The Feminization Of America
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| Mon, 06-21-2004 - 12:12pm |
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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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Given enough time? How long do we give? 100-200-300 years? Sorry, regulation has it's place... and privatising schools, prisons, etc is a very bad idea.
Government has to regulate commerce, it has to be arbiter of what is safe, it has to protect people who have no power to protect themselves. Insurers have clearly demonstrated regulation is essential. If you look at the cycle in property & casualty insurance, the swings are dramatic, and are a big problem for business when the cycle goes into hard market phase.
>>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.<<
You believe that every fertilised egg should be nurtured and brought into this world. Right, I'd love to see your take on government taxation then. It is a woman's right to decide what happens within her body, not yours, not government, hers. Like it or not, it is the way it shall be, and nothing you do can change it.
>>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.<<
You are wrong about the numbers. You also neglect to mention that every major city in this country would be shut down by outraged women.
>>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.<,
That is very telling to me... being around a woman who is confident in different beliefs, confident as a feminist, and willing to speak her mind... would bother you.
I thought her point was valid.
>>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.<<
There is a woman... and her decision. She can consult with another if she wishes, allow another input if she wishes... but it is *her* call.
>>Peace through strength<<
This is the stuff guys like to throw around to make their toughness have relevance in a world that needs none.
I said that it did.
"You believe that every fertilised egg should be nurtured and brought into this world. Right, I'd love to see your take on government taxation then."
Not sure the correlation.
"You are wrong about the numbers. You also neglect to mention that every major city in this country would be shut down by outraged women. "
Not likely.
"That is very telling to me... being around a woman who is confident in different beliefs, confident as a feminist, and willing to speak her mind... would bother you. "
It has nothing to do with being different. It has to do with incompatible beliefs
Edited 6/23/2004 4:28 pm ET ET by vader716
Peach through Strength.
What would your Jesus say about that sentiment?
One million extra babies a year in the US alone... you can pay for their well being.
>>Not likely.<<
Yeah... women won't take to the streets... right. We just had a million plus gather in Washington.
>>It has nothing to do with being different. It has to do with incompatible beliefs<<
It has everything to do with not being comfortable around strong, confident women.
Wrong
<<>>
Yes, forcing a kid to wear a bike helmet in order to keep his brains from being scrambled when he falls or gets hit by a car is irrational.
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"If you don't stand up for something, you'll lie down for anything." -- B
<<>>
Then beat the kid with a baseball bat.
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"If you don't stand up for something, you'll lie down for anything." -- B
And you know why???
________________________________________________
"If you don't stand up for something, you'll lie down for anything." -- B
<<>>
And before big-bad European men introduced guns, how do you think the Native American culture hunted and defended themselves?
How did the ancient Egyptians get food without guns?
How did early man get food without guns?
Talk about a weak argument - you paint guns as necessities when, in fact, they were only a convenience which upped the odds in favor of man over the hunt.
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"If you don't stand up for something, you'll lie down for anything." -- B
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