanticism glorified self-will. Solipsism and self-will are epitomized in sexually victimizing woman. Cruelty, rape and other defilement are praiseworthy; they manifest the triumph of the will, the victory of the active and assertive over the passive. Atheist Ayn Rand, an enormously influential pioneer of modern libertarianism, a self-proclaimed Romantic whose motive was "the projection of an ideal man," worshipped assertive male self-will. In Randian eyes, rape is romantic and heroic; the greater her beauty or achievements, the greater his triumph. [Several paragraphs on the rape of Dominique, etc. omitted.]

… Profound woman-hatred also informed modernity's ugly, decidedly unwomanly ideal of female beauty: thin, stringy arms and legs; a hard flat abdomen; vestigial breasts. New York writer Dalma Heyn lauded "the miracle of female bodies; the reproductive significance of those curves and bulges, the sumptuous glory of it all" - and added perceptively that women accepting the starveling

boyish ideal suffer from "revulsion at looking female" and "self-loathing," and "battle our own intrinsic femaleness." If a woman's normal voluptuousness has "reproductive significance" and sumptuous glory," draw your own conclusions about how an ideal of resembling "a well-developed adolescent boy" values life and beauty.

Radical feminism is a misogynistic Sadean rebellion against metaphysically-given existence, repudiating womanhood, aiming to "liberate" women from it.

… In 1948, Richard Weaver wondered "whether modern civilization wishes to survive" (Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19481, P. 185). Half a century later, we have our answer.

Modernism's crowning suicidal lunacy
in an era full of them
is feminism's campaign to force women into combat.

Now women too can die horrible deaths chillingly like Sade's "murderous passions": tortured to death as POWs, dismembered by artillery, crushed by tanks, roasted alive with napalm. Instead of admitting that the whole modern project which began with the Enlightenment has been a lethal error and a ghastly flop, feminists and other moderns keep stripping woman of her few remaining protections, prating all the while of how they are setting her free.

Excerpted from John Attarian's Women and the Sadean Death Culture (Culture Wars 12/97, pp.14-21)

Also on point (where the deconstruction of male common sense and divesting him of the self-discipline and assumption of responsibility from which flow his rightful authority and keep him impervious to the attempts of the State to manipulate him) ... Eyeless in Gaza: Sexual Liberation as Political Control

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