The Feminization Of America

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
The Feminization Of America
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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
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 11:13am

Sorry for butting in...but I have to address a couple of things...


It got my attention but not because it empowered your view point, or took anything back. It got my attention because it is a ridiculous attempt to be noticed.


I hope that was the 'collective you' and not a personal comment...and 'herstory' is valid.


iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 11:27am
No activism there."

There ARE activist judges. To deny it is to deny reality.

"There are certainly regulations... all in the public interest"

Free enterprise if given the change would straighten the problems out. Of course regulations have done such a great job thus far, lets just add more.

"They don't?"

No they don't. The government does some things well and even what they do well they don't do efficiently. No one but our government could build and run a military but it doesn't mean it is efficient. We have the greatest military in the world but it wastes a lot of resources as well.

"I know y'all think it is fashionable to dis government and liberals... "

I don't care what if fashionable. I have principles and they guide my beliefs. I love our country and our Constitution. I don't like what our government has become.

"there is little comparison to a viable and sentient being."

Little maybe. None No. The human being is constantly developing, different stages of life doesn't make the person less human. Abortion is murder but abortion is convenient to fix a problem. What a choice.

"Overturning Roe would not stop abortion. Women have aborted forever, and will forever. "

Maybe but it would cut it down significantly. Oh and adoptions would go up. Imagine that a childless couple receiving a child they love because he/she was given the chance to live.

"Is it? If her view of things changed? Is it "too" late? Would you devalue what she had come to believe? "

If we started out diametrically opposed on core values then marriage wouldn’t' work, at least in our case. Would I devalue it? Depends on what she has "become"

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 11:30am
"I hope that was the 'collective you' and not a personal comment"

"You" referred to feminists and the assosicated movement.

"What's wrong with her being honest?"

Nothing but her sexual preference was not pertinent to the discussion.


It is a little late to discus core beliefs after you are married, at least in my POV.

"Not many I'd be willing to bet. "

You'd be surprised.

Jim

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 11:40am

If the federal government does its Constitutionally declared duties and left the states to manage local laws the number and type of laws would be taken care of by local citizens.

And most of these laws that you and I are


iVillage Member
Registered: 03-24-2003
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 11:46am
>>There ARE activist judges. To deny it is to deny reality.<<

Forgive me, you are right. Fighting an order to remove the ten commandments from the courthouse was activism, and inappropriate.

>>Free enterprise if given the change would straighten the problems out. Of course regulations have done such a great job thus far, lets just add more.<<

Why were regulations developed where there were once none? Why was OASDHI made law? Why were minimum age and wage laws developed? Workers compensation? Unemployment compensation? OSHA? Why were regulatory bodies for insurance developed?

>>No they don't. The government does some things well and even what they do well they don't do efficiently. No one but our government could build and run a military but it doesn't mean it is efficient. We have the greatest military in the world but it wastes a lot of resources as well.<<

Companies don't waste resources? Are there functions best left to government? And what happens to the waste money? Does it evaporate out of our economy?

>>Little maybe. None No. The human being is constantly developing, different stages of life doesn't make the person less human. Abortion is murder but abortion is convenient to fix a problem. What a choice.<<

You say murder, I say nonsense. Work to reduce the number of abortions by education, by providing health care, including birth control as a covered benefit. You are constantly talking about rights... taking away something as precious as the right of someone to decide what goes on with their body is horrid. Again, if guys were able to get preggers, this would be a total non issue.

>>Maybe but it would cut it down significantly. Oh and adoptions would go up. Imagine that a childless couple receiving a child they love because he/she was given the chance to live.<<

This isn't 1960. Women would take care of each other. Our history is full of examples of unworkable or unjust laws being circumvented. I've no doubt women would do the same here. I've asked this before... what do you think happens if tomorrow Roe is overturned?

>>If we started out diametrically opposed on core values then marriage wouldn’t' work, at least in our case. Would I devalue it? Depends on what she has "become"<<

So you could not be with someone with differing views? Would it bother you she was in search of a different path? Would you discourage her? Would you try to prove her wrong?



Avatar for jc1202
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-25-2003
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 11:48am
<>

Such as your right to control every aspect of a woman's life w/o having to listen to her complain about it? Well, sorry about that. It was bound to happen sometime.

<

I carry a gun, no one dies. You have an abortion, a child dies.>>

Why do you need to carry a gun? So no one will mess with you? To protect your family? Why do you need a loaded weapon to do that? What makes you think you need one? Do you really want to live in a society where everyone is armed and dangerous at all times, in order to protect themselves from others who are also armed and dangerous? I know I don't. There is no reason for it, other than to make men feel powerful.

And in regards to abortion, the idea that 'a child dies' as a result of it is largely a religious one. An eight week old pregnancy is not a child, medically speaking. It's a pregnancy, and it's something that you will never experience, so what's it to you?

Why does the idea of a woman - who may have been raped or date-raped or have been the victim of incest, or who is 13 and didn't feel confident enough to tell her partner to use a condom or didn't have any real education about sex and thought she couldn't get pregnant the first time b/c the boy told her so, or who may suffer complications as the result of going through a pregnancy, or whose method of birth control may have failed and who simply isn't ready to go through a pregnancy - why does the idea of her making a choice about her body offend/threaten you so? Is it really that you feel such compassion for an embryo, or is it that you feel women are *meant* to have children, and any woman who has sex had better be prepared to go through childbirth? Does a woman who has sex *deserve* whatever she gets as a result of it? Your arguments and comments so far have led me to believe that you might feel this way. Set me straight if I'm wrong.

<>

This argument is based on the very 'male' idea of "Be realistic! War and shooting people are just part of human nature! It's how the world works, get used to it." Have we ever *tried* defending ourselves with words? I know it sounds silly - that's b/c we've gotten so used to a world where people resort very quickly to violence.



iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 11:51am

"What's wrong with her being honest?"
Nothing but her sexual preference was not pertinent to the discussion.

But it wasn't irrelevant either.


iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 3:59pm
"There ARE activist judges."

""Forgive me, you are right.""

9th circuit for another.

"Why were regulations developed"

I'm not saying regulations are necessarily bad. Excessive ones are, that is of course open to debate as to what is excessive. However most problems would be addressed by free-enterprise given time. It is the time that is sometimes unacceptable.

"Companies don't waste resources? Are there functions best left to government? And what happens to the waste money? Does it evaporate out of our economy? "

Getting a little off subject but...

Yes compaines waste resources, ones that continunaly do go out of business.

Yes there are function best left to gov't

No it doesn't evaporate out of our economy but that isn't a reason to waste it.

"You say murder, I say nonsense. "

This continues the abortion debate. I recognize human life in all its stages, anti-prolifers don't because to do so would be to recognize the error of their murderous ways.

"what do you think happens if tomorrow Roe is overturned"

Our birth rate goes up. Adoptions go up. Unplanned pregnancies go down because there is a consequence now. And yes back room abortions would again appear but in small numbers.

"So you could not be with someone with differing views?"

Depends on how different. If she were to become a militant feminist, No I don't think so. We would be too different to enjoy each other's company.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 4:08pm
"Such as your right to control every aspect of a woman's life w/o having to listen to her complain about it? Well, sorry about that. It was bound to happen sometime. "

This isn't worth a reply. It is only meant to inflame and doesn't attempt to post a viable point of discussion.

"Why do you need to carry a gun? "

That is like asking why you need free speech. It is a constitutional right. The better question is why you think gun control works.

"where everyone is armed and dangerous at all times"

Armed doesn't mean dangerous.

"There is no reason for it, other than to make men feel powerful."

Again see my reply to the top of this post.

"why does the idea of her making a choice about her body offend/threaten you so?"

It doesn't threaten me, it repulses me. We want helmet laws for children and kill them before they see the light of day.

"Does a woman who has sex *deserve* whatever she gets as a result of it?"

The woman made a choice to have sex. So did the man. They know the possibilities or should know. If conception occurs a 3rd person has been introduced into the situation. Abortion kills the 3rd person before they have a chance to defend themselves. Choice ends at conception, then it becomes murder.

"we ever *tried* defending ourselves with words? I know it sounds silly - that's b/c we've gotten so used to a world where people resort very quickly to violence. "

It doesn't sound silly, it sounds unrealistic. Sure a non-violent world would be nice but it isn't going to happen. IF we were to disarm as a country we would be overtaken in days by a more powerful aggressor. Peach through Strength.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-03-2003
Wed, 06-23-2004 - 4:18pm
With all due respect for your personal beliefs... "You have an abortion, a child dies.", but that *is* just an opinion, not a fact. At what point the various disparate cells actually become a "child" is quite open for (spirited) debate, and not an objective fact.


~mark~

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