Time to Set Down the Tools

There's been some brouhaha recently on my second home, reddit, with respect to the recent creation of a "kinder, gentler" men's rights subreddit (r/masculism) whose stated intention was to build bridges of understanding and find common ground between MRAs and moderate feminists. Team up for equality! Yay!

A few feminists (mostly regular trolls of r/mensrights, but a few well-meaning ones) have already stormed off in a huff, citing the "rabid MRA spittle" of anger that "already permeates" the subreddit, after only being open for business a week or two, and others have retreated to r/egalitarian or r/equality after being forced to hear their beloved feminism maligned.

Some MRAs, on the other hand, accuse some posters and the head moderator of bias, intellectual dishonesty, intentional skullduggery, sock-puppetry, and an agenda of distract/divide/appropriate and thus conquer the MRM.

There have been complaints by MRAs regarding the name of the subreddit, indicating a degree of worry that an "ism" is, sorta by definition, based on ideological and advocacy concerns that don't necessarily conform to equality of rights between men and women. "Will masculism become like feminism, which has arguably become a movement with nothing much left that needs doing, but which doesn't know how to stop advancing women's interests for fun and profit?" Unlike feminism, the MRM's stated goals are right there in its name--and many members look forward to a day when they can declare "mission accomplished" and cease their work. (Personally, considering the state of things now and the natural, cultural and legal obstacles in the way, I'm neither holding my breath nor dreaming of drinking pina coladas on some beach anytime soon.)

I myself did not have high hopes for r/masculism, though it was difficult for me to articulate exactly why. Given that my SO was called on board to help moderate the forum, has had long discussions with its creator, and that he seemed cautiously optimistic about finding some common ground, I was really bothered by my misgivings, especially since it was very difficult for me to determine their exact source. He is...well, much more forgiving of wrongheadedness in others than I am, and has characterized me as antagonistic at times. And while this is certainly true--I can antagonize like whoa and like damn when someone is being obtuse or intellectually dishonest--I don't agree that allowing bullshit to stand is in any way correct or helpful.

My intuition was that I would not be able to participate on the subreddit in any meaningful way without having to don the mantle of "bullshit-caller" constantly, and after perusing some of the posts and participating in the comments, this intuition seems to have been accurate.

But it wasn't until I briefly discussed it with my SO yesterday morning, that I finally pinpointed the source of my doubts. When I mentioned that r/masculism was losing credibility with MRAs, he told me, "Seems to me that what MRAs want from feminists is an apology, and what feminists want is to not have to admit that feminism has fucked up or that they're wrong."

And while I think there is a grain of truth in what he said, I don't believe it's a true or complete picture of the situation. I don't think MRAs want an apology. I don't think they're that petty. What they do want is for feminists to acknowledge their fallibility, that they got it fundamentally wrong right from the start, and that they are continuing to get it wrong.

A quick look at some of the links and comments posted on r/masculism reveals that this is not something feminists seem prepared to do. Many links go to seemingly supportive articles on feminist blogs--blogs with other articles that are altogether different, such as this one, purporting to be supportive of helping male victims of domestic violence, which states:

I wish they had done a fourth ad showing a boy child as a future victim. Men are a minority of victims of intimate violence, but “minority” doesn’t mean “nonexistent.” There are male victims of intimate violence who require assistance, and there seems to be virtually no outreach to abused men. (The Family Place provides assistance to both female and male victims of violence.)

But the best evidence we have indicates that most intimate violence — and in particular, the most severe and harmful cases — are typically cases of men abusing women. Given that context, it’s ridiculous that Glenn objects to the depiction of women suffering from male abusers. It’s notable that Glenn didn’t work to have a new ad added to the campaign, reaching out to male victims of abuse; that’s a goal I could support. Instead, he campaigned to have these adsremoved. Whatever his intent, what Glenn’s demands called for wasn’t inclusion of male victims, but the erasure of female victims and male perpetrators.

...and which decry the efforts of the MRM as "anti-feminist", the tone being that "anti-feminist" is synonymous with being anti-woman, or with tearing down battered women's shelters, or with being against equal rights.

What MRAs want from feminists is an acknowledgement of empirically proven reality, and the above quote falls WAY short of that. What MRAs want from feminists is full concession that feminist interpretations of DV, rape and patriarchy itself are, and always have been, completely wrongheaded.

Yet when I mentioned to one commenter in r/masculism:

The entire feminist line of thought wrt rape being about power rather than sex is analogous to their views on domestic violence as evidenced in VAWA. The entire thing is constructed on the premise that both rape and domestic violence are patriarchal crimes--society-wide patriarchal oppression of women enacted on a microscale.

Both DV and rape (feminist interpretations thereof, I mean) have been held up as supporting evidence for the more general feminist Patriarchy Theory that formed the basis of feminist discourse on gender and power structures, privilege/disadvantage, gendered oppression, etc, and even helped to develop what many call "intellectual tools" for examining those issues (otherwise known as the feminist lens).

If there is mainstream acceptance that rape is NOT primarily about patriarchal power structures or views of women, and DV is NOT patriarchal oppression and violence on a microscale, it serves to discredit the entirety of feminist thought on gender, and on the nature of the tools we must use to examine it.

Feminist academics have a vested interest in dismissing all evidence that their supporting evidence is inaccurate or flawed, which makes their efforts to dismiss, discredit, disregard, manipulate and ignore the mountains of evidence wrt DV being essentially ungendered, very understandable (though no less malfeasant).

When you look at child abuse PSAs, the abuser is almost inevitably male, despite the empirically proven fact that mothers abuse and kill their children at a much higher rate than fathers do. While male child abusers do indeed exist, this mainstreaming of only one side of the problem poisons social perceptions of maleness and leaves women completely unaccountable for their (larger) share of the problem.

This is what we're talking about.

...what I get in response, over and over, is the same tired reasoning that it is "useful to examine" the different gendered motivations men and women have to hit each other, and how cultural views of women inform them--such as a woman who hits may feel like she's standing up for herself, or may not actually be trying to strike fear into a partner. Just more of the same--that men must be hitting for reasons consistent with the patriarchal terrorist paradigm, and that who knows (or cares) why women hit, so long as we can make excuses for them?

The CTS studies on domestic violence point to ungendered motivations for hitting. The only aspect of domestic violence that seems to be gendered to any degree is in the reporting differences between men and women--men are less likely to report being victimized (for a variety of reasons), men are more likely to understate both their own and their partners' perpetration (possibly indicating shame wrt both, or a desire to protect a female partner from consequences), and women are more likely to overstate both their own victimization (heh) and their own perpetration (wowza).

If domestic violence is gendered at all, it is in that as a culture, we teach boys and men that it is always wrong to hit girls and women, and we do not teach girls and women the inverse--in fact, we teach them that hitting boys and men is hunky dory, even funny, and an avenue to empowerment for which they will face no consequences, not even getting hit back. And we teach them that it is never okay for anyone to hit them, ever, for any reason, and if someone does hit them they are being victimized and deserve protection.

Is it any wonder then that woman will happily overstate their own perpetration? With the culture telling them men are fair game for a beating, and the law letting them off the hook for any bad behavior so long as they cry "victim", is it any wonder that they will overstate their victim status?

But no. The feminist paradigm of domestic violence as inherently gendered in its perpetration (wrt both rates and motivations) is entrenched in the hearts and minds of feminists. Men hit women because they view women as "less than". Men hit women more often than the inverse. If women do hit men as often, then men are less harmed by it.

Sigh.

How do you deal with someone like that? How do you find common ground? How do you attempt to do this and reconcile it with any sort of personal integrity or ethical dedication to truth? How do you attempt to find common ground with someone who refuses to set down the faulty tools they've been taught to use when examining what society, and gender's place in it, looks like?

Here's a snippet of conversation I recently had with a feminist man on reddit. His sally:

So what about 'women's lib'? not even 60 years later and I'm supposed to believe that everything[sic] that not only did they already achieve equality but they were the ones actually causing the oppression the entire time?

You have a long history of claiming that, and I can't imagine how you convinced yourself that. Trading protection from work, war, hunger, etc for being a sex object? Seems like a fairly one sided deal, no? Women get all these things and only have to give up one. That would be pretty oppressive if it was women who were forcing men to protect them. Is that what you think is happening? Women are wielding sex as a weapon to get what they want?
Is that because sex is a powerful weapon, or because it's the only agency that traditionally woman has?

My reply:

Both.

I've never said that women caused the oppression. Only that they benefited from it and encouraged and enforced it, because the nature of the world up until recently would have rendered the alternative far more oppressive to them.

His response:

Wait, so you actually agree with me that women's power in a 'traditional society' is derived sexually?

my head just exploded.

My riposte:

Women certainly had other forms of agency available to them. Those forms of agency, however, had significant downsides and obstacles.

Listen, monogamy was a model of human interaction that springs from the cave, and could be rendered down to a very simple and powerful exchange:

A man got a shot at fathering children. In return for that shot, he provided resources and protection to his woman and children.

The majority of human behavior--especially, but not exclusively, wrt male/female interactions--can be inevitably reduced to a few primary motivators--individual survival, the ability to successfully pass on one's genes (generation and survival of offspring), and tribalism (bonds of family, community, etc).

For women, sex wasn't the only avenue to agency. It was just the one with the best cost/benefit ratio for most.

And that was pretty much the end of the conversation. He had nothing more to say. In light of our subsequent conversations, he's not convinced, but there was no logical argument with which he could refute my own.

There is no room in his feminist worldview for him--even as a man--to examine the issue from the other side of the gender fence, or through a different lens but that of feminism. For him, a woman was a sex object, and this was the worst thing ever (even if it was her best option at the time and improved her quality of life--not because of men or society, but because she could not realistically bring up children without being dependent on a man's resources).

There was no thought in his mind for where exactly this arrangement left a man, wrt sexual and reproductive agency. How this transaction objectified HIM. While it is sad that 400 years ago a woman's primary value was her ability to provide a man with children, it is equally sad to me that a man's primary value to a woman (and to the perpetuation of society) was his ability to provide a woman (and her children) with resources.

Warren Farrell called it "success objectification", and it is every bit as terrible and restricting and dehumanizing as sexual objectification, and just as much still with us today. If a woman had to sell access to her body in return for a living, then a man had to sell a living for access to a woman's body, didn't he? If either party wanted to procreate, this was the best deal available to each of them, even if it objectively sucked.

And all feminism's talk of historical male agency...well, yeah, I'm willing to concede that on the surface, men had more options--a million different forms of wage slavery (in a coal mine or a foundery or a factory or a forge or a barrister's office or a barracks) to choose from if they wanted a ticket in the genetic lottery. But if they wanted a ticket, they had to pay for it with cash on the table.

It isn't agency if you have to do it. It's only a choice between one form of slavery or another, a choice to either make horseshoes or plough a field all day, instead of writing poetry like you really wanted to, because writing poetry might keep your own belly full, but wouldn't bring you a "marrying wage".

My adversary on the internet is wearing very special glasses, and those glasses only allow him to see certain things from very specific angles. Those things all have to do with how women have always had things awful compared to men. Those glasses make him believe that it was obviously much worse to derive power with respect to the opposite gender through sexuality than through being seen as a walking ATM. He doesn't even see the men who sacrificed their health and their lives, the hours upon hours upon hours of labor when they'd rather have been doing something else, in order to spare their women the need to make those sacrifices themselves.

Those glasses make him believe that even though women initiate violence more than men do in relationships, that women are still more often the victims of violence in relationships because their reasons for hitting are different than men's. They make him believe that poster campaigns like this one and this one are better than nothing, instead of worse than nothing because they are lying to us about the nature of the problem, about the nature of society--both pre and post-feminism--and about the nature of men.

And while many would insist that any help--even wrongheaded help--is better than none, that if a feminist believes men are "the minority" of victims of severe DV still deserve support then we should bring that feminist on board...it just leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Because that is not alliance--it's conditional assistance, and it is conditional upon them being allowed to go on believing the same lies as before, and spreading them, and feeding the problem even as they're supposedly trying to solve it. And someone who cannot or will not see truth, who is lying even when he believes he's telling the truth, isn't someone you can trust as far as you can throw him.

Feminism and Gender Enforcement

I know most of you are probably expecting this to be a diatribe about how feminism has vilified and demonized male sexuality, and criticized the aggressive qualities (ambition, achievement, competitiveness, assertiveness) of masculinity that have been so useful to society since the dawn of time.

I mean, it's no secret to those in the know that feminism is all too happy to reinforce, manipulate and even codify the cultural norms surrounding maleness--in domestic violence discourse, policy and law, sexual assault discourse, policy and law, family law, etc.

But what I want to talk about is how feminism has manipulated and enforced other masculine qualities that most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about in any depth with respect to feminism. I mean, if society has been well-served by the men who were ambitious and high-achieving--the scientists, inventors, artists, leaders, etc, who inhabited the upper echelons of social status--well, for every William Shakespeare or Henry V or Sir Isaac Newton, there were a thousand or ten thousand male cogs in the machinery of society, dutifully bending their backs and making the whole thing work, often at the expense of their health, their happiness and their lives.

These men were dutiful, honorable, responsible, self-sacrificing, generous, hard-working, decent, and devoted to those in their care. "Nose to the grindstone", "get 'er done", "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do", "grow up, get a job, do something with your life."

I've often thought that there's not that much difference between a "mangina" and what has always been thought of as a "real man". Both manginas and real men are generous, thoughtful of others (especially women), and put the benefit of others (especially women) before themselves. Manginas have been accused, probably accurately, of behaving this way out of a (mostly vain) hope of being rewarded with pussy. Real men, throughout history, did this because it needed to be done, and because up until very recently, a real man's efforts and sacrifices were worth the rewards he received, even if those rewards only consisted of social acknowledgment and appreciation and the returned devotion of a woman.

A real man will help a woman move her shit, and expect a thank you. A mangina will go way out of his way to ingratiate himself by helping her, and then tolerate being treated like an asshole for it.

And "guys"? When a woman needs to lug her furniture from one apartment to another, "guys" duck her calls and let them go to voice mail. And if she wants a commitment? Forget that shit, he's got his XBox.

The collective feminist gnashing of teeth over this state of affairs has been no less frenzied than that of more traditional arms of society, as they all scratch their heads and wonder whatever happened to real men.

We've gotten so used to men's sense of duty, obligation and responsibility toward women, children and society, that we didn't even know what we had until we realized it was going extinct. And you see the anger and lamentation over men abandoning those roles nowhere more than in what many feminists have to say about "guys".

Guys--or MGTOW--are characterized by feminists and traditionalists alike as irresponsible to the point of repugnance, commitment-phobic, losers, Peter Pans, wasting their lives, and refusing to "grow up". Keep in mind, these men aren't welfare cases. They're self-sufficient, not leeching off their families or society. They don't peel up and down suburban streets at 3 AM waking up babies and kicking over mailboxes, or refuse to pay their taxes. But as Kay Hymowitz once put it, they're free to live in "pig heaven" until women get sick of it and go to a sperm bank.

But think about what this kind of criticism is actually saying about our expectations--even feminists' expectations--of men.

The complaint is not that they're a burden on others or on society, but that they refuse to take on anyone else's burdens. This is a far cry from the very occasional, heavily-qualified criticisms we hear of women--and utter condemnation of men--when they willingly take on a responsibility by, say, having children, and then fail to live up to it. No, this is all about, "You men are not doing what women want, and what women want is to be given what they want."

Women have spent the last 50 to 75 years challenging the roles they used to be stuck in, sort of negotiating and renegotiating with society as to exactly what was acceptable and what was pushing too far too fast. They've cast off their shackles, been free to define themselves as women, and to put personal fulfilment first. Until recently, for men, it's been mostly business as usual--they've worked, achieved, devoted themselves to women and children, and continued to put the good of others before themselves.

And I think women, and society, sort of figured that men would just keep doing it--working, being responsible, being dutiful and honorable, toiling and sacrificing for the betterment of society or the benefit of women, achieving, building, etc... even though a huge number of the benefits men were given in exchange for these efforts and for putting others first have been effectively removed. What used to be a well-compensated bondage is now an entirely onerous form of imprisonment. 

I mean really, how long can you expect a man to continue living up to those expectations when society stops respecting or appreciating them for it, when society only threatens to take away what he's built and what he loves, shoves its hands deeper into his pockets, and constantly tells him he's an idiot, or evil, or unnecessary, or a piece of shit?

A lot of feminist writers have been taking great pains to tell everyone for years about what giant assholes men are and have always been. And even when men do awesome things, like working around the clock digging children out of a collapsed school after a tsunami, it's just another opportunity to remind people how the chaos of the situation puts children at risk from pedophiles (who are always men, of course). When men die saving lives, they're called police officers or firefighters, but when they mow down a bunch of innocent people at a mall, they're gunmen. Hell, even the millions of men whose lives have been callously and brutally thrown away on battlefields through history--even their suffering and tragedy can be appropriated by feminists to prove to everyone who'll listen that women have always had it worse. 

Can anyone blame men for finally starting to say fuck this shit, why try to cram yourself into that mold if you're just going to be called an asshole? Some--PUAs, most notably--are even saying, "Fuck, if I have the name, I might as well have the game."

For the first time in history, men are starting to do what makes them happy, even if it doesn't benefit women or society, hell, even if it pisses women and society off. And EVERYBODY'S freaking out about it.

I'm not gonna lie, it's a tough pill for everyone to swallow, because those characteristics--duty, honor, devotion, self-sacrifice, responsibility--are the very characteristics that societies are largely built on. Without them, it's every human for him/herself, isn't it?

And feminism--which pushed women to live for their own fulfilment, to be true to themselves, to break out of the roles they were stuck in, who insist patriarchal gender norms harm everyone--should be celebrating men's increasing casting-off of their shackles, of men's smashing of patriarchy by eschewing traditional masculinity in favor of smoking pot with their buddies. But they aren't. Because feminism itself has been as dependent on those particular male roles as individual women have been throughout human history.

I mean, the entire feminist movement, and society's reaction to it (swift capitulation), boils down to the interaction of two traditional gender norms, right? Women wanted to be protected, provided for and given the things they want and need. And men have, for the most part, kept doing that, for decades, even as what women say they want and need has changed. Mostly male governments have passed laws and enacted public policy that gave women what they wanted (freedom, protection, provision, support, and opportunity) and individual men have also continued to keep giving women what they say they want and need (freedom, provision, support, understanding, accommodation).

Those are the two patriarchal gender norms that have been at work throughout the entire timeline of the feminist movement--women asking for something, and men doing it or going along with it to make women happy. So I suppose it's been something of a shock to women when men started putting their foot down and saying, "Yeah, I don't think so. Me first now. I got shit of my own to deal with." The men's rights movement has only driven this point home for feminists and women in general, and it's like two gender norms going kablooie all at once--women being indulged in their needs and desires, and men being indulgent of them.

And the most radical feminists? I kind of think of radical feminism itself as a kind of collective shit-test. Sort of a "Are you guys really gonna let us get away with this? Huh, I guess you are... Okay, how about this? We're really talking some shit about you now. You gonna let that stand? Hmmm.... Okay, well, I bet you're not gonna put up with THIS!" 

And the longer people have put up with it and let them get away with it, the higher they've escalated the test. The collective temper tantrum that's begun over men starting to put their foot down--whether it's through activism and advocacy for the equality of men, or through playing XBox and refusing to devote themselves to doing what women want them to--rivals the antics of any three-year-old denied candy in a grocery store check-out line.

And me? Do I want men to cast off those roles they've had throughout history? To be honest, no. Those roles are beneficial to society, and they get shit done that needs to get done. But do I blame men for saying, "Hells, no, I only look out for me now"? Why would they do anything different? There's no individual benefit in men living up to those standards anymore--not even appreciation--only risk, punishment and the reward of being called an asshole no matter what you do. 

Who the fuck needs that?

Woman and Black are Not the Same Thing

The other day, I had someone who identified himself as a feminist man, tell me that he is certain that women are more disadvantaged than men in our society because men hold more positions of power and influence than women.

I told him that when examining patterns of oppression, advantage, disadvantage and privilege, one cannot look only at the top. One must look downward as well (to the needless deaths, the incarcerated, the homeless, the suicides, the impoverished, etc), and frankly, men dominate the numbers there, too. They always have, and their domination of these areas has become even more lopsided relative to women as women break through the glass ceiling without concurrently breaking through the glass basement.

He replied that looking to those in power has always been a good indicator of privilege and oppression, citing apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow America as examples. Whites at the top, therefore whites are privileged. When I asked him if he did indeed feel that the experience of women throughout history was remotely comparable to the experiences of blacks during slavery, he replied "Absolutely."

I was shocked. And a little sick to my stomach. And I began to realize one of the reasons why I've been seeing more and more women of color throw up their hands and disavow mainstream feminism.

Anyone who has read my piece on Patriarchy will know that in my view, patriarchy was not a system of oppression, but a collective strategy for dealing with a world that was very different from what the world looks like now. Differences in biology that go just a little deeper than the color of one's skin, and a history of public sphere labor that more closely resembled the work portrayed on "Dirty Jobs" (only without the machinery) than "The Office" made it essentially impossible throughout most of humanity's time on this planet for women to collectively put their hands to "men's work".

The most effective team strategy humans ever stumbled on for perpetuation of the species, one that has been seen in some form or other throughout most of human history, was the pairing of a resource-gathering unit with a child-caring unit. Given the fact that until very recently, any sexually active woman was, or could have been, pregnant at any given time, that she was the sole member of the team who had the necessary equipment to provide food to a child in its infancy, and that the vast majority of public sphere work was either beyond her physical capabilities or more ably performed by the larger, stronger, faster man, it should really come as no surprise that the vast majority of societies have always arranged themselves this way. It was, up until recently, virtually impossible for men and women to swap roles on the team.

Then the nature of public sphere work began to shift dramatically with the Industrial Revolution, assembly lines, and automation, allowing women entry into jobs outside the home and giving them the tools to be able to compete with men. But even so, it wasn't until women got control over their fertility (the pill) and were provided with realistic options that eliminated their children's physical dependence on them and only them (bottles, formula, disposable diapers, regulated daycare providers), AND the workplace became dominated by service jobs rather than resource ones, that women gained some serious equality in the working world and became 50% of the workforce.

To say that this means men and women are equal is...disingenuous. Women and men are not equal and can never be, because men are still larger and stronger than women, and women are still the ones who gestate and lactate. What it does mean is that both public and private sphere work have changed in such as way as to make the biological differences between the sexes largely irrelevant. A father cannot lactate, but he can bottle-feed a baby as well as any woman can, and so can a daycare provider. A woman could never have been reasonably be expected to cut down trees with a handsaw for a living or harvest grain with a scythe, but she *can* file documents, run an office, diagnose an illness, operate a forklift, drive a taxi, enter data on a computer or work a cash register as ably as any man.

The biological differences between men and women are not even remotely the same as the skin-deep differences between black people and white people. Women's unique gendered disadvantages throughout history can ALL be traced back to those very real and significant biological differences between the sexes. Women were forced into their roles not by men, but by reality. And men's options were, realistically, not much more varied than women's.

The disadvantages blacks faced under slavery, and the ones they still struggle to overcome even now? Those disadvantages owed to nothing more than the color of their skin, and what that signified with respect to their status as persons to those in power. How on earth can the two be considered even remotely comparable?

Moreover, when we examine oppression with respect to men and women and their relative places in society through history, we see men at the top and men at the bottom. If we looked only at the top, as feminists have been, and are still, wont to do, we could say men were the privileged class and women oppressed. But if we look only at the bottom, and the expectations and obligations required of men that were not required of women, we could just as accurately and justifiably say that women were the privileged class and men the oppressed.

While there were downsides to being a woman, there were upsides to being one as well.

• She might have less freedom of movement, but she had a greater expectation of safety and protection than a man did.
• She might not be able to own property, but she had an often legally codified entitlement to financial support from men.
• She might not be able to work outside the home, but at the same time, she wasn't expected to risk life, health and limb earning money.
• She may have been "stuck" at home with the kids, but she wasn't "stuck" for 12 hours a day in a coal mine, either.
• She may have been under her husband's authority, but if she committed a crime, she wouldn't be held fully accountable for her actions.
• The upper echelons of power and influence were mostly (not completely) barred to her, but she couldn't be ordered against her will to die for her country, either.

When we examine the pattern of oppression, disadvantage and privilege with respect to black people and white people during slavery, things are rather more...uh...black and white. You looked up, and you saw all whites. You looked down to the very bottom and you saw mostly blacks. And things still very much look that way even now--the higher up you go in the strata of society, the whiter things look. And blacks still disproportionately dominate the areas of greatest disenfranchisement--the poor, the incarcerated, the uneducated. All based on a difference that is no more relevant than eye color or the size of one's nose.

And what, pray tell, were the "upsides" to being black in America during slavery? Can anyone here name a single white slave owner who ever died to save the lives of his black slaves? Who ever gave up a space in a lifeboat to his black slave and chose himself to go down with a ship? Who ever stood with a rifle between his black slaves and an enemy to defend their lives, rather than his right to own them?

Can anyone even imagine a white slave owner working 16 hours in a field while his black slaves stayed inside and kept his house tidy, then coming home and sharing the fruits of his labors with his black slaves?

Did a black woman who was the sexual partner of a white man have any expectation of respect, lifelong provision or shelter, or of sharing the benefits of his quality of life and his social status? Or was she just an object of the moment, free to be used and cast aside at will? Did a black man who was obligated to obey his owner's wife have any legal right or recourse when she turned around and pointed a finger and claimed he raped her? Or was he swinging from a tree within hours?

Can anyone imagine a reality where a white slave owner would perform physically gruelling or dangerous work his black slave was incapable of? Or would he simply set more slaves to the task, or work his slave to his death, or discard his used-up slave and buy a better one? If women were truly oppressed by men, would they have been spared the most onerous and dangerous work because they were less physically capable of it, or would men have simply assigned more women to the task?

Can anyone here name a single black person, man or woman, who rose to a state-sanctioned position of serious political power during slavery? Off the top of my head, I can name a fuck-ton of women who have been heads of state, going as far back as Ancient Egypt. The greatest and most notable black leaders emerging from Jim Crow America and apartheid South Africa rose to influence by opposing the government, not being elected to it, because they had no avenue to power within a system that oppressed them.

Women have always been less likely to be punished than men for the crimes they commit, and less severely punished. When, under slavery or Jim Crow laws, did black people enjoy this advantage? While women historically had to defer to men, in return for this disadvantage they have always been held less accountable for their actions. Black slaves, on the other hand, were under the total authority of their owners, and could be (and often were) brutally punished or executed--without trial--for crimes not their own.

Even now in these "enlightened" times, blacks are not only more likely to be convicted of crimes than whites, but their sentences are disproportionately long compared to whites. At the same time, while women no longer have to defer to men in any aspect of life in the west, they are STILL not held as accountable for their crimes as men are.

While a woman had less freedom of movement than a man, she had a socially and legally enforced expectation of safety and protection from the harshness of the world. Black slaves, on the other hand, had NO freedom of movement, and no right to any expectation of protection from those in authority over them, or from greater society.

Women had no money of "their own" (once they were married, anyway), but the most difficult, dirty, nasty, smelly, dangerous, physically arduous jobs (other than childbirth) belonged to someone else. And slaves? Do I really need to outline how it was downside all around for them in this area too?

When one wishes to identify groups which oppress and those which are oppressed, one simply cannot look only at the top of society and draw all your conclusions from who occupies those positions. In order to be oppressors, a group doesn't just have to occupy positions of power, but they have to, you know, do some oppressing. And while the biological differences between men and women could be said to be oppressive to both parties with respect to the expectations, obligations, choices, freedoms and rights afforded to each group, the oppressor responsible for patriarchy was not men, but nature.

The nature of human sex differences and the nature of the world we lived in, wherein some choices were simply not realistically open to either gender. Roles were rigidly enforced because rigid enforcement was beneficial to the stability of society. Was a man "oppressed" by women because his inability to lactate forced him into the role of provider rather than a possibly preferred role of nurturer? How then can we characterize a woman as oppressed by men because her inability to control her fertility and the limitations of her physical size and strength kept her from earning her own money working in a foundery?

The only quantifiable, material, functional and practical difference between black people and white people? Skin color. That's it. And yet it is black people, who won the right to vote before women did, who are facing a more difficult and arduous struggle for equality with whites than the women who have breezed to equal, near equal, or better than equal status with men in the space of a century. It is black people--not women--who even now inhabit an average position of lower social, educational, legal and economic status than white people in America, who are still disproportionately represented among the incarcerated, the poor, and a dozen other areas of real disenfranchisement.

And that's because the oppression of black people in America was--and is--really-and-for-true, one-way, genuine oppression that looked NOTHING like the experience of women relative to men at any point in human history.

Patriarchy was a cost/benefit partnership where men and women each bore some of the costs and reaped some of the benefits. Slavery was a cost/benefit system of oppression where all the benefits were reaped by one party and all the costs borne by the other.

To compare the experience of women--a valued, protected and provided-for class--throughout history with that of black people under slavery and apartheid is a slap in the face to every single black man who died wrongfully imprisoned in South Africa, to every single black woman who was forced onto her back by her white owner, to every single black man who was ever executed by a mob without trial, to every single black person who lived and died in bondage or in a concentration camp, and every single black person who still struggles to overcome the lingering and devastating effects of the utterly baseless, unjustifiable and man-made oppression of slavery and segregation.

So I just wanted to repeat, so we're all clear on this:

Women and Black are NOT the same thing.

Sex, Lies and Political Agendas

A very good article over at the False Rape Society, on how women's advocates are harming victims by their spinning of the outcome of the DSK sexual assault case. I started to leave a comment there, but then it got kinda big, so I decided a post was in order.

Prosecution's decision to drop the case has been condemned by women's advocates as a miscarriage of justice. They characterize the system as one that demands a "perfect victim" if they aren't going to abandon her. This is a gross mischaracterization of the facts of this specific case. Nafissatou Diallo was not just an "imperfect victim", she was a "toxic complainant" who has a long history of lying, and has done pretty much nothing but lie from the moment she reported the alleged incident.

Credibility is important in a sexual assault case--more important than in many other criminal prosecutions. In cases of rape and sexual assault, there is often no physical evidence unambiguously indicating a crime was even committed. What evidence there may be is frequently evidence of a legal act, not a criminal one. The factors that differentiate the legal act of sex from the crime of rape are based entirely on two states of mind: those of the victim's non-consent, and the perpetrator's intent--that is, his (or a reasonable or law-abiding person's) awareness of the victim's lack of consent.

There are usually only two witnesses who can testify to either party's state of mind at the time of the incident--and each of those two witnesses have a vested and oppositional interest in the outcome of the trial. This means that in a sexual assault case, credibility is everything. Due to the ambiguity of the evidence and the biases of the only eyewitnesses, it should be more difficult to convict a man of rape than it is to convict a man of murder, or aggravated assault, or any number of other crimes that rely more heavily on physical/forensic evidence.

But here's something I bet you all didn't know (I'll explain why you probably don't know it below). The conviction rate for rape is frequently higher than the conviction rate for homicide. Seriously. The conviction rate for a crime where there is no unambiguous physical evidence, and which therefore hinges almost entirely on a jury believing one party over the other, is often higher than the conviction rate for a crime with a dead body, forensic evidence of cause of death, and physical evidence tying the defendant to the crime.

To suggest that the outcome of the DSK case means the system "doesn't work" is egregiously misleading and harmful. I'm not going to lie. The system works perfectly for neither victims nor defendants, but it's the best possible balance we can manage given the circumstances. And to characterize the dismissal of the DSK case as some sort of evil on the part of the prosecution is...well, I can only say it's batshit insane. Diallo repeatedly lied to those whose job it is to help her and punish the man who allegedly assaulted her. Then recanted her lies, only to present prosecutors with, yup, more lies. She insisted she was not after money, then launched a civil suit against DSK for monetary damages. She lied to the Grand Jury, under oath. She quite plainly proved herself to be someone who can't be counted on to tell the truth about anything.

Even more frightening to prosecutors was her ability to lie with "complete conviction". This meant that, no matter how convincing her story of a given day or week was, there was no way for prosecutors to determine if THIS particular version was the truth. The complaining witness was not an "imperfect victim". She was the justice system's worst nightmare. To go to trial with an alleged victim who can lie so convincingly that even prosecutors could not tell truth from falsehood...this could result in railroading a potentially innocent man based on the word of a woman who'd taken a tire iron to her own credibility.

As the FRS rightly claims, this case does not demonstrate that prosecutors require "perfect victims", and it is the women's advocates who make such absurd statements--not police or prosecutors--who are discouraging women from coming forward to report their rapes.

But I think women's "advocates" have a very different agenda from the one they openly admit to. As people who care about women, and care about rape victims, they should be doing everything in their power to convince women to come forward and report when they are raped. And yet they do the exact opposite.

WHY?

I once suggested on a feminist forum that my advice to any victim of rape was to get a kit done. Even if you don't want to report--in fact, even if you're positive you don't want to--getting a kit done leaves you with options if you ever change your mind. You can stand on the bridge for a long time before deciding to cross it or go back, but not if you've burned the way in front of you--and you do that by washing away all the physical evidence of what was done to you. Not getting a rape kit done erases all your choices, removes all your power.

Oh, the shit I got from feminists! That I should have the gall to "tell victims what to do! Don't you realize how hard it is? How small the chances of justice are? How victims are revictimized if they report? It's up to every victim how she wants to respond to what happened to her! She knows what's best for herself!"

I suppose it's just as well that I didn't suggest that women have a social responsibility to report their rapes, even if they don't want to go through the ordeal of pursuing charges. Go in to police, tell them, "I was raped. His name is John Doe. His DNA is in a test tube at Local Hospital. I don't want to pursue the case. But if another woman comes in saying this guy raped her, believe her and do everything you can to nail him."

Imagine someone implying that women have a responsibility to other people! I would probably have been crucified for even hinting at such a thing.

Sigh.

There's a pervasive and very public sentiment among feminists and women's advocates that it is pointless to report. That women should not trust the police or the legal system because it will, at best, let them down, and at worst, clobber them. At the same time, they inflate rape statistics, always applying the highest possible estimates on non-report figures (even when such numbers couldn't possibly add up), and including women who didn't believe they'd been raped among victims in surveys. At the same time, they deflate false report statistics, clinging to the insistence that false report rates for rape are ~2%, the same as for every other crime, even though a growing body of evidence places the rate somewhere between 8% and a staggering 50%.

They routinely compare the attrition rate for rape (the percentage of reported rapes that end in conviction) alongside the conviction rates (the percentage of trials that end in conviction) for other crimes. How many times have we all read that the "conviction rate" for rape is a "pathetic" 6%, when in reality it is usually 50-60%, and often higher than the conviction rate for homicide.

All while simultaneously implying there is nothing women can do, no way they can (or should) dress or behave that will minimize their risk, and that every woman is at risk because "any woman can be raped". They go out of their way to highlight a "culture of victim-blaming" that, in their view, applies solely to rape, when I would argue that we as a society are more likely to engage in blaming male victims of female violence (he must have done something to deserve it, he was probably a cheater, he probably battered her, she was defending herself), and male victims of female reproductive abuse (he should have thought of that before he had sex, don't stick your dick in crazy, if he didn't want kids he should have kept it in his pants).

Even when these feminists and victim advocates are being nominally truthful, they still spin the truth in the most pessimistic light.

It's like they want women to believe that there's a HUGE chance they'll be raped, that there's nothing they can do to prevent it, and that when it happens, not only will no one help them, but those responsible for helping them will only inflict more harm on them. To what purpose?

We're seeing the thin end of the wedge on campus now, with the attack on due process rights--the new 50.01% burden of proof, the barring of an accused from cross-examining his accuser, etc. Feminist's defence of this atrocious situation tends to consist of, "What, so it's a horrible thing that the accused won't be able to personally ask the accuser, 'Isn't it true you're a big ol' slut?'" when such a question would already be inadmissible in any hearing or court. Again, painting a false picture of the process as it was before this "reform" in the ugliest possible colors.

I can only believe that those who engage in this kind of scare-mongering and doomsaying have a specific goal in mind. I'm not a conspiracy nut, but here's how I see it, looking at the entirety of feminist discourse on rape:

• discourage women from reporting by telling them it is pointless, that they won't be believed, or will be blamed for their own rapes and revictimized by the system, that the police can't be trusted
• manipulate consent law to the point where even women who enthusiastically participated in consensual sex can be numbered among victims (consensual drunk sex, consensual unconscious sex)
• generate fear among women by telling them there is nothing they can, or should have to, do to protect themselves from rape
• generate fear among women by telling them that any woman at any time is at risk of rape
• inflate the numbers for underreporting, leading to a pervasive belief that rape is everywhere
• compare attrition rates for rape with conviction rates for other crimes, so that the public will believe the system doesn't work in rape cases
• constantly reiterate the erroneous 2% false rape "statistic", generating an erroneous assumption that women "don't lie about rape"
• define rape as a crime of "patriarchal domination" rather than one that has a multitude of different factors and causes--in other words, blame rape on "maleness" in such a way that all men are cast as rapists or rapists-in-waiting
• charge the discourse with emotional language that places "feelings" in authority over facts--i.e: "If she feels she was raped, then she was raped."
• characterize the necessary due process protections for accused rapists as an "infringement of female/victim's rights", even though the "rights" of complainants--female or otherwise--are currently greater in cases of sexual assault and rape than in other criminal case (anonymity is a privilege, not a right, as is the inadmissibility of an accuser's sometimes relevant sexual history)

Is anyone else seeing a pattern here? The last thing many women's advocates want is for anyone to believe the system isn't irreparably broken. Because if it isn't hideously broken, then there is no need to "fix" it or rebuild it. And if rape isn't everywhere, and something women must walk around in constant fear of, then the masses will simply never be terrified enough of it to enact the kind of overhaul that would lead to the kinds of "reforms" that are "necessary", ones we've already seen enacted on campuses across the US.

After examining the entirety of the rhetoric of sexual assault and rape from feminist circles, I can only conclude that the end game of women's advocacy groups is to reengineer sexual assault and rape law to the point where a woman need only claim a man raped her for him to be locked away for years. 

Welcome to Hell.

Again? Sigh...

Again Schrodinger's Rapist, and yet another attempt to point out all that is wrong with men with respect to how they don't respect women's fears, and another pointless exercise in trying to explain to men that this is somehow not bigotry.

It opens:

Schrodinger’s Rapist is not about “all men are rapists.”

It is not even about “all men are potential rapists.” All men are, in fact, potential rapists, in much the same sense as all women are potential rapists, and all brunettes are potential rapists. All people are potential rapists, because rape is not a function of anything about a person except the fact that they rape people.

It is about “a very significant proportion of women will, when you approach them, be assessing whether you are going to be That Asshole...”

Okay. So far, so good. But let's reword things a little here, substituting "men" for another largely villified and demonized group:

Schrodinger’s Gangsta is not about “all black people are criminals.”

It is not even about “all black people are potential criminals.” All blacks are, in fact, potential criminals, in much the same sense as all whites are potential criminals, and all Asians are potential criminals. All people are potential criminals, because crime is not a function of anything about a person except the fact that they commit crimes.

It is about “a very significant proportion of whites will, when you approach them, be assessing whether you are going to be That Thug...”

Sounds a little different when put that way, don't it? And if someone, some blogger, some woman, some man, even some black person, were to follow that intro up with this:

...and it is in your best interest to ensure their conclusion is not that you are.”

...no one would have any problem whatsoever calling out their racist ass. It is not up to black people to bend over backwards to prove to white people that they are not criminals, any more than it is up to men to bend over backwards to prove to women that they are not rapists.

But wait! There's more. Here's a goodie:

That Asshole makes up only a tiny percentage of men. However, he has poisoned the well for everyone else.

I think a lot of men underestimate the fear most women have around rape. For instance, I am the happiest little slut you could ever hope to meet. However, I would never have sex with a man whom a friend, or a friend of a friend, didn’t vouch for, because he might kidnap, rape and murder me. On a rational level, I know the chance of me getting murdered because of Craigslist Casual Encounters W4M is about as likely as me getting hit by lightning. However, on the emotional level, my brain associates “sex with men I don’t know” with “getting murdered.”

Uh huh. Let's look at it this way:

That Thug makes up only a tiny percentage of black people. However, he has poisoned the well for everyone else.

I think a lot of black people underestimate the fear most white people have around violent crime. For instance, I have lots of black friends. However, I would never associate with with a black person whom a friend, or a friend of a friend, didn’t vouch for, because they might assault, rob and murder me. On a rational level, I know the chance of me getting beaten up because I talked to a black person at the bus stop is about as likely as me getting hit by lightning. However, on the emotional level, my brain associates “being around black people I don’t know” with “getting assaulted.”

In other words, "Please understand that I'm bigoted against people like you, simply because of your biology and my own inability to judge people as individuals, understand that I have cause to be this way, and you're just going to have to accept the fact that this is YOUR problem, not mine. I acknowledge that my fears are essentially groundless, since I know, as I stated in my first paragraph, that other groups of people commit crimes, and only a small percentage of people in your group commit crimes, but it is up to YOU to prove to ME that you are not a criminal before I will treat you as a human being worthy of interaction with me."

I'm disgusted. Absolutely disgusted. Whatever prejudices and fears--rational or otherwise--people may hold in the privacy of their own thoughts, no one could ever get away with talking in this way about Jews, or Muslims, or black people, or Asians, or Hispanics. Yet this...this is not only an accepted way of thinking about men, it is defended, over and over, when the identifiable group involved is men.

How about we reword it again? Let's try this:

Schrodinger’s Maneater is not about “all women are evil.”

It is not even about “all women are potentially evil.” All women are, in fact, potentially evil, in much the same sense as all men are potentially evil, and all brunettes are potentially evil. All people are potentially evil, because evil is not a function of anything about a person except the fact that they do evil things.

It is about “a very significant proportion of men will, when you approach them, be assessing whether you are going to be That Crazy Bitch...”

...That Crazy Bitch makes up only a tiny percentage of women. However, she has poisoned the well for everyone else.

I think a lot of women underestimate the fear most men have around relationships of any kind. For instance, I am the happiest little stud you could ever hope to meet. However, I would never date or have sex with a woman whom a friend, or a friend of a friend, didn’t vouch for, because she might lie about being on birth control and ding me for 18 years paying for a child I didn't want, or cry rape the next morning when her boyfriend demands to know where she was all night, or only be after my wallet, or take me for everything I have or care about--including my kids--when she's done with me. On a rational level, I know the chance of me getting screwed over in some way because I slept with or entered a relationship with a woman is about as likely as me...well, actually, it's getting likelier all the time. Huh. I mean, on an emotional level, I want intimacy with a woman, but my powers of observation and sense of self-preservation associates "sexual involvement with women, whether I know them or not", with "getting fucked over, maybe for life.”

The big difference between what Ozymandias wrote, and my rewrite, is that my rewrite is not based on sexism. My rewrite acknowledges that only a tiny percentage of women commit the wrongs I described above, and does not hold all women somehow responsible for the behavior of a few. What my rewrite does, however, is address the reality that should a woman turn out to be That Crazy Bitch, she will be aided and abetted by the legal system--both family and criminal--in her wrongdoings.

I used to think it was only the system that was broken--a system that has effectively ignored, dismissed and trampled the rights of men in favor of women's interests. But now, after reading blog after blog and comment after comment from women who've succumbed to rape hysteria, patriarchal oppression hysteria, domestic terrorist hysteria...I'm finding that more and more, it is women who are broken. They've been broken by a system that panders to their interests in the most negative way possible--by sacrificing men and masculinity on the altar of "equality".

I'm not afraid of men, and I never have been, not even after my assault. And I suppose there may come a time when I end up getting seriously burned by that lack of fear. But the possibility of being burned *isn't worth the price of living my whole life in fear*, of rape, of men, of sex, of relationships, of meeting people, of experiencing intimacy, of *living*.

The women who fear Schrodinger's Rapist are living in a cage made of their own prejudice and fear. That is THEIR problem, not men's, and it's up to THEM to climb the fuck out of there, not up to men or to the ever decreasing numbers of sane women to climb in there with them.

It is not men's responsibility to pander to and indulge women's irrational fears, Ozymandias. Women's irrational fears of rape are their own fucking problem, and they need to deal with it.

Atheists, elevators and watermelons...

So Rebecca "Elevatorgate" Watson has finally come out of hiding to post a video response to the criticisms she's received over the shitstorm instigated by her, "Word to the wise....guys? Don't do that," advice.

I am...well, I'm hardly shocked. 

There was a crap-ton (1.016 crap-tonnes, for us Canucks) of commentary and debate on her initial video, with many thoughtful and eloquent opinions on both sides. Granted, there was plenty of "shut up u dum cunt u just hate men ur stupid and ulgy bitch" going on (this is Youtube, after all...the gathering place of pretty much every human being alive who has not learned to spell, punctuate or express complex thought), but her treatment of the criticism she received...

I can only say to Rebecca Watson, "Atheism: Ur doin it rong."

Atheism rests on a few tenets. One is that faith and moral absolutism are essentially harmful to society. There's plenty of evidence to back this up. Argue religion with anyone who is devoutly religious, and you'll come up against a wall, again and again, an intellectual dead end that usually goes something like this:

"I'm a [Christian, Muslim, Hindu, whatever] because I know my religion is right. All the evidence I need is my faith. And if you don't believe the way I do, you are [heathen, infidel, amoral, wrong, ignorant, about to die, going to hell]."

I was poking around some atheist videos while on Youtube, and came across an assertion by a Muslim, in an interview with Richard Dawkins. The Muslim indicated that because Dawkins was non-religious, he by definition must have no moral code--that atheists, in not having an external and absolute set of ethical rules to live by, "would not care" if, say, people were copulating in the street. That if morality is flexible, then it is worthless.

Dawkins responded by saying morality itself should not be immune to examination and criticism. At one time, we believed slavery to be, if not morally good, at least morally neutral. We as a society think differently now. If our morality was absolute, there would be no room for equality or humanity, no room to improve society. I would further argue that if you're only being "good" because you've been told to, and the penalty for not being "good" is an eternity in hell, you are no different than a homicidal sociopath who knows to behave himself when there are cops around.

So now let's examine Rebecca Watson's assessment of the shitstorm that ensued after her initial video and how this meshes with her atheism.

Her description of her critics is confined to "a large audience of idiots." In other words, "I'm right. All I need to know I'm right is my feelings. And anyone who disagrees with me is an idiot."

She then reduces that field of "idiots" even further, down to: 

"I just wanted to address some of the questions you've all had....'I'm a man, and I don't see the problem in cornering a woman in an elevator and inviting her back to my room...uh, despite the fact that she said she's tired and going to bed, and despite the fact that she said she didn't want to be hit on, and despite the fact that I've never talked to her before. I don't see a problem with this situation. So if you say I can't do that, then how can I possibly get laid?'"

Yes. Because this is the only problem anyone had with her complaint and the ensuing debacle. The whole, "How are we supposed to we get laid if we can't 'corner' women in elevators?" thing. That was men's only concern.

There was absolutely no concern expressed by anyone regarding how male sexuality has been so effectively demonized that even a polite pass (maybe...heck, maybe it was just coffee) in an enclosed space could kick off a chain reaction of rhetoric that descended into passionate feminist testimonials outlining how all women walk around in fear of rape, comparing men to dogs that just might be rabid so RUN!!, that being in an enclosed space with a strange man is scary enough even when he doesn't open his mouth, and that "because you're men, you just don't understand women's understandable terror of sexual assault, and how we have to assume every man could be a rapist because maybe he is!" 

Nope. No concerns about that at all.

The equivalent would be if that Muslim had accused Richard Dawkins of wanting to do away with religion so he'd have carte blanche to fuck people in the street. Because hey, there's no other possible reason an Atheist might have a bone to pick with religion. Nope. 

But then. Oh then...

Then Rebecca Watson goes on to categorize those who agree with her as "normal". Normal this and normal that, and other subsets of normal people who were blind before but saw the light of her wisdom and are thankful for it. 

And those who disagreed? Creeps who can't get laid. We know they can't get laid, because she goes to great lengths to helpfully suggest alternatives to the flesh and blood women these guys won't be fucking--sex dolls, fleshlights, and watermelons with holes cut in them. 

The misandric inanity, it hurts. It hurts SO BAD. 

I almost don't know what to say. I really don't. Other than that Rebecca Watson is clearly a religious nut. Her religion is not Atheism, it's feminism. 

Feminism has all the answers, you see. Feminism dictates what is "appropriate" and what is not, what will "get guys laid" and what will not, what is "normal" and what is not, who are idiots and who are not, what should be allowed and what should not, how people--especially men--should behave and how they should not. Feminism is her absolute morality. Change "normal" to "saved", and change "creeps" and "idiots" to "sinners" and you've got yourself a bona fide cult. Convert, heathen, or be doomed to a life of loneliness, porn and masturbation (hell on earth, for sure). 

Which tells me that in addition to being a sexist bigot who, when she has nothing relevant to say descends into pettiness and insults, Rebecca Watson kind of sucks at being an atheist.

Patriarchy shmatriarchy

I hear a lot about patriarchal oppression within feminist circles, and in my opinion, I think it's largely a load of hooey.

This is not to say that I don't believe that patriarchy has been around for the vast majority of our species' time on this planet--of course it has. And this is not to say that I believe women haven't suffered from oppression throughout the course of history, or that strict enforcement of gender roles isn't harmful to individuals.

But the feminist interpretation of patriarchy as a system of oppression of women...it seems to be kind of wilfully detached from the reality of human history. It seems like a concerted effort to marry the idea of patriarchy with the concept of oligarchy into a single two-headed, double-penised beast known as Patriarchy Theory. This marriage of two completely disparate sociological concepts is, to feminists, a self-evident truth, simply because the majority of the agents of the oligarchy are, and always have been, male.

Oligarchy IS indeed a system of oppression, where the majority of real power and influence is held by a small network of individuals and families, who depend on the subservience of everybody else. While it may not always include barbed wire, machine guns and a police state, it is designed in such a way as to suck resources from the masses and funnel them, and the power they afford, to the members of the elite.

Because those elites have such power, they are able to influence legislative policy in such a way as to maintain and increase their power. And yes, the US is an oligarchy--it may be a democracy, where individuals are able to cross lines of class between modern serfdom and the top tier, but the 500 richest individuals in the US hold as much wealth as the bottom 150 000 000 combined. That, my friends, is oligarchy.

Oligarchical power structures, by their nature, tend to be self-perpetuating. As the saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, usually until someone says something about peasants and cake, something snaps among the masses, and the pitchforks come out. Given how well off even the least wealthy members of western civilization are (children aren't dropping like flies for lack of a loaf of bread), that isn't likely to happen anytime soon. Oligarchy is the root of classism, and classism is the root of much of racism, and yes, sexism as well.

Patriarchy, however, is not an inherently oppressive idea. It is simply a way that the base-unit of society--the family--was organized. And it's been the way that societies, large and small, have been organized pretty much since the dawn of time, and for good reason. Families were led by a male head of household, major decisions lay under the aegis of those family leaders, and lines of descent passed through males. That is, quite simply, all patriarchy is. And up until very recently on the continuum of human history, it was the most beneficial system for both men and women. And contrary to what feminists would have you believe, in the west patriarchy is mostly a dead system.

Feminists often point to capital P Patriarchy as the culprit behind all sexism, all oppression of women (though they're finally admitting that "patriarchy harms men too", which is something of a victory for common sense, however small), and the "Othering" of women by men. The way they approach the stark reality of most of human history is from the standpoint that men somehow consciously or willfully constructed and directed femininity for their own benefit, and that women just kind of had to go along with it because they were physically weaker. They presume that masculinity developed under the influence of men alone in such a way that it became attached to characteristics of agency, like strength, action, and virility. 

They believe men imposed this system on women, essentially Othering women as a class, and turning even the simple partnership of marriage into a contract of servitude and oppression of women for the benefit of men. What they fail to realize is that patriarchy imposed other characteristics on men than those of agency--disposability, utility, self-sacrifice and resource acquisition--and for the vast majority of our evolutionary past, women were the main beneficiaries and enforcers of these patriarchal gender norms.

Look at it this way. You have a rich man. This is his primary characteristic open for discussion, and he has all kinds of agency--he has flipping great wodges of money to purchase whatever he requires, servants to do his purchasing for him, to cook his meals, clean his house, maintain his vehicles, drive him around, and because he's wealthy he has friends and hangers on who "bask in his glow". Until his money is gone. And then he becomes C. Montgomery Burns on an episode of the Simpsons, unable to even dial a phone, standing in the supermarket for 15 minutes wondering if there's a difference between ketchup and catsup. He can't fix a doorknob. He can't microwave a Mr. Noodles. He can't even find his own clothes. He had agency, but it was dependent on his wealth.

This is a very tempting way to live a life. It really is. If you didn't HAVE to ever clean your own gutters or change the oil in the car or go out and risk your life killing and gutting an animal or defending your village from the assholes down the valley, why would you?

Men were, in many ways, all through human history, a servant class, not a class of oppressors. This is because even in the earliest stages of human evolution, we had an instinctive understanding of the ultimate equation. 10 women + 1 man = 10 babies, and that switching the numbers around pretty much meant the end of the whole shebang for us.

Dangerous work was the work of men, and it still is. Physically taxing work was the work of men, and it still is. Going out into the big bad dangerous world to get resources while women stayed safe was the work of men, and it still is. Those among our ancestors who were born without some pattern of these gender roles in their brains would have ultimately been unsuccessful wrt passing on their genes. The woman who decided to go hunt mastodon rather than staying home in the cave was much more likely to end up dying young.

And as has been demonstrated through genetic research, individual women were much more successful throughout the whole of human history at passing on their genes. 80% of the females who have ever lived had children. Only 40% of the males who have ever lived have done the same.

Because all those small innate gender differences feminists view as insignificant now, were generated and reinforced by one HUGE difference, and that is that females, not males, are the limiting factor in the perpetuation of any species. A human settlement survived through the toil and sacrifice (often of the lives) of its men, and through the safety of its women and children. This is simply the way things had to be throughout the majority of human evolution, and when they weren't, natural selection selected those individuals out of the species.

It's so easy to sit back in the comfort of our cushy lives right now and think that going outside the house to work is fulfilling, action-packed, exciting, kick-ass and an avenue to agency. But for the vast majority of our evolution, leaving home base meant taking your life in your hands--it was dangerous, physically taxing, and often ended in death. I lived in a wilderness area for 18 years. I know whereof I speak. We used to bring the dog on walks in the woods so we'd have something to throw at the cougars while the rest of us ran away.

Masculinity and femininity have indeed been bred into us, to varying degrees depending on the individual. Women developed a type of agency all through evolution. They had more reproductive agency than men have ever had (some social scientists estimate that double-digit percentages of men are raising children not their own, without their knowledge). And they had a kind of secondary agency, through the direction and manipulation of men. While a man used a scythe to get grain, the tool a woman used to get grain was...well, a man. While a man used a spear to defend his home from invaders, the weapon a woman used was--yup, you guessed it--a man.

I would guess that the average man has always had much less agency, even now, than most people believe. Is it agency if you HAVE to do it to survive? Is it agency if you're doing it at the behest of another person--whether that person is partner or child? And while feminists are busy deconstructing those aspects of masculine and feminine gender norms that have been restrictive and costly for women, women, on the whole, still seem perfectly fine enforcing male gender characteristics that are of benefit to them--utility, self-sacrifice, disposability and resource acquisition--and feminists don't seem that interested in changing this. In the advancement of women's interests, they've dismantled most of the benefits men enjoyed under patriarchy, while leaving the costs and responsibilities untouched. 

Feminists are infamous for looking at the past through the lens of the present. To take what the domestic and public spheres look like NOW, and apply that to their vision of history. But the nature of work outside the home was a very different beast throughout most of history than it is now. Feminists don't ask themselves what it might have been like to hew coal out of a tunnel by hand for 12 hours a day, or to cut hay by hand for 16 hours in the August heat before mosquito repellent or sunscreen were invented, or to split an entire winter's worth of firewood in the month before the snow fell. The majority of men's work in our past was as different from public sphere work today as a cauldron and a laundry mangle is from a digital, front-load washing machine. And because most of the few dirty, dangerous, physical jobs left out there are still the domain of men (and one which feminists are perfectly happy leaving that way), feminists have no yardstick by which to measure what being a man might have been like in the past, or that women were privileged to not have to put their hands to men's work.

On the microscale of society, men and women could be said to have oppressed each other--the whole concept of marriage could be considered a two-way street of oppression (if one were a "glass is half empty" kind of person, I guess) where both parties benefitted from their oppression of the other. A kind of cost/benefit arrangement where, human nature being what it was, could certainly lead to one party contributing more than the other and benefitting less. Sometimes that was the woman, but I'd have to say that it was probably just as often the man. But while marriage used to be a cost/benefit arrangement for both parties, women now reap disproportionate benefit while men pay disproportionate costs. And while women now work outside the domestic sphere, the 93% workplace death gap demonstrates that even feminists are just fine with men continuing to embody utility and disposability for the benefit of women and society. 

The application of the concept of Othering to gender norms is...a wilful blindness to the reality of human evolution. Othering is the offspring of colonialism, and last I checked, women had never had their own society where they were going along minding their own business, and a bunch of men invaded and took over. This simply isn't how it happened. Symbiotic gender roles evolved through an interaction between the importance of women as the limiting factor in reproduction, the extremely dangerous world we inhabited for the majority of our evolutionary past, and genetic paths of least resistance. Given the nature of what our world was like, patriarchy was simply the most functional, successful way humans stumbled on to deal with the world as it was, no more diabolical or purposeful than the way ant colonies or wolf packs organize themselves. Like democracy, it's the worst possible system, except for all the others. And when you consider the nature of the labor, sacrifice and demands placed on men in the past, I would guess that most women saw male authority as a fair trade for what they got out of the deal.

Patriarchy was, essentially, a collective, evolutionary human survival strategy. Arranging society that way created stability in a turbulent world--a world where a single loaf of bread could mean survival or starvation--and allowed us all our best chance to pass on our genes. And for most of history, people were too busy just surviving to tinker with such a successful system. This, I believe, is why gender roles are typically so much more strictly enforced in places where life is hard, cheap and soon over. Those roles offer both women and men living under extremely severe conditions the best chance of surviving long enough to create another generation. In other parts of the world, our lives are safe and relatively easy, and everything is much more relaxed.

That most oligarchical oppressors have been men rather than women is a result not of men being oppressors, but rather the result of men's gender roles, which are themselves a result of the path of least resistance in the way societies tend to organize themselves due to our biology and the fact that, up until very recently, almost no one had any time, energy, wherewithal or luxury to challenge their roles. The oligarchy does, indeed, have an interest in maintaining the status quo for as long as the status quo benefits the oligarchy. For the majority of human history, oligarchies depended on patriarchy to maintain stability and generation of resources, but any feminist who believes the world would be a kinder, gentler place under female rule would be advised to read a little about Elizabeth Bathory. Oppressors gonna oppress, no matter their gender.

If we're going to build a better society for everyone, we're going to have to let go of the idea of Men as the main oppressive force in Women's lives. It simply isn't how it was, and it isn't how it is, either. Am I arguing for a return to patriarchy? Absolutely not. I'm a bisexual, slightly genderqueer, divorced mother of three who writes dirty books for a living. I'm not interested in having my gender enforced, thanks. I have agency (inasmuch as my children allow it :P), and I'm not prepared to hand it over to anyone, even if it means I'd have an easier life. We as a society no longer have the business of bare survival as the dominant force in our lives. In the distancing of humans from the task of basic human survival, we are freer to explore our humanity, and consider the happiness of individuals as more important than just getting by. 

BUT. And this is a big but. I understand the reality of the natural world, and how different that is from what my life is like in a house, with heat, electricity, hot and cold running water, cars, frozen pizzas, toaster ovens, plastic, easy work, an overdraft and streets that are safe to walk on. I realize that in nature, life is hard, cheap and soon over, and that very, very few animals ever die of old age. And were we living in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where life outside of walls was as dangerous and brutal as most of raw nature is, and where hay would have to be cut by hand without mosquito repellent or sunscreen? I think I'd absolutely be okay with letting the men have their "agency". Being stuck at home ain't that bad if it means the gruelling, dirty work of survival belongs to someone else, and you get to stay alive.

Something to think about.