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: 03-23-2003
Mon, 06-28-2004 - 7:58pm

Hi Morgan...welcome to the board!


iVillage Member
Registered: 09-05-2003
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 8:44am
So the reason for divorce is pornography?
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-05-2003
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 10:08am
Regarding the article about the Feminization of America, I would like to offer a few observations I have made in my 63 years.

Men have gradually and willingly refused to accept responsibility for themselves and their families. Look at the newer generations. Men have several children with several different women, and most of them don't give any child support until they are caught and their wages are garnished. Where I work, I have seen men quit their job and move on when their "ex" finally gets their wages garnished.

Men now expect their wives, girlfriends, etc. to hold down a full-time job, take care of the children, do yard work, keep up the house, shopping, etc. Of course, men still hold their jobs, (yippie) and most come home and wait for wifey to come home and whip up dinner. And...let's not forget the constant whining that men aren't getting enough loving and wifey doesn't keep herself pretty and giddy as she used to be before marriage, nevermind that he has put on a few pounds and lies around slovenly and bored.

In most relationships, women make most of the decisions because the guy just doesn't get around to it. Maybe that's because he is using any free time standing outside with his buddies slinging back cans of beer.

I suppose I could ramble on and on. For anyone that cares, I have been married to the same man for over 40 years. We have had our ups and downs like everyone else, but we are as close as ever, but we both look around at younger couples and we both wonder what happened to the men? Was it an intentional Feminization or did the men just get spoiled rotten and now have lost a good deal of control and respect. I think they did it to themselves, but its so much easier to blame the women.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-09-2003
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 12:03pm
All I can feel is pity for the author- it's very apparent that he's learned nothing in his time here on earth. Such ignorance... what a shame.

"Without music, life is a journey through the desert"...

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 1:45pm
Some wish to cling to old ways out of self interest, caring nothing for those who were hurt by how things were. Our country and world needs a healthy does of women's point of view... I'd say a hair over a fifty percent say is about right... maybe we (US) won't be averaging getting into a war every 17 years or so, as we have since the beginning of the 20th century.
iVillage Member
Registered: 06-24-2004
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 2:52pm
Agreed. If you look at matriarchal societies throughout the world (granted, there aren't many, but they do exist), you'll see that they tend to be peaceful and economically sound. Since we've never tried matriarchal rule or at least equal rule in the US, and patriarchal rule has led us through a series of devastating wars, I think it's pretty ignorant to say that women won't make good leaders. The only problem with feminine leadership would be that many men can't swallow their pride enough to accept it.

Stephanie


I Read Banned Books Pictures, Images and Photos

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 3:09pm
All I care about is an equal voice. That alone is bound to lead to significant change. I don't wish men to think we are out to get them... we just need to run our collective affairs together.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 4:39pm

And the previous 10,000 years of "masculine rule" didn't hurt women one bit, right?


Gimme a break......


Males will only feel inferior if they are raised to doubt themselves as individuals.

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"If you don't stand up for something, you'll lie down for anything." -- B

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 4:41pm

<<<She makes valid points in the book. >>>


That depends on your point of view.

________________________________________________

"If you don't stand up for something, you'll lie down for anything." -- B

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Tue, 06-29-2004 - 4:45pm

<<>>


And here all along I thought that SOME women wore them just because no panty lines showed through their slacks.


Sexual in nature?


LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL! LOL!

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"If you don't stand up for something, you'll lie down for anything." -- Bob Day, Marriage Equality Rally, Rochester NY

Help in the fight against a constitutional amendment!


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________________________________________________

"If you don't stand up for something, you'll lie down for anything." -- B

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