The Feminization Of America
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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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The WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men
by Christina Hoff Sommers
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684849577/qid=1088183467/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-6814778-4899969?v=glance&s=books
Sommers is an idiot.
Have you read the book?
If you don't want to buy it and don't have access to a library I'll buy a copy for you. If you are interested in reading it.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39030
Feminism's last hurrah: Madonna and the deafening silence
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Posted: June 18, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
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© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
The recent passing of Ronald Reagan highlighted the death of Marxism and communism. But to the list of "isms" which met their end in the late 20th century, we must surely now add "feminism."
Any rational evaluation of American culture would have to conclude that the movement that sought to have women taken seriously has failed. For every one positive female role model that uses her mind to advance her career – think Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton – there are hundreds more who are famous for exposing their bodies and catering to male lechery. Never in the history of the American republic have so many semi-naked women filled our magazines and TV screens, and the growing defilement of America's women meets with barely a murmur of protest from those who claim to be feminist leaders.
Three weeks ago, I strongly criticized the Kabbalah Center for allowing Madonna to be its poster girl. I made the simple point that a woman who became famous by simulating sex in front of teenagers and children on MTV, and who continues her vulgar displays by kissing Britney Spears on stage and being completely naked in her films cannot front a religious movement.
If Richard Gere, America's most high-profile Buddhist, began doing a nude review at the Crazy Horse Saloon, surely the Dalai Lama would distance himself from his protege. Fortunately for the Dalai Lama, Gere has shown that his adherence to Buddhism has ennobled his character and he no longer plays roles like "American Gigolo." If only such change were visible in Madonna.
But Madonna's public-relations agent, Liz Rosenberg, attacked me, calling my comments "frightening." She added: "Rabbi Boteach's vile attacks on Madonna's character and as an artist are staggering for someone who professes to be a religious person."
What is truly frightening, however, is that for more than two decades, Madonna has been allowed to destroy the female recording industry by erasing the line that separates music from pornography. Before Madonna, it was possible for women more famous for their voices than their cleavage – like the beautiful Ella Fitzgerald and the divinely talented Barbra Streisand – to emerge as music superstars.
But in the post-Madonna universe, even highly original performers like Janet Jackson now feel the pressure to expose their bodies on television in order to sell albums. This, in turn, has spawned the lascivious careers of copycats Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, who, together with Madonna, comprise modern-day music's axis of evil.
Sixty years ago, feminism rightly demanded women cease being treated as a collection of body parts and be accorded the dignity of an equally intelligent and capable member of society. But Madonna and her ilk have spawned a tragic world where, according to Time magazine, 40 percent of American teenage girls now wear thongs, many with the strap showing above their jeans, and thousands of college girls lift their shirts on "Girls Gone Wild" videos in exchange for a T-shirt. In other words, even women who pursue an education have learned that in order to get ahead they better get naked.
American television especially has become a sewer-spewing misogyny. Some of the most recent hits include "The Swan," wherein "17 average women who never believed they could compete in a beauty pageant" are cut apart by plastic surgeons who transform them from ugly ducklings into "swans." It has become a crime in America for a woman to be "unattractive."
Coming up in the fall, we can look forward to such edifying offerings as "Desperate Housewives" and "Wife Swap," which the ABC television network promises will "tap into America's voyeuristic tendencies." None of these programs are on the Playboy Channel or cable. All are on mainstream, commercial television, watched by millions of kids. The message that young boys take from these shows: Women are brainless bimbos and mindless nymphomaniacs, created by God for naught but male entertainment.
If Jews were continually portrayed on television as money-grubbers, or blacks as criminals, surely the leadership of the Jewish and black communities would howl in protest. So why won't feminist leaders speak out against the incessant portrayal of women on American reality television as publicity-seeking prostitutes?
Why would an accomplished woman like Liz Rosenbaum attack me, rather than Madonna, as vile? Because feminists mistakenly believe that a woman's right to simulate masturbation at a concert is empowering. It's all part of the women's rights movement, translated as a woman's right to do whatever she damned well pleases. But since when is behaving like a man's sex slave a form of empowerment?
But while it is unbecoming of responsible feminist leaders to remain silent in the face of Madonna and her copycats wholesale vulgarization of the female image, it would be downright scandalous for Jewish religious leaders not to object to Madonna being promoted as the world's most recognizable practitioner of Jewish mysticism. Kabbalah is a moral discipline that demands a striving for ethical excellence. Stripping on stage and calling oneself a Kabbalist are mutually exclusive.
Two weeks ago, on the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that desegregated America's schools, Bill Cosby, who brought to TV a highly successful show that broke the false, negative stereotypes of African-American families as poor and unstable, criticized those African-Americans whom, he said, persist in reinforcing negative black stereotypes and who fail to take advantage of the civil-rights reforms blacks fought so hard to achieve:
Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads! You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth! It's time for you to not accept this language that these people are speaking which will take them nowhere. What the hell good is Brown v. the Board of Education if nobody wants it?
Rather than being mauled for his highly provocative comments, Alexis Scott, publisher of America's oldest daily black newspaper, said the majority of black Americans said, "Amen, Brother Cosby."
How tragic that America's women don't have a Bill Cosby figure to condemn those women who continue to get ahead by flashing their busts rather than using their brains. This would be the perfect battle for an intelligent and accomplished woman like Hillary Clinton, and would have the added benefit of winning over her many detractors.
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Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is a nationally syndicated radio host daily from 2-5 p.m. EST on the Liberty Broadcasting Network, and was named by Talkers magazine as one of America’s 100 most important talk-radio hosts. A best-selling author of 14 books, his latest work is "The Private Adam: Becoming a Hero in a Selfish Age" (HarperCollins).
but I read it.
There is a mistaken notion that feminists have this rigid point of view, that we believe women should seek career and to hell with family. Bzzzzzzt.
We believe women should have the freedom to make their own choices in life, to follow the path of their choice. I will not knock Hilary for using tactics men have used for generatons, simply because she is good at it.
I don't have to like the choices some make. The whole Super Bowl stunt was ridiculous, and what was bad was one person ripping another's clothing off... not her exposed breast.
That some might cross the line leaves them open to criticism for their transgression, not for violating tenets of feminism.
Feminism is hardly dead... it is alive and well. I look at Title IX and all see it's brilliance whenever I see college sports results, or results of high school sporting events.
I see a need in other areas... more women in government, equality in wages, abuse and rape eliminated... basic respect for women in everyday conversation, not sophomoric comments.
With equal rights also comes the right to be make what appears to be stupid choices... as so many men have demonstrated for all to see.
It is absolutely amazing to me that you can feel so strongly about your right to *choose* what is best for your child, and still believe that a woman shouldn't have the right to *choose* what happens to her body.
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