The Feminization Of America

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
The Feminization Of America
181
Mon, 06-21-2004 - 12:12pm
I don't always agree with his columns (who does) but he is a compelling writer and this column is no different. I think he is right for the most part on this one.


http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

Driving Down Unknown Roads

The Feminization Of America

March 29, 2004

In the United States women are, I think for the first time in history, gaining real power. Often nations have had queens, heiresses, and female aristocrats. These do not amount to much. Today women occupy positions of genuine authority in fields that matter, as for example publishing, journalism, and academia. They control education through high school. Politicians scramble for their votes. They control the divorce courts and usually get their way with things that matter to them.

If this is not unprecedented, I do not know of the precedent. What will be the consequences?

Men have controlled the world through most of history so we know what they do: build things, break things, invent things, compete with each other fiercely and often pointlessly, and fight endless wars that seem to them justifiable at the time but that, seen from afar, are just what males do. The unanswered question is what women would, or will, do. How will their increasing influence reshape the polity?

Women and men want very different things and therefore very different worlds. Men want sex, freedom, and adventure; women want security, pleasantness, and someone to care about (or for)them. Both like power. Men use it to conquer their neighbors whether in business or war, women to impose security and pleasantness.

I do not suggest that the instinctive behavior of women is necessarily bad, nor that of men necessarily good. I do suggest that that the effects will be profound, probably irreversible, and not necessarily entirely to the liking of either sex. The question may be whether one fears most being conquered or being nicened to death.

Consider what is called the Nanny State by men, who feel smothered by it, but is accepted if not supported by women, who see it as protective and caring. (Yes, I know that there are exceptions and degrees in all of this, and no, I don’t have polling data.) Note that women are much more concerned than are men about health and well-being. Women worry about second-hand smoke, outlawing guns, lowering the allowable blood-alcohol levels for drivers, making little boys wear helmets while riding bicycles, and outlawing such forms of violence as dodge ball or the use of plastic ray guns. Much of this is demonstrably irrational, but that is the nature of instincts. (Neither is the male tendency to form armed bands and attack anyone within reach a pinnacle of reason.)

The implications of female influence for freedom, at least as men understand the word, are not good. Women will accept restrictions on their behavior if in doing so they feel more secure. They have less need of freedom, which is not particularly important in living a secure, orderly, routine, and comfortable life. They tend not to see political correctness as irritating, but as keeping people from saying unpleasant things.

The growing feminizaton accounts for much of the decline in the schools. The hostility to competition of any sort is an expression of the female desire for pleasantness; competition is a mild form of combat, by which men are attracted and women repelled. The emphasis on how children feel about each other instead of on what they learn is profoundly female (as for that matter is the associated fascination with psychotherapy). The drugging of male schoolchildren into passivity is the imposition of pleasantness by chemical means. Little boys are not nice, but fidgety wild men writ small who, bored out of their skulls, tend to rowdiness. They are also hard for the average woman to control and, since male teachers are absent, gelded, or terrified of litigious parents, expulsion and resort to the police fill the void. The oft-repeated suspension of boys for drawing soldiers or playing space war is, methinks, a quietly hysterical attempt to assuage formless insecurity.

The change in marriage and the deterioration of the family are likewise the results of the growth of political power of women. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen, but it is assuredly happening. Divorce became common because women wanted to get out of unsatisfactory marriages. In divorce women usually want the children, and have the clout to get them. But someone has to feed the young. Thus the vindictive pursuit of divorced fathers who won’t or can’t pay child support. And thus the rise of the government as de facto father to provide welfare, tax breaks, daycare, and otherwise behave as a virtual husband.

When women entered a male workplace, they found that they didn’t much like it. Men told off-color jokes, looked at protuberant body parts, engaged in rough verbal sparring as a form of social interaction, and behaved in accord with rules that women didn’t and don’t understand. Women had the influence to change things, and did. Laws grew like kudzu to ban sexual harassment, whether real or imagined. Affirmative action, in addition to being a naked power grab, avoids competition and therefore making the losers feel bad. It degrades the performance of organizations, sometimes seriously, but performance is a preoccupation of males.

Men are capable of malignant government, whether authoritarian or totalitarian, as witness North Korea or the Russia of Stalin. I don’t know whether women would behave as badly if they had the power. (I’d guess not.) But women have their own totalitarian tendencies. They will if allowed impose a seamless tyranny of suffocating safety, social control, and political propriety. Men are happy for men to be men and women to be women; women want us all to be women.

The United States becomes daily more a woman’s world: comfortable, safe, with few outlets for a man’s desire for risk. The America of wild empty country, of guns and fishing and hunting, of physical labor and hot rods and schoolyard fights, has turned gradually into a land of shopping malls and sensible cars and bureaucracy. Risk is now mostly artificial and not very risky. There is skydiving and scuba and you can still find places to go fast on motorcycles, but it gets harder. Jobs increasingly require the feminine virtues of patience, accommodation to routine, and subordination of performance to civility. Just about everything that once defined masculinity is now denounced as “macho,” a hostile word embodying the female incomprehension of men.

A case can be made that a feminized world would (or will) be preferable to a masculine. Perhaps. It is males who bomb cities and shoot people in Seven-Elevens. Yet the experiment has not been made. I suspect we will have the worst of both worlds: a nation in which men at the top engage in the usual wars and, a step below, women impose inutterable boredom.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 10:58am
>>I'm advocating the right of a parent to choose what is best for their child, not the state.<<

Why does each state have child protective services?

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 11:17am
>>I'm advocating the right of a parent to choose what is best for their child, not the state.<<

"Why does each state have child protective services? "

.....sigh.....

I'll assume for my own sanity that is was made tongue in cheek.

If you don't believe in my initial statement than you are susceptible to any number of problems if they arise down the line. Suppose your state decides that in the best interest of all children, shorts should be outlawed because wearing pants protects from skinned knees. Guess you will fall in line?

I have never advocated child abuse being allowed. Freedom to raise your children is essential to raising a healthy child. If a parent is abusing their child then they need to be protected. Allowing your child to ride a bike without a helmet is not abuse.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 11:30am
>>If you don't believe in my initial statement than you are susceptible to any number of problems if they arise down the line. Suppose your state decides that in the best interest of all children, shorts should be outlawed because wearing pants protects from skinned knees. Guess you will fall in line?<<

There is a big difference between the two. Head injuries can cause permanent damage or death. I've seen enough head injuries for one lifetime. Anyone who rides a bike frequently will be at risk, and will be injured. When I was a child it is amazing I never suffered a serious head injury, because I came damn close several times.

>>I have never advocated child abuse being allowed. Freedom to raise your children is essential to raising a healthy child. If a parent is abusing their child then they need to be protected. Allowing your child to ride a bike without a helmet is not abuse.<<

My point is child services exists because parents don't always make good choices. Sometimes they need prodding. An example is getting kids into back seats... few knew it was a problem until agencies started publicising it. Same with car seats, and occasionally you still hear of a child who has died because they were not in a seat or wearing a seat belt. There is a social cost to not wearing a helmet, to not wearing a seat belt.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 11:35am
"My point is child services exists because parents don't always make good choices. Sometimes they need prodding. "

Yes but where do you draw the line? Bike riding in general can be dangerous should we consider outlawing it? At some point the laws will get to a point where you will think they are too intrusive but by then it will be to late. No one worries about losing their freedoms, like we are daily, until they are actually impacted by it.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 11:42am
No, proper safeguards are not an infringement on one's ability to enjoy. You put a helmet on and forget about it two seconds later. Personally, I'd like to see them mandatory for skiers as well.
iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 11:48am
"No, proper safeguards are not an infringement on one's ability to enjoy."

Let me ask you this in all seriousness. Have you ever riden a motorcycle without a helmet? There is a difference in the "enjoyment" you get from being free.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 12:54pm
NH rescinded it's motorcycle helmet law, and it should reconsider. I've never been on a bike without a helmet, and would never be that stupid.

There is a cost to others if someone leaves their brains on the highway, even if you don't think so.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-31-2003
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 12:58pm
ITA with the article. I think life is a pendulum, and what was once a 'man's world' is now becoming a 'woman's world'. Neither are good. But such is the nature of a pendulum, it NEVER rests in the middle, where I think we can all agree, would be the best.

I think of my poor son, bomarded with "girls rule" attitude. One day I told him, you know, girls don't really rule honey. And he said (defeatedly) yes the do mom. Girls rule and boys drool. MY SON!! (and before you jump all over me, I have 2 daughters as well.) That is when I decided that my daughter will no longer be allowed to wear the feminist propaganda we dress our girls in thinking there is no harm in a girl wearing a T-shirt saying "Girls Rule" and "Girl Power".

~Rhonda

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iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 1:01pm
Great decision.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Fri, 06-25-2004 - 1:07pm
Hmmmm... it is important that our children understand the dynamics of this, why women have had to push for rights, why we still have a ways to go. And while doing so, we have to raise our sons to be confident, to understand this is not to their detriment, that they are not being shortchanged, that it is a better world when their is equality in gender. None of our push for rights should be at the expense of men... it is simply "move over and share."

I think it is good young women feel empowered, and equally good young men feel similarly.

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