An Open Letter to Gender Feminists

"[‘An Open Letter to Gender Feminists’] is AMAZING... [It is] so well reasoned, filled with so many non-obvious truths, so well researched, you owe it to the world to make all efforts to get it read by as many people as possible. Men truly are being prejudiced against. You document it so well."

-Marty Nemko, Ph.D.; Career & Personal Coach; producer and host, “Work with Marty Nemko” (NPR-San Fran.); author, Cool Careers for Dummies; columnist, San Francisco Chronicle; www.martynemko.com

A “gender” feminist (female or male), unlike an “equity” feminist, advocates a female-centered, anti-male view of the world. She sees God as female and Satan as male. She is outraged that in the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” in which we saw thousands of men slaughtered or horribly maimed, all the typists are women. (The terms for these different feminists are from Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism?)

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Stop Polarizing

the Sexes!

by Jerry A. Boggs, Author of the Male Matters blog

     Gender relations could not be more strained.

"On some days," writes Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in Feminism Is Not The Story Of My Life, "it is hard not to believe that our society has collapsed into an all-out war between the sexes.”

Cathy Young laments in Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, "...[F]or every sign of a return to sanity, there are several signs that the culture of gender polarization is alive." Ceasefire, p. 265, hardcover

In Fire With Fire, Naomi Wolf says, “We are not simply experiencing a ‘war against women’ in which women are unthreatening victims. Rather, we are in the midst of a civil war over gender, in which there is not one side waging battle but two, unevenly matched though they may be. It is also a war against men.”

Daphne Patai, author of Professing Feminism, notes that “years of exposure to feminist-promoted scare statistics have succeeded in imbuing many young women with a foreboding sense of living under the constant threat of predatory men.”

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Dear Gender Feminists:

Here is the short reason for this great gender divide: Like an ill-trained doctor, you misdiagnosed the sexes’ condition from the get-go and now you prescribe the wrong remedy, one that has set many men and women seething at each other over a wide range of issues, from jobs and health funding, to violence in the home and sexual harassment in the workplace.

As all know, you diagnosed the sexes’ condition along this line: Men possess a cornucopia of power and privilege, and women possess nothing save the misfortune of being crushed underfoot by a patriarchal boot. Your remedy, then, was to confer to women, at men’s expense where necessary, more rights, privileges, power, self-esteem, money – anything that would make life as good for them as you envision it being for men.

Because of your persistence and no small dollop of chivalry, this “remedy” was eventually seized upon and promoted by virtually every institution as if gospel. This happened, as did the gender alienation, because in your diagnosis of the gender condition, you and the largely suppliant, unquestioning news media gave not even the briefest glance to the male side of the issues. You failed to look beyond your oversimplified “Men run things and earn more money, so they have the power.”

So, for example, when you deemed women oppressed because “they were stuck at home with the children,” you failed to acknowledge the male side: men were stuck at work away from the children, and that it can be just as oppressive to be stuck with the boss, over whom one has no control, as it can be to be stuck with the children, over whom one generally has control; men often endured pressure-cooker jobs solely to fulfill their role of earning enough income so their stay-at-home wife could stay home.

“The relations between men and women have indeed become ‘problematized,’ so much so that any word, any gesture, may these days give offense to women.” –Daphne Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism

Your diagnosis of gender stumbled early on when you compared the sexes’ wages. Some of you admitted it was logical that men earned more as providers, but then most of you illogically declared it discriminatory that women earned less. Your word for it was that women were “corralled” into lower-paid jobs.

You refused to admit the obvious: men were corralled away from low-paid jobs by their provider role and by society’s – including women’s – expectation of greater male success. Burdened with supporting two or more people, men were denied access to lower-paying jobs that might have interested them more or offered them the flexibility they needed to become more involved with their children.

And you refused to understand something any 14-year-old realizes: most women either have been married and had most or all their expenses paid by a husband, or have been single and expecting their expenses to be paid by a husband. As a supported group that needs less income than men because their expenses are paid (or are expected to be paid), women have been able to “underbid” men for the lower-paid jobs that are usually more flexible and less stressful. The “corralling” of women into lower-paid occupations stems from supported women’s ability to accept the pay of jobs which men have been priced out of by their greater financial obligation as sole or primary provider and the greater expectation of male success. Many if not most supported and expecting-to-be-supported women are like live-at-home teens. These teens can accept a job that barely pays pocket change, while their parents cannot, since they must support both themselves and the teens.

A job’s pay, you insist, is determined by which sex dominates the job. In fact, it is the opposite: Which sex dominates a job is determined by the job’s pay. Just as society steered women into low-paid jobs, it steers men away from them and into jobs which pay more but which men pay more for with longer hours, a job accident rate 600 percent higher than women’s, and a job death rate 15 times higher.

The “corralling” of the sexes into different jobs began in earnest around 1908. That’s when states were pressured, largely by women, to pass hours-limitation laws. These laws barred employers from requiring women to work more than ten hours a day. Clearly discriminatory against men, the laws forced employers to hire only men in jobs subject to last-minute changes in work-hours. These laws to protect women launched the division of labor by sex and the gender wage gap.

But never mind all this. Never mind logic and common sense and the fact that it is incontrovertible that providers, who have mostly been men, will perforce earn more than those who are provided for, who have mostly been women (and children). To advance your oppression theory, you simply ignored this reality and demanded acceptance of your idea that the sexes’ wage gap derives entirely from discrimination against women to benefit men.

With this demand, you and your inexhaustibly faithful handmaidens in the dominant media influenced employers and institutions everywhere to brush aside equal opportunity – the sensible, fair approach to gender equity in employment – and to establish in male professions equal outcomes, which by definition require discrimination against men where imbalances exist.

But to you, being unfair to men was downright upright. After all, men earned the lion's share of the money and hence had the power.

It still has not dawned on you that there is no power in earning money. There can be satisfaction, even exhilaration (the “thrill of the hunt and conquest”) in earning money, but in time, for most of us this satisfaction tends to wither as the monotony of work bears down. For the vast majority of workers, earning money produces not power but responsibility and stress. The power in money is in spending it. (Ask political action committees, or criminals who bribe officials. Or suppose you worked 60 hours a week and earned $1 million a year but couldn’t spend it? Would you feel powerful? “Money talks” points to the power or influence derived from spending money, not from earning it.) And according to American Demographic, women control consumer spending by a wide margin in nearly every consumer category. The greatest power in money, I suggest, lies in the right to spend money toiled for by others.

Who controls most of the wealth in the nation? Women. And they read newspapers. Newspaper advertising puts messages in front of an audience that controls most of the nation’s retail spending.

–Editor & Publisher, front page, Sep. 21, 1996

When the man became wealthy from the work he did for over two decades, he was 45 years old and his wife was 40. He died at age 73, men’s average longevity. She died at age 79, women’s average longevity. She enjoyed the wealth he alone created eleven years longer than he did. Yet ideological feminists would say he had power and she had oppression.

You stumbled again in your analysis of gender when you said the male-provider/female-providee arrangement was created and controlled by the man to benefit him. You chose to see it this way although in your heart you know the truth. Suppose that at any time in our history, including today, a fellow had told a woman on their first date, “When I get married, I plan to stay at home with the children so my wife can work like a man and acquire power.” It's pretty safe to bet, I think, that there never would have been a second date, but there would have been a lot of laughter of the rolling-around-on-the-floor, hysterical type, by her and by everyone else within earshot.

You erred, too, in thinking men want only one thing. (No, not sex. Work.) One of your deepest biases is to believe that men would not dream of giving up a fraction of their “privilege-and-power-filled” romp at work and staying at home with their children. In truth, most men even today fear societal scorn and female rejection too much to deviate from their primary provider-role script. So until very recently they have not felt permitted even to think about staying at home with the children. And you haven’t bothered to ask them whether they think about it, either. If you were to ask, you’d find what, according to a June 16, 2002, report in Australia’s Sunday Times, was found by an Australian Institute of Family Studies report titled "Talking to Fathers": a “strong motivation among the fathers interviewed to be involved in their children's lives – an involvement that many of them found difficult with their present workloads and work conditions and/or cultures…."

The news media have fed us a relentless parade of politicians and other male bigwigs – the U.S. president, Donald Trump, the CEO du jour – whose wealth or power you can almost smell. The daily high visibility of such men enabled you to successfully plant your feminist fallacy: all the people with power are men, therefore all men have power. Virtually every adult can see through this fallacy, but that didn't stop you and the mainstream media from continuing to imply through your rhetoric that it is valid.

What you and the news media failed to mention was that these “powerful” men represent only a tiny fraction of working men, and that most of them each week log in 60-plus hours at the office and still more at home while tethered to briefcase, phone, and computer. No doubt as a result of this "voluntary slavery," according to a survey by Burson-Marsteller, the New York-based global communications consultancy, a whopping 73 percent of 369 CEOs answered yes to the question, "Do you think about quitting your job?" More than 80 percent said they are kept awake at night by company demons, including worries about the competition and how to increase business and make shareholders happy. That's power?

The huge majority of women moving onto “male” turf have entered the physically safe professions. So more men are forced to seek dangerous jobs, the increased demand tending to lower the jobs’ wages.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1203/execs_quit.asp

But more to the gender point, you omitted the fact that virtually every one of these men have or will have a wife who does not have to work at all and can usually do as she pleases, especially after the nanny and the domestic workers arrive to do her work for her, including much of her “social director” work.

The successful man’s wife now has it even better. “Has there ever been a better time to be a woman?” asked Forbes in its August 11, 1997, issue. “Want to work 70 hours a week and compete with the boys on Wall Street? Or do you prefer to stay at home and do a good job raising your children? As a woman you can now have it either way.” Thanks to husbands.

The successful man’s wife has a third option: doing some combination of part-time work and mothering. Compare her three options, says Warren Farrell, author of Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, to men’s three “options”:

1. work full time

2. work full time

3. work full time with overtime.

When using the gender wage gap to symbolize women’s oppression, you neglected to point out that a woman generally has had as good a chance to find a well-paid husband as a man has had to find a well-paid job. Conversely, a man has had as poor a chance to find a well-paid wife – who would give him the options traditionally accorded only to wives – as a woman has had to find a well-paid job. What has limited one sex has tended to limit the other. Some would call that a gender wash.

You have told us countless times that husbands have had equal access to the home-cooked meals and other domestic advantages wrought by wives, without equal production in the home. But when will you admit that wives have had equal access to the income and other economic advantages wrought by husbands, without equal production in the workplace?

For a jolting illustration of the latter, consider the marriage of software tycoon William Gates. To build his mind-blowing wealth, Gates doubtless labored hard for most of his adult life. Yet when he married, his bride and former subordinate Melinda, barring some prenuptial agreement stating otherwise, gained legal access to everything he has, including, with or without a prenuptial, his extravagant standard of living – in one day. He became a billionaire over decades; she became one overnight. Who has power? And who has more privilege, the CEO with his one option and over-60-hour workweek, or his wife with her three options and control over most of their spending? Might this at least partly explain why women as a group outlive men by many years and enjoy better health?

Society denies husbands the options given wives, then with diversity-like programs penalizes men for the gender wage gap created by giving wives options. What option does society deny women, then punishes them for not having it?

Just as females were punished for trying to succeed, men are still punished for failing.

(Incidentally, did not Gates’ premarital pursuit of Melinda violate the law pertaining to the “hostile work environment,” the definition of which includes bosses requesting dates from subordinates? What would have been Melinda’s response had Gates been not her billionaire employer but her so-so well-off immediate boss? A request for a date by Ultra Rich Gates, who is Everywoman’s Mr. Right, is the kind of “harass­ment” few of his female employees would have griped about. Such reminds us of who in practice ends up being penalized most by sexual harassment laws: men who aren't handsome enough if they aren't successful enough.)

You and the mainstream media, which largely serve as your protectors and agents, have long given a forum to women’s complaint that men treat women as sex objects, that men eye women as if they were only so much racked meat. But how often have you listened to men’s complaint that women treat men as success objects and regard them as if they were only so much stacked money? On the singles’ scene, a woman’s seemingly innocent “What do you do?” equates fully to a man’s eyeing her up and down. (Never mind that she eyes him up and down, too, to check out his physical appeal as she also checks out his economic appeal, in essence expecting twice as much of him as he expects of her, this double expectation being the real double standard.) Many women still buy books and attend courses with names like “How To Marry Wealth.” There is no demand for books and courses called “How To Get a Man Who Wants To Stay At Home With the Children So You Can Pursue a Career.” And many young women are still told, “You can fall in love with a rich man as easily as with a poor man.” They are encouraged to focus on a man’s check size even as they are taught to label sexist a man's focus on her chest size.

So naturally, because of your and the media’s one-sidedness on such issues, we hear much about a “Beauty Myth,” which blames men for women’s preoccupation with beauty, and we hear little about an “achiever myth,” men’s preoccupation with success. When we do hear about the latter, we hear that it, too, is blamed on men, on the male ego.

You would never bring yourself to question whether the sexes’ respective preoccupations might be linked to the sexes’ unequal sharing of the initiative-taking that launches and advances male-female relationships.

Ask yourself – and stay with me as I walk you through this – why women wear makeup and men do not. Your answer is that men’s demand for beauty compels women to wear it, and even tough women who iron-fistedly rule cut-throat companies are powerless to resist the demand. There is, of course, a better answer.

The female traditionally has not had the role of taking romantic initiatives. Instead, she sees her role as trying to induce the man to take them. How does she go about doing this? How does a woman at a dance, say, try to induce men to approach her rather than some other woman? She does it mainly by trying to be as attractive as possible in the hope of being the first to catch and hold a man’s eye. One of her chief means to this is makeup. Makeup, along with other beauty enhancers, is intended to improve a woman’s looks and help her compete with other women in her role of inducing men to take initiatives. (At that dance, she may periodically appraise her makeup before a mirror in the women's restroom, performing a “rehearsal” to see if she is at her best at inducing. Just as men rehearse and appraise their “lines” to do better at seducing, women “rehearse" and appraise their looks to do better at inducing.)

When the makeup works and an encounter leads to dating, the woman feels pressured to continue wearing makeup whenever in the man’s presence. After all, in her mind, that is how she “sold” herself – with a made-up face – and that is how he “bought” her. To stop wearing makeup and obsessing over her looks is to risk causing him to stop taking initiatives. How much she obsesses depends on such factors as how secure she feels in his presence.

The male’s initiator role pressures the man differently. From the moment he initiates a conversation with a woman, and until a solid relationship develops, his perhaps unconscious but abiding concern is: Will she reject my next initiative? This is especially true if he is insecure and feels he may not be “good enough” for her. So he may resort to using male “makeup” – a facade to cover up what he thinks she might consider weaknesses. His makeup may consist of, among other things, a confident demeanor and subtle or not-so-subtle dialogue designed to show he is clever, witty, and worthy of her. He may exaggerate everything about himself, particularly his financial success or potential for it: “Well, I'm not earning much right now, but my boss says big bucks are in my near future.”

Such statements about succeeding, which are an integral part of men’s “makeup,” may sometimes be outright lies to fool her into thinking he has more ambition or ability than he has. But doesn't she lie and fool him, too, with the makeup and the WondraBra (or the X-Bra, with a cord that lets her “Adjust to Stun”) that she wears to project more beauty than she has? Once he promises, or merely implies, that he’ll be successful, he cannot easily relinquish his preoccupation with that goal. After all, in his mind, being a success is how he “sold” himself to her and it’s how she “bought” him. To give up this preoccupation is to risk being dumped for “false advertising.”

As a result of the female-inducer and male-seducer roles and the unequal sharing of the initiative-taking, the male is preoccupied with achievement, the female with beauty.

The sexes’ unequal initiative-taking is a driving force behind another wedge between men and women – sexual harassment in the workplace.

To the degree that women aren’t permitted to be as sexual as men -- which we have called the double standard -- men aren’t permitted to be as emotional as women -- which we have ignored and which could also be called a double standard.

Quid pro quo sexual harassment, as when a male supervisor in effect tells a female subordinate, “Give me sex or I’ll give you the boot,” is one thing; so is it when he promises, “Give me sex and I’ll give you that promotion you want,” thereby discriminating against all the other women and the men who were eligible for the promotion.

But it is quite another thing when a woman can sue her employer because she was “of­fended” by such as the following: a male co-worker, whose first request for a date the woman rejected, thought she may have had a change of heart when he spotted her reading a women’s magazine article, “The Workplace is a Great Place to Find Romance,” and she reflexively gave him a polite smile, and so he, thinking she might be “inducing” him again, asked her out again (and he not only got rejected again – the pain of this rejection perhaps hurting more than the first – but was accused of “harassing” her and was fired under his employer’s zero-tolerance policy).

“All the new sexual harassment litigation,” says Christina Hoff Sommers, “has turned the workplace into something very unpleasant and very grim.” So grim are some workplaces that the male employees and the female employees no longer look to each other for romance and companionship, but give each other a wide berth, the women fearing “sexual predators” and the men fearing “financial predators,” women eyeing sexual harassment’s pot of gold for being “offended.”

Asked if he now makes the first move, comedian Drew Carey said, “No. I worry some woman might say, 'Drew Carey tried to do something with me and it was unwanted.' I don't want to get in the paper for that. It used to easier for me...before I was well known. But now it worries me."Playboy, 3/99 So much for the male power men derive from fame and fortune.

How might some men feel about the firestorm of sexual harassment?

Suppose men said to women, “We men have decided that it is women’s role, and women’s role only, to raise the children. We men will take no part in this role whatsoever.” Suppose men added, “We will never acknowledge when you do well in your role of taking care of the children. Our only feedback to you will be to criticize you when we think you care for the children improperly or make them angry. We will then call you ‘abusers.’”

Women, knowing full well that most of the children would be raised properly, would surely feel this is sexism compounded with cruelty. They might see all women becoming stereotyped as potential abusers.

Imagine, then, how men must feel when realizing this: you, the media, and the courts have fixated only on sexual harassment outside the context of all male-female flirting and courting interactions in the workplace, and so have in effect said to men: “It is your role, and your role alone, to initiate romantic relationships even though women may want them more than you do. It is your role to take the roughly 150 initiatives – and the attendant 150 risks of rejection – which Warren Farrell says must be taken to advance a relationship from first eye contact to first sexual contact. We do not want women to take any part whatsoever in male-female interactions except to say yes or no to your initiatives. And we will not commend you when you perform this role properly and each day countless good relationships result. Our only feedback to you will be to vilify you when we think you ‘do it wrong.’ We will then call you ‘harassers.’” (For more on how women unwittingly fuel sexual harassment, see my Detroit News op-ed, "Women's roles key to ending harassment.")

Such extremist views, allowed to help formulate sexual harassment law, prompted Newsweek staff writer Ellis Cose to write in his book, A Man’s World, “Inevitably, the heightened sensitivity to sexual harassment has left some men feeling persecuted...” If in fact extremist sexual harassment laws are nudging us toward gender persecution, are they not also nudging us toward becoming a little bit like Hitler’s Nazis, whose extremist racial views led to legalizing racial persecution?

You truly went off the rail in your diagnosis of gender affairs when you leaped to a quick conclusion on domestic violence, creating a gender divider if ever there was one. You bought hugely into ideology such as that evinced by the sexist, viciously dichotomizing slam-dunker uttered by Kay Leigh Hagan writing about husbands in Ms Magazine: “If he can hurt you, he will.”

By focusing exclusively on husbands' violence, you and most of the media lured us into picturing every husband as a potentially brutish wolf and every wife as an innocent lamb who is led blindly by marriage to the slaughter-house and who herself is incapable of harm except in wholly justifiable self-defense.

In your world, women never initiate unprovoked violence against their husbands. “According to contemporary studies,” says one of your more prominent members, Phyllis Chesler, “90 percent of all violent crimes are still committed by men. ... When those women who commit 10 percent of all violent crimes do kill, nearly half kill male intimates who have abused them or their children, and they invariably do so in self-defensehttp://www.foxnews.com, Battered Women's Syndrome: Science or Sham? Tuesday, October 22, 2002, Wendy McElroy.” You cling to this notion despite contrary facts which the dominant media disregard or make little of to perpetuate women’s image of innocence.

Those contrary facts are:

• Women are more likely to commit major physical abuse of their children than are men: 56.8 percent to 43.2 percent. (Regarding women's sexual abuse of children, see “Female Perpetration of Child Sexual Abuse: An Overview of the ProblemFire With Fire, p. 221””””: a study of college men revealed that of those who had been abused as children, 78 percent had been abused by females.)

• Women are more likely to kill their children than are men: 55 percent to 45 percent. [Source: “Women and Violent Crime,” a paper by Prof. Rita J. Simon, Department of Justice, Law and Society and Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, D.C]

• Women commit almost all of the murders of newborns. In Dade County, Fla., between 1956 and 1986, according to the June 1990 Journal of Interpersonal Violence 5:2, mothers accounted for 86 percent of newborn deaths. When She Was Bad, p. 255, note 71

The view that women can assault children is finally becoming acceptable. Thanks to hidden cameras, mothers and female baby sitters increasingly are caught attacking small children. “Prime Time Live,” for example, on November 19, 1997, treated us to the nightmarish scene of mothers clamping their hand over the nose and mouth of their desperately struggling infants. In Great Britain, researchers using covert video cameras in just two hospitals filmed parents suspected of child abuse, predominantly mothers, in the act of deliberately trying to smother their babies.

"Yet even though these children are all alleged to have died at the hands of a parent, no one is using the term 'domestic violence' to talk about their demise.:" -July 18, 2001, "Domestic violence isn't a gender issue," Donna Laframboise, National Post

You insist that violence against women is not taken seriously. Yet it is taken far more seriously than violence by women. Such monstrous mothers as those caught on video are often dismissed as victims of one of several syndromes attributed to women who abuse. One of the syndromes is postpartum depression, said to be brought on by hormonal changes. (I can imagine your reaction to the father who, after murdering his newborn, claimed to be afflicted by a testosterone surge.) Another is Munchausen by Proxy syndrome, a disorder in which a parent – almost always a mother – may cause illness or injury in a child to draw attention to herself in the role of sympathetic caregiver. (Again, I can imagine your reaction to the father harming his child to draw attention to himself. And God help his poor soul if he hurt his wife to do that!) Introducing these syndromes permits you and the news media to shift the talk away from mothers’ domestic violence against children to the mothers as tragic figures who deserve not jail time but therapy and sympathy.

Had the war criminals we rightly hunt and prosecute been women, we'd have crafted a neat little syndrome by now so we could explain away their evil deeds. -Christine Dirks, London Free Press

It is understandable why in your one-sided opines on domestic violence you would never bring up women’s willful killing of newborns and infants. “Across the country,” writes crime journalist Patricia Pearson in When She Was Bad – Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, p. 70“according to the National Center on Health Statistics, the killing of infants climbed 55 percent between 1985 and 1988, until it was several times the rate at which adult women were murdered.” [Emphasis mine.] Were you to air this little tidbit, it would explode your fanatically guarded Innocent Woman hypothesis and put an entirely new face on domestic violence.

So what conclusion must we draw from the facts on women’s rather extensive, unprovoked violence against children? Just this, which is painfully obvious to anyone unhindered by feministthink: If women can batter or kill their own innocent children without provocation, they can, despite your fierce protestations to the contrary, batter or kill their husbands without provocation.

The plausibility of this rises dramatically once we consider the vision of husbands that you and the media have exhausted themselves to construct. In this vision, every husband salivates at the idea of regularly sending his wife out on a stretcher bruised and broken, just to show her, among other oppressive aims, who’s the boss. With husband-as-brute drummed daily into women’s brains, why should not some wives, in the heat of an escalating quarrel with hubby, forget trying to calm the waters in the traditional feminine manner and strike out preemptively with the justification: “I’d better nail him first because he’s sure going to nail me!”?

Wives are in fact the spousal killers 41 percent of the time, according to the July 1994 Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, “Murder In Families.” Yet that might not tell the full extent of it. As Warren Farrell says, “a woman is more likely to poison a man than shoot him, and poisoning is often recorded as a heart attack or accident.” She is more likely than a husband to employ contract killing, which is also less detectable because it is premeditated and often hired out to a professional. Often this professional vanishes, and no evidence can be found to link the wife. If evidence is found, says Farrell, the Justice Department records the murder as a “‘multiple offender killing’ – it never gets recorded as a woman killing a man.”

“More American women are assaulted by other women than by husbands or ex-husbands.” –Cathy Young,Ceasefire!

As for spouse abuse, sociologists Murray Straus and Jan Stets analyzed the 1985 National Family Violence Survey, the largest survey on domestic violence, and wrote, "Of the... respondents who experienced one or more assaults, both parties engaged in violence in 49 percent of the cases, violence by men occurred in 23 percent of the cases, and violence by women occurred in 28 percent of the cases. No significant differences were found by gender of respondent . . . [W]omen not only engage in physical violence as often as men, but they also initiate violence about as often as men.”

Women are more seriously hurt than men in domestic violence, but Murray Straus and Richard Gelles reported in the 1980s that less than one percent of women involved in domestic violence required medical care.

Straus found that in later years men’s violence against women, even as reported by women, fell 43 percent between 1985 and 1992. In the same period, female assaults against men rose by about 28 percent. Straus says “part of the reason may be that there has been no effort to condemn assault by wives parallel to the effort to condemn assaults by husbands.”

That’s putting it mildly. If it were simply that wife assault was not condemned, its rate would have remained roughly constant, rather than rise a remarkable 28 percent. As said, violence against husbands has been encouraged – if not quietly mandated – by your hate literature. It is encouraged also by feminist-influenced laws. Some states pardon husband killers who apply for clemency because of physical abuse, which often cannot be disproved. California, according to Patricia Pearson, “has added new provisions to its prisoner clemency policy, allowing women to apply for release for killing their mates due to ‘emotional’ abuse. [Stress mine.] Since nobody can sensibly argue that women are not capable of extremely artful and wounding verbal attacks (studies find high degrees of female verbal hostility in violent marriages), the whole question of ‘harm’ gets turned on its head.” Not to mention that California’s emotional-abuse escape practically begs women predisposed to violence to take the law into their own hands and murder their husbands.

There also has been little or no effort to condemn women’s non-domestic violence against men. At a 1995 Wimbledon tennis match, the wife of a player who had been ruled against by the referee rose from her stadium seat, proceeded to the referee’s chair, and slapped the male referee in the face. She then walked haughtily out of the arena with her husband.

Reverse the sexes: the husband of a female player strides over and slaps the female referee in the face. He turns to leave... What happens next? You know exactly what would happen if any man were loony enough to pull such a stunt: Enraged spectators – doubtless all men – would swarm down onto the court and slam this misogynist ape to the ground. Several would probably pummel him with their fists. The cops would be summoned, and the man handcuffed and dragged off to be booked for assault. The next day’s caption for thousands of editors and columnists around the world: “Another example of male violence against women.”

“This tradition—of men killing a man who insults a woman—is still with us in places like Sicily....” –Warren Farrell

Why can’t you imagine this reversal actually happening? Because you know society does not condone violence against women. The “most oppressive members of the patriarchy,” men like religious fundamentalist Pat Roberts, wanted Texas to spare the life of Karla Tucker, the woman who in 1997 was executed for burying a pick-ax in a woman’s chest. But since society does not tolerate violence against women, she was executed precisely because she killed a woman. In her rampage she also killed a man, a former boyfriend. Had she killed only him, she no doubt would still be alive. No woman has been executed in the United States for killing only a man since 1954.The Myth of Male Power, p. 240

If such “oppressive” patriarchs as Pat Roberts wanted to protect the grotesquely violent Karla Tucker, how much does the average guy want to protect women in general? Enough to risk discrimination lawsuits. Warren Farrell illustrates: “A 17-year-old Michigan high school student attempted to choke a male teacher. Afterward, teachers got no additional protection. Two months later, a 14-year-old attempted to choke a female teacher – in the same school. [Emphasis mine.] The school immediately withdrew all female teachers from the school, reducing the staff from twenty-one to nine [and risking lawsuits by the withdrawn women]. Now here is the rub. The male teachers were still expected to remain but now they had to handle classes that were more than twice the size. The larger the class size, the greater the chance of violence. Protecting every woman put every man in jeopardy—without the men’s consent.” [Italics and bold type Farrell’s.] You say the violence against which sex is not taken seriously?

If we shouldn’t take women’s violence seriously, why should we take women’s opinions seriously? After all, an act of violence is an opinion acted out.

Why were you not upset when you heard the real story of the Wimbledon tennis player’s wife slapping the male referee? Why was no one else? Because you and society, while abhorring violence against women, tend to tolerate – if not encourage or at least not take seriously – female violence against men. Of Betty Broderick, who shot her ex-husband and his new wife to death, Patricia Pearson says, “Broderick’s behavior is hers alone, but her account of it, and the way that account was received, reflects a widely accepted idea in this era about permissible female aggression.” (Stress mine.)

I’ve never heard of a man who, when he saw a man beating up a woman, dashed over to help the man. Yet if we are to believe your canard about misogynist violence and male conspiracies, that is exactly what we should expect to happen. Yet because many do believe that canard, the following really did happen:

“I overheard two men talking about seeing a 28-year-old woman assaulting a 67-year-old man. At the point they stumbled onto the attack, the man was on his back and the woman was choking him. The two men did nothing to stop the attack, they didn't call the police, they just watched for a minute and then left. When I questioned their behavior one said, ‘If I had pulled that woman off the man I would have gone to jail for attacking her - plain and simple.’” -Andrew Bokelman, NCFM.org

With domestic violence shaping up as an equal-opportunity recruiter, why do the newsmedia continue to deny male victims of domestic violence at least a token recognition? (A rare exception is ABC’s September 1997 “20/20” story, “Battered By Their Wives: Men Who Are Abused – More Common Than You Think.” Hopefully, for the sake of gender harmony, this signals a new direction in reporting on domestic violence.) Female victims get more recognition than warranted even in non-domestic violence. “I was in Vietnam,” said Bill Geist, CBS reporter and author of The Big Five-0, “and didn’t see any women over there, and we have a monument for them.” [Said 12/18/97 on Imus In the Morning]In reports on the soldiers killed in all our nation’s wars, the phrase “the men who died” is being replaced by the politically correct “the men and women who died.” Yet the Gulf War took 368 male lives versus only 15 female lives. The Vietnam War killed 57,000 men and only eight women. The Civil War snuffed out 600,000 men – and boys – and only about sixty females. Yet on May 22, 1998, during an ABC News pre-Memorial Day story on the Civil War, Peter Jennings intoned somberly, “More than 600,000 men and women died before the war was over.” Do the benighted think that as many as 300,000 women were killed? No one called Jennings down for this. But what if the topic had been sexual assault and he had said, “Each year 200,000 women and men are raped”? Even though this would have been much closer to the truth, his feminist staffers would have forced him to apologize before day’s end. The entire world would have been immediately apprised of his “gross misstatement.”

The purpose of defining war-killed troops as “the men and women” is to rewrite history. It’s to diminish men’s risk and sacrifice and to suggest that women are equally burdened with the responsibility of protecting the nation, and that female soldiers are equally victimized by war’s violence. (Might we one day, in the apex of political correctness, hear only “the women” killed in war? After all, I never thought I would hear Jennings’ incredible statement. And despite the abundance of easily accessible facts on the Web, we already say just “the women” regarding domestic violence.) In domestic violence reports, “the women and men” is avoided because of chivalry and antimale sexism and, I suspect, because feminist employees of the media stiff-arm the networks into airing a feminist slant on all news about gender, and too many male journalists are intimidated into silence by you and political correctness. (See "The Mainstream Media Don’t Report Fairly On the Sexes’ Risk and Sacrifice in War".)

“Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today's warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.”-Hillary Clinton, in her speech to the First Ladies' Conference on Domestic Violence in San Salvador in 1998

Of course, non-domestic violence, too, looks different when the statistics are not cooked or interpreted by you.

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), revised in 1992 under pressure from you to produce more accurate reporting of crimes against women, showed that in 1995, 26 percent of all crimes were violent acts. Of this 26 percent, 16 percent were simple assaults, 16 percent aggravated assaults, three percent robberies, and less than one-tenth of a percent were rapes. The revised NCVS revealed what it had previously revealed: men are victimized by assault more than women, even when rape is counted. Men “were more likely than women to experience violent crimes committed by both acquaintances and strangers. In fact, men were about twice as likely as women to experience acts of violence by strangers.” In 1995, the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed U.S. violent crime rates per 1000 persons as follows:

Victims’ Gender	Total	Rapes/ SexualAssault	Assault
Male	53.2	0.3	45.3
Female	36.4	2.8	30.4

As for homicide, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 1994, 23 percent of the victims were female, 77 percent male.

Despite statistics showing males more at risk than females, you concluded that since most murders of women are committed by men, this proves men hate women. But if we are to rely solely on homicide statistics to determine who hates whom, it appears that since men kill far more men than they kill women, men must hate the male sex more than the female. And since male suicides (43.8 per 100,000 males just between ages 15 and 24) outnumber female homicides (17 per 100,000, all ages), one must conclude there are more men who hate themselves than men who hate women. And while we are at it, statistics show, as stated, that women kill their own children more often than men do – so should men wail incessantly about women hating children?

You say male gun owners are among the most misogynist. If so, why are those paper silhouettes on the firing range always male? You also say boys are trained to harm females. Why, then, are the people destroyed in their violent video games almost always male? In the popular “Tomb Raider,” female protagonist Lara Croft kills uncountable men and, I am told, only the occasional female. If anything, boys learn that females can kill males, but not the other way around.

If we are to use murder statistics to tell us who hates whom, we must use rescue statistics to tell us who cares for whom. The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission shows that far more men pull women from the jaws of death than women pull men. Using your logic, men could say women care only about themselves.

But forget what all the foregoing statistics tell us about violence. In a chivalrous and unconstitutional bow to women, and with a slap in the face of men, especially black men, Congress passed a Violence Against Women Act to combat violence against the group less at risk of violence. This act seeks to place all violence seen as directed primarily at women into a special category, particularly violence in relationships. Adequate laws already exist to punish violence against members of either sex, but in the “gender war,” Congress wants to show whose side it is on: the side with the power to humiliate and bring Congress to its knees, almost literally.

So now, in the aftermath of your “remedy” for gender inequality, we are beleaguered with polarizing spin-offs. Many women despise all men solely because you have convinced them that all men despise women. Many other women, if not hating men, keep them at arm’s length, leery of the male’s highly propagandized penchant for pitbullness.

And new negative gender stereotypes have formed. In the late nineteenth century an American husband could have his wife committed to an insane asylum entirely on the basis of his word. He could get away with this because women were stereotyped as being fragile and prone to hysteria. “A century later,” says Patricia Pearson in When She Was Bad, “a confluence of social forces has created a parallel opportunity, but with the sexes reversed: Men can be committed to prison on the strength of stereotypes about them.”

Perhaps worse, the female who commits a crime, including battering or killing her own child, is now often seen as having no control over her actions and as having been pushed over the edge by patriarchal oppression; the devilish male sex made her do it. Yet when she commits a good act, it is attributed to the nurturing, saintly feminine – or to feminist influences. The man who commits an offense is regarded as acting solely within his own control. He is seen as making a choice with no influence save his own evil desire to oppress, especially if the offense is against a woman. His “rare” good behavior is often suspect. Ergo the emerging stereotype, “Men are evil, women are good.” One can hear in this the echoes of a similar ideology of a different place and time: Nazi Germany in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

It used to be that a stranded female motorist symbolized only that she feared a man stopping not to help but to sexually assault her.

But now because of the heightened gender alienation, we also have this: "If I see a woman stranded by her car in the heat or snow, I would naturally assume that she would accuse me of rape if I stop to help her. She wouldn't stop for me and she wouldn't even make a phone call for me, so the hell with it." –Lenny, member of NCFM discussion group

You insist men want to oppress women. But what men really want is to love them. “In fact,” says Nancy Friday, who in Men In Love reveals herself to be one of the few feminists to hear men out rather than presume their mo­tives, “my research tells me men’s love of women is greater than their love of self” [page 15, Men In Love]. The ship Titanic, where men sacrificed their lives to save women at a time when society perhaps stood at the pinnacle of patriarchy, represents but one illustra­tion of men’s greater love of women than of themselves.

Does this, along with the statistics on saving lives, describe a group that wants to oppress women? Compare this treatment of women to that of blacks, a group that indeed knows oppression. To my knowledge, in the 300 years of blacks’ disenfranchisement, not a solitary researcher has reported that (white) men’s love of blacks was often greater than their love of self. And for sure no crew member overseeing the life boats of a sinking ship ever commanded, his pistol at the ready, “Blacks and children first!”

On power and the Titanic: There can be no greater power than to live a long life, then to be rescued at the expense of others, including young children, as happened to the old women helped into the lifeboats of the Titanic.

Some say the Maritime law should read “the women and the children first,” because women have less upper-body strength, reducing survivability. But the same point about strength can be made regarding women versus children. Why not the children first, then the women? I estimate that the Titanic lost four or five children for every three women placed in the lifeboats. Children should not be sacrificed to save adult females.

Moreover, the men who you claim oppress women most – men such as fundamentalist Christian Pat Roberts (perhaps none of whose extremely conservative ideas I embrace, having a Saganesque view of a Creator) – cry out against sending female soldiers into battle. Such protests indicate unequivocally that men want not to oppress women but to protect them. If men wanted to oppress women, what better way to do so than to treat them like men: send them into battle to be killed or maimed, or execute them, or shove them away from a sinking ship’s lifeboats with a snarling, “Men and children first!”? Such men as Pat Roberts should trouble you less than such men as I, for I demand for the sexes equal treatment, which you abhor because you desire preferential treatment of women.

Nor do men “conspire” with employers to bar women from “male” jobs. Some men feel threatened when a woman enters “male” turf, but not in the evil, conspiratorial sense presumed by you. The “threat” springs from the diminished self-worth a man may feel because, as put by anthropologist Helen Fisher, women the world over prefer the man who has greater resources, power, and status than they. The man without these can feel as invisible and worthless to women as the homely woman can to men.

The threat can come from a man’s thinking, “If women can succeed at work as well as I can, thus proving they are as competent at making money, why would a woman need me?” This reflects how deeply men internalize their success-object status. It reflects how much they attach their self-worth to economic achievement as a means of attracting and holding women. Feeling threatened is fearing loss of worth and rejection.

You ignore the fact that women feel similarly threatened by men on “female” turf. “If the baby responds to the father as lovingly and automatically as to her,” says Nancy Friday in The Power of Beauty, “then who is she, given the definition of womanliness in almost all cultures as ‘care-taker’?” In the world of work, men have been socialized to perceive males as superior, and in the world of children, women have been socialized to perceive females as superior. Anyone can feel threatened if his or her expected superior competence is threatened.

Even as you mythologize about men conspiring to deny women equality in the world of work, you conspire to deny men equality in the world of children. In California, for example, you argued against the presumption of joint child custody in divorce cases. [[See HCR 182, a resolution introduced by Rep. Constance Morella of Maryland that appears to be little more than a re-write of a position paper at the National Organization for Women’s Web site]]. Custody, you insisted, should be awarded to the parent who spent the greater time raising the children.FlawedRpt.txt: see: arguing for almost automatic sole custody being granted to the "primary caregiver" How does this differ from saying management jobs should go to the sex with the greater experience raising family income – men? A custody law based on your argument would discriminatorily stack the deck against men, insuring that mothers virtually always get custody.

“We women are as much involved in discriminating against men at home as caretakers, as they are in wanting to keep us from taking their jobs.” [Power of Beauty, p. 366]–Nancy Friday

Your fantasized “male conspiracies” have been employers’ efforts to hire the most productive, most malleable workers. This generally has been men due to their provider role. The role has taught men to think, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” – they produce even more. For women, when the going gets tough, many more of them than men can quit and be supported by a spouse. Or many more of them than men can risk suing to force a tough workplace to adapt to them, whereas most men have always tended to believe they must adapt to the workplace.

Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, most male employers, even conservative ones, today view equal opportunity positively. Equal opportu­nity means more job seekers. More jobseekers means more competition for jobs and thus a greater willingness to accept lower pay. A greater willing­ness to accept lower pay helps employers’ bottom line and surviv­abil­ity for all.

Why did I expend enormous time and energy to write this admitted polemic? I did so because I:

1. Realized that long ago society began interpreting gender equality as ignoring men’s issues and giving women what radical feminism wants for them, which is mostly a full-optioned world free of risk and adversity, wrought by gender-specific laws that penalize men where necessary.

2. Heard that to curb sexual harassment, a branch of the military considered prohibiting its servicemen from looking at servicewomen no longer than four seconds (and one construction company adopted a policy specifying that workers could look at a woman passing by, but only for six seconds; see "A new sexual harassment dynamic" ), and recognized that this is similar to some countries’ rule requiring commoners in the presence of royalty to glance down to acknowledge an inferior status.

3. Realized that with the media’s help, you have taught the government and the rest of society to care with great compassion about the gender wage gap but to ignore the occupational gender death gap. Over 93 percent of workplace deaths occur to men – to our fathers, our brothers, our sons. And women, as said, control consumer spending by a wide margin in nearly every consumer category and control 89 percent of the nation’s wealth. Still, women’s wages mean more to you than men’s lives.

4. Saw the movie "Titanic" and understood that when the male passengers were held back from the life boats, they were denied the right to be equal to women when it came to the most important right of all, the right to live. The movie was a dramatic statement of which sex mattered most - even at the height of "patriarchy" and the "oppression" of women.

5. Realized that the Maritime law “women and children first” symbolizes the suppressed truth that not only are men ultimately considered unequal to women, but they are bribed by promises of “glory” and “power” into accepting a protector role that requires a view of themselves as secondary to women.

6. Recognized just how bad the sexism against men was while watching a "Phil Donahue" show years ago when the military draft was still in effect. I heard a woman in the audience say to the three draft resisters on the stage, "You ought to be taken outside and shot." How did Donahue, the supreme despiser of sexism, reply. "Hmm," he muttered without emotion, and quickly moved his mike to the next person. (I know the importance of defending our nation, but imagine a man in Donahue's audience saying to three female quests who were merely housework resisters: "I think they ought to be taken outside and spanked." After the audience thunder quieted down, Donahue would have replied, "Maybe YOU ought to be taken out back and SHOT for such a sexist remark." Are only women allowed to protest a sex-role, no matter how oppressive?

7. Recognized that we are transforming from a society of unconsciously socialized, unintentional sexism against both sexes, to one of intentional sexism against men. (Again, refer to Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men.)

The more you and the media ignore men’s issues, the more you will insure an outcome like that predicted by Charles Reich about 30 years ago. In The Greening of America, Reich said, “When the white man discovers his servitude, we will see a real explosion in America. Black rage, black pride, black militancy, give us some idea what it will be like. But with whites, the self-deception has been greater, and perhaps that will make the truth all the more infuriating.” Reich was talking about a rebellion against the “meritocracy,” which he faulted for making men without a top-echelon job feel unworthy. Because he did not see the effect on men of gender roles, he had no idea that it was men’s provider role and success-object status that made men vulnerable to the meritocracy’s depredations in the first place. And he could not have realized that on top of this “meritoc­racy,” the ‘90s man would have to deal also with a culture strong-armed into an antimale animus by you.

“[T]he world view of our society has become increasingly both gynocentric (focused on the needs and problems of women) and misandric (focused on the evils and inadequacies of men).” –Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, Spreading Misandry

If you continue your war on men and plunge us into a Gender Dark Ages, we doubtless will see Reich’s predicted explosion occur in men (especially liberal men, who perhaps are the most deceived) possibly within the next five to ten years. But the explosion will not consist entirely of white men, as Reich thought. It might consist mostly of black men. As race issues diminish in significance for black men, gender issues become more problematic. This is particularly true, as Cathy Young’s Ceasefire! alarmingly details, concerning the rapid erosion of men’s rights and due process when men are charged, increasingly falsely, with domestic violence, rape, stalking, sexual harassment, and violation of restraining orders, which are often obtained with breath-taking ease. This broad erosion of men’s rights represents part of a sexism that returns black men to the second-class status they were escaping with the war on racism.

In general, black men bristle at government’s tripping-all-over-itself eagerness to become, in the words of Warren Farrell, women’s substitute husband. They see government’s limited resources increasingly diverted to protect and extend the lives of women, mostly white women, who have always been the safest, healthiest, and longest-living group in the nation, outliving black men by fourteen years.

At the turn of the century, men and women had roughly the same life expectancy: 45 years for men, 46 years for women. But by 1950, women were outliving men by five years. Today women live about 7½ years longer than men. If the trend continues, by 2020 women will be outliving men by a dozen years, demographers say. -Detroit News, 7/30/96

Black men have noticed that government money is pouring into breast cancer research (though most of the women felled by breast cancer are age 70 or older; by this age, the average black man has been dead for five years!). From 1990 through 1997, the National Cancer Institute directed $1.8 billion toward breast-cancer research. During the same period, it sent only $376 million to prostate-cancer research projects. Even the Department of Defense, oddly enough, has jumped onto the women’s health bandwagon. Its cancer research expenditures for 1993-96 were $455 million (95.8%) for breast cancer and $20 million (4.2%) for prostate cancer. Widening the gender health-care gap still more, former President Clinton called for insurance coverage of mammograms but not of tests for prostate cancer. All this despite Time’s April 1, 1996, article by Leon Jaroff, which(in Health file) said: “The American Cancer Society estimates that in 1996, 317,000 Americans will be told they have prostate cancer, more than the 184,000 new cases of breast cancer...expected this year.” What would be the rate of prostate cancer if men lived as long as women? (Now that women's health advocates have secured an unfair amount of funding for breast cancer research, they have begun doing the same thing regarding heart disease.)

“The information highway is bumper to bumper with men fuming over the disproportionate attention given to women’s health issues at the expense of men’s.” –columnist Kathleen Parker, Free Press, Nov. 1, ‘96

Black men know, too, that there has been an Office of Women’s Health for a long time, but still no Office of Men’s Health. Want to know how men of all races might feel about this? Ask women how they would feel if men, who already out earn women, had an Office of Men’s Economic Advancement, but no similar office existed for women.

I am a former world peace research writer who sent to 200 individuals and peace groups my pamphlet exploring the underpinnings of the ill will that develops between nations. As such, I am troubled to see that with a strategy bordering on that used by Hitler’s Nazi propagandists (who cast Germans as good, Jews as evil), you are attempting to alienate women from men.

But what troubles me more is the mainstream news media. They know the importance of balanced views, and they know that such views as mine are quickly obtainable on the Web. But political correctness and a stone-cold indifference to men relieve them of the need to provide a balance regarding gender issues. Television in particular resists airing balanced gender views, usually accommodating only feminists. If marriage counselors listened only to, say, husbands, would the counselors be deemed fair? Could we trust that marital problems would get solved?

So you likely will continue to wound the truth and wreak your damage, before you are stopped. But you will be stopped. Men and women like myself will not stand idly by while you wreck and botch, driving the wedge deeper between the sexes. We have formed a men’s movement, however much you and the media deride it. This movement consists not of vengeful patriarchs trying to turn back the clock, but of fair-minded men and women who want to put the quest for gender equality back on a non-sexist track.

We have begun a campaign of protest, boycott – anything within legal boundaries – and will not cease until we have shoved a crowbar between the spokes of your “feminism” and stopped the gender alienation set aflame by your calumnies against men. We will free society of the intentional anti-male sexism that you have substituted for the unintentional, socialized sexism against both sexes. We intend to hand over a non-sexist, gender-harmonious nation to our children. That is the very least we can do for them.

Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weaknesses. -Marie Anne du Deffand, in a letter to Voltaire. Like most women, she clearly understood men's easily exploitable chivalry and male guilt.

tags: gender feminists  black men  mainstream media bias  nancy friday  gender issues  gender alienation  titanic  female preferential treatment  

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