The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
Some commentators like to point out that many of the most passionate and bravest defenders of the West are women, citing Italian writer Oriana Fallaci and others as examples. But women like Ms. Fallaci, brave as they might be, are not representative of all Western women. If you look closely, you will notice that, on average, Western women are actually more supportive of Multiculturalism and massive immigration than are Western men.
I got many comments on my posts about Muslim anti-female violence in Scandinavia. Several of my readers asked what Scandinavian men are doing about this. What happened to those Vikings, anyway? Did they drink too much mead in Valhalla? Despite the romantic mystique surrounding them today, the Vikings were for the most part savage barbarians. However, I doubt they would have looked the other way while their daughters were harassed by Muslims. In some ways, this makes present-day Scandinavians worse barbarians than the Vikings ever were.
One of the reasons for this lack of response is a deliberate and pervasive censorship in the mainstream media, to conceal the full scale of the problem from the general public. However, I suspect that the most important reason has to do with the extreme anti-masculine strand of feminism that has permeated Scandinavia for decades. The male protective instinct doesn’t take action because Scandinavian women have worked tirelessly to eradicate it, together with everything else that smacks of traditional masculinity. Because of this, feminism has greatly weakened Scandinavia, and perhaps Western civilization as whole.
The only major political party in Norway that has voiced any serious opposition to the madness of Muslim immigration is the rightwing Progress Party. This is a party which receives about two thirds or even 70% male votes. At the opposite end of the scale we have the Socialist Left party, with two thirds or 70% female votes. The parties most critical of the current immigration are typically male parties, while those who praise the Multicultural society are dominated by feminists. And across the Atlantic, if only American women voted, the US President during 9/11 would be called Al Gore, not George Bush.
The standard explanation in my country for this gender gap in voting patterns is that men are more “xenophobic and selfish” than women, who are more open-minded and possess a greater ability to show solidarity with outsiders. That’s one possibility. Another one is that men traditionally have had the responsibility for protecting the “tribe” and spotting an enemy, a necessity in a dog-eat-dog world. Women are more naïve, and less willing to rationally think through the long-term consequences of avoiding confrontation or dealing with unpleasant realities now.
Didn’t feminists always claim that the world would be a better place with women in the driver’s seat, because they wouldn’t sacrifice their own children? Well, isn’t that exactly what they are doing now? Smiling and voting for parties that keep the doors open to Muslim immigration, the same Muslims who will be attacking their children tomorrow?
Another possibility is that Western feminists fail to confront Muslim immigration for ideological reasons. Many of them are silent on Islamic oppression of women because they have also embraced “Third-Worldism” and anti-Western sentiments. I see some evidence in support of this thesis.
American writer Phyllis Chesler has sharply criticized her sisters in books such as The Death of Feminism. She feels that too many feminists have abandoned their commitment to freedom and “become cowardly herd animals and grim totalitarian thinkers,” thus failing to confront Islamic terrorism. She paints a portrait of current U.S. University campuses as steeped in “a new and diabolical McCarthyism” spearheaded by leftist rhetoric.
Chesler has a point. Judging from the rhetoric of many feminists, all the oppression in the world comes from Western men, who are oppressing both women and non-Western men. Muslim immigrants are “fellow victims” of this bias. At best, they may be patriarchal pigs, but no worse than Western men. Many Western universities have courses filled with hate against men that would be unthinkable the other way around. That’s why Scandinavian feminists don’t call for Scandinavian men to show a more traditional masculinity and protect them against aggression from Muslim men. Most Norwegian feminists are also passionate anti-racists who will oppose any steps to limit Muslim immigration as “racism and xenophobia.”
Totalitarian feminists in Norway are threatening to shut down private companies that refuse to recruit at least 40 percent women to their boards by 2007, a Soviet-style regulation of the economy in the name of gender equality. I have read comments from Socialist politicians and leftist commentators in certain newspapers, such as the pro-Multicultural and feminist — critics would say Female Supremacist — newspaper Dagbladet, arguing that we should have quotas for Muslim immigrants, too.
What started out as radical feminism has thus gradually become egalitarianism, the fight against “discrimination” of any kind, the idea that all groups of people should have an equal share of everything and that it is the state’s responsibility to ensure that this takes place. A prime example of this is Norway’s Ombud for Gender Equality, which in 2006 became The Equality and Anti-discrimination Ombud. The Ombud’s duties are “to promote equality and combat discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability and age.”
Western feminists have cultivated a culture of victimhood in the West, where you gain political power through your status in the victim hierarchy. In many ways, this is what Political Correctness is all about. They have also demanded, and largely got, a re-writing of the history books to address an alleged historic bias; their world view has entered the school curriculum, gained a virtual hegemony in the media and managed to portray their critics as “bigots.” They have even succeeded in changing the very language we use, to make it less offensive. Radical feminists are the vanguard of PC.
When Muslims, who above all else like to present themselves as victims, enter Western nations, they find that much of their work has already been done for them. They can use a pre-established tradition of claiming to be victims, demanding state intervention and maybe quotas to address this, as well as a complete re-writing of history and public campaigns against bigotry and hate speech. Western feminists have thus paved the way for the forces that will dismantle Western feminism, and end up in bed, sometimes quite literally, with the people who want to enslave them.
Swedish Marxist politician Gudrun Schyman has suggested a bill that would collectively tax Swedish men for violence against women. In a 2002 speech, the same Schyman famously posited that Swedish men were just like the Taliban. A male columnist in newspaper Aftonbladet responded by saying that Schyman was right: All men are like the Taliban.
The irony is that in an Islamic state similar to the one the Taliban established in Afghanistan, certain groups of people, in this case non-Muslims, pay a special punishment tax simply because of who they are, not because of what they earn. Radical feminists such as Ms. Schyman are thus closer to the Taliban than Western men, although I’m pretty sure that irony would be completely missed on them.
Schyman’s battle cry is “Death to the nuclear family!” I have heard the same slogan repeated by young Norwegian feminists in recent years. Schyman seethed that today’s family unit is “built on a foundation of traditional gender roles in which women are subordinate to men. The hierarchy of gender, for which violence against women is the ultimate expression, has been cemented.” “Conservatives want to strengthen the family. I find this of grave concern.”
In the year 2000, Swedish feminist Joanna Rytel and the action group Unf**ked Pussy entered the stage during the live broadcast of the Miss Sweden contest. She also wrote an article called “I Will Never Give Birth to a White Man,” for a major Swedish daily, Aftonbladet, in 2004. Rytel explained why she hates white men — they are selfish, exploitative, vain, and sex-crazed — and just to make things clear, she added, “no white men, please… I just puke on them, thank you very much.”
Misandry, the hatred of men, isn’t necessarily less prevalent than misogyny, the hatred of women. The difference is that the former is much more socially acceptable.
If all oppression comes from Western men, it becomes logical to try weakening them as much as possible. If you do, a paradise of peace and equality awaits us at the other side of the rainbow. Well congratulations to Western European women. You’ve succeeded in harassing and ridiculing your own sons into suppressing many of their masculine instincts. To your surprise, you didn’t enter a feminist Nirvana, but paved the way for an unfolding Islamic hell.
It is correct, as feminists claim, that a hyper-feminine society is not as destructive as a hyper-masculine society. The catch with a too soft society is that it is unsustainable. It will get squashed as soon as it is confronted by more traditional, aggressive ones. Instead of “having it all,” Western women risk losing everything. What are liberal feminists going to do when faced with aggressive gang of Muslim youngsters? Burn their bras and throw the pocket edition of the Vagina Monologues at them?
Perhaps women can succeed in turning their men into doormats, but it will be on the cost of doing so to their nation and to their civilization as well. According to Italian American feminist Camille Paglia, “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” That may be an exaggeration, but male energy is definitely a driving force in any dynamic culture.
Muslim anti-female violence in the West is a symptom of the breakdown of the feminist Utopia. Freedoms need to be enforced by violence or the credible threat of violence, or they are meaningless. Even though women can take steps to protect themselves, the primary responsibility for protection will probably always belong to men. Women will thus only have as much freedom as their men are willing and capable of guaranteeing them. It is a major flaw in many feminist theories that they fail to acknowledge this.
The difference between women’s rights and women’s illusions is defined by a Smith and Wesson, not by a Betty Friedan or a Virginia Wolf.
Writer Lars Hedegaard in Denmark does not buy into the theory that women approve of Muslim immigration out of irrational naivety or ideological conviction. He thinks they simply want it, as he writes in a column entitled “The dream of submission.” He does notice, as I do, that women are more likely than men to support parties that are open for more Muslim immigration.
Why is this, considering that there is hardly a single Muslim majority area in the world where women enjoy the same rights as men? And Hedegaard asks a provocative question: Are women more stupid and less enlightened than men, since they in such great numbers are paving the way for their own submission? He comes up with an equally provocative answer: “When women are paving the way for sharia, this is presumably because women want sharia.” They don’t want freedom because they feel attracted to subservience and subjugation.
The English author Fay Weldon has noted that “For women, there is something sexually very alluring about submission.” And as Hedegaard dryly notes, if submission is what many women seek, the feminized Danish men are boring compared to desert sheikhs who won’t allow you to go outside without permission. Muslims like to point out that there are more women than men in the West who convert to Islam, and this is in fact partly true. Islam means “submission.” Is there something about submission that is more appealing to some women than it is to most men? Do women yield more easily to power?
In a newspaper article about Swedish women converting to Islam, the attraction of the Islamic family life seems to be a common feature among women converts. Several of them state that in Islam, the man is more rational and logical, while the woman is more emotional and caring. This means that the woman should be the one to take care of the children and do the housekeeping, while the man should be the one to work and provide for the family. Many of the women feel that their lives lack a sense of purpose, but Christianity does not seem like a relevant alternative to them.
The fixation with looks in our modern society and the tougher living conditions for women, who are supposed to both have a career and do the housekeeping, play a part, too. Which is curious, considering the fact that it was women themselves, encouraged by modern talk show hostesses such as Oprah Winfrey, who talked about “having it all”; it wasn’t the men. Men know that nobody can “have it all,” you have to give up something to get something. Maybe women have discovered that working life wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be? Men do, after all, universally die years before women all over the world.
The plot of novelist Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is that the modern history of Christianity was a big, patriarchal plot to deprive women of the rights they supposedly enjoyed before this, during the age of “the sacred feminine” and the fertility goddesses who were always barefoot and pregnant. But if that’s the case, why is it that women make up the majority of Europe’s churchgoers? Why do women, out of their own free will, seek out these oppressive, patriarchal religions? Maybe French philosopher Ernest Renan was onto something when he called women “the devout sex.” Do women need religion more than men?
Are some feminists simply testing out men’s limits in the hope of finding some new balance between the sexes, or are they testing men to find our which men are strong enough to stand up to their demands, and thus which men can stand up to other men on their behalf? I heard one woman who was an ardent feminist in the 1970s later lament how many families they broke up and destroyed. She was surprised at the reaction, or lack of reaction, from men: “We were horrible. Why didn’t you stop us?”
In psychiatry, female patients are seen more frequently with self-inflicted wounds or self-destructive behaviour than men, who tend to direct their aggression outwards. It is also a well-known fact that many women blame themselves for abusive husbands, and make excuses for their abusers’ behavior. Has the West adopted some of the negative traits of the female psyche? The newly feminized West gets attacked and assaulted by the Arab and Islamic world, and continues to blame itself, while at the same time be fascinated by its abusers. It is thus behaving in the same way as a self-loathing woman towards an abusive man.
Virginia Woolf in her book A Room of One’s Own praises the genius of William Shakespeare: “If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare’s mind.” “Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.” “His extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil.” She “killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross–roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.”
Feminists claim that the reason why women haven’t been as numerous in politics and science as men is due to male oppression of women. Some of this is true. But it is not the whole story. Being male means having to prove something, to achieve something, in a greater way than it does for women. In addition to this, the responsibility for child rearing will always fall more heavily on women than on men. A modern society may lessen these restraints, but it will never remove them completely. For these practical reasons, it is unlikely that women will ever be as numerous as men in politics or in the highest level in business.
Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of The War Against Boys, points out that “after almost 40 years of feminist agitation and gender-neutral pronouns, it is still men who are far more likely than women to run for political office, start companies, file for patents, and blow things up. Men continue to tell most of the jokes and write the vast majority of editorials and letters to editors. And — fatal to the dreams of feminists who long for social androgyny — men have hardly budged from their unwillingness to do an equal share of housework or childcare. Moreover, women seem to like manly men.”
She also notes that “One of the least visited memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle ‘women and children first.’ “The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by ‘the women of America’ in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: “To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved.”
Simone de Beauvoir famously said, “One is not born, but becomes a woman.” She meant that they should reject all the inducements of nature, society, and conventional morality. Beauvoir condemned marriage and family as a “tragedy” for women, and compared childbearing and nurturing to slavery.
Strangely enough, after decades of feminism, many Western women are now lamenting the fact that Western men hesitate to get married. Here is columnist Molly Watson:
“We’re also pretty clued up about why our generation is delaying having children — and it has nothing to do with being failed by employers or health planners. Nor, despite endless newspaper features on the subject, does it have much to do with business women putting careers before babies. In my experience, the root cause of the epidemic lies with a collective failure of nerve among men our age. […] I don’t know a woman of my age whose version of living happily ever after fundamentally hinges on becoming editor, or senior partner, or surgeon, or leading counsel. But faced with a generation of emotionally immature men who seem to view marriage as the last thing they’ll do before they die, we have little option but to wait.”
What happened to the slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”? I’d just like to remind Ms. Watson that it was in fact the women who started this whole “single is best” culture that now permeates much of the West. Since women initiate most divorces and a divorce can potentially mean financial ruin for a man, it shouldn’t really be too surprising that many men hesitate to get involved at all. As one man put it: “I don’t think I’ll get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.” At the same time, women during the past few decades have made it a lot easier to have a girlfriend without getting married. So women make it riskier to get married and easier to stay unmarried, and then they wonder why men “won’t commit?” Maybe too many women didn’t think all this feminism stuff quite through before jumping on the bandwagon?
The latest wave of radical feminism has severely wounded the family structure of the Western world. It is impossible to raise the birth rates to replacement level before women are valued for raising children, and before men and women are willing to marry in the first place. Human beings are social creatures, not solitary ones. We are created to live with partners. Marriage is not a “conspiracy to oppress women”, it’s the reason why we’re here. And it’s not a religious thing, either. According to strict, atheist Darwinism, the purpose of life is to reproduce.
A study from the United States identified the main barriers to men tying the knot. Heading the list was their ability to get sex without marriage more easily than in the past. The second was that they can enjoy the benefits of having a wife by cohabiting rather than marrying. The report lends weight to remarks by Ross Cameron, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Family and Community Services, who chided Australian men, blaming Australia’s looming fertility crisis on men’s commitment phobia. “The principal reason young women say they don’t get around to having children is they can’t find a bloke they like who is willing to commit,” he said. “This commitment aversion in the Australian male is a real problem.”
Barbara Boyle Torrey and Nicholas Eberstadt write about a significant divergence in fertility between Canada and the U.S.: “The levels of Canadian and American long-term trends in age of first marriage, first births, and common-law unions are consistent with the divergence in total fertility rates in the two countries. But the divergence in none of these proximate variables is large enough to explain the much larger divergence in fertility.” “Changing values in the U.S. and Canada may be contributing to the fertility divergence. The stronger notional role of men in U.S. families and the greater religiosity of Americans are positively associated with fertility, and the latter is also a strong predictor of negative attitudes toward abortion. Women in Canada enter common-law unions more often, wait longer than American women to marry, and have children later and less often.”
In Europe, Newsweek magazine writes about how packs of wolves are now making a comeback in regions of Central Europe: “A hundred years ago, a burgeoning, land-hungry population killed off the last of Germany’s wolves.” “Our postcard view of Europe, after all, is of a continent where every scrap of land has long been farmed, fenced off and settled. But the continent of the future may look rather different. “Big parts of Europe will renaturalize,” says Reiner Klingholz, head of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. Bears are back in Austria. In Swiss alpine valleys, farms have been receding and forests are growing back in. In parts of France and Germany, wildcats and ospreys have re-established their range.”
“In Italy, more than 60 percent of the country’s 2.6 million farmers are at least 65 years old. Once they die out, many of their farms will join the 6 million hectares (one third of Italian farmland) that has already been abandoned.” “With the EU alone needing about 1.6 million immigrants a year above its current level to keep the working-age population stable between now and 2050, a much more likely source of migrants would be Europe’s Muslim neighbors, whose young populations are set to almost double in that same time.”
It is numbers like these that have induced Phillip Longman to foresee “the Return of Patriarchy” and proclaim that “conservatives will inherit the Earth:”
“Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry.” “It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify themselves as “world citizens” are also those least likely to have children.” “The great difference in fertility rates between secular individualists and religious or cultural conservatives augurs a vast, demographically driven change in modern societies.” “Tomorrow’s children, therefore, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society.”
“In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage.” “People will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating traditional religious values.”
This last point is worth dwelling with. The elaborate welfare state model in Western Europe is frequently labelled as “the nanny state,” but perhaps it could also be named “the husband state.” Why? Well, in a traditional society, the role of men and husbands is to physically protect and financially provide for their women. In our modern society, part of this task has simply been “outsourced” to the state, which helps explain why women in general give a disproportionate support to high taxation and pro-welfare state parties. The state has simply become a substitute husband, upheld by taxation of their ex-husbands.
It should be mentioned that if this welfare state should for some reason cease to function, for instance due to economic and security pressures caused by Muslim immigration, Western women will suddenly discover that they are not quite as independent from men as they like to think. In this case, it is conceivable that we will se a return to the modern traditional “provide and protect” masculinity, as people, and women in particular, will need the support of the nuclear and extended family to manage.
Another issue is that although countries such as Norway and Sweden like to portray themselves as havens of gender equality, I have heard visitors to these countries comment that the sexes are probably further apart here than anywhere else in the world. And I readily believe that. Radical feminism has bred suspicion and hostility, not cooperation. And what’s more, it has no in any way eradicated the basic sexual attraction between feminine women and masculine men. If people do not find this in their own country, they travel to another country or culture to find it, which in our age of globalization is easier than ever. A striking number of Scandinavian men find their wives in East Asia, Latin America or other nations with a more traditional view of femininity, and a number of women find partners from more conservative countries, too. Not everyone, of course, but the trend is unmistakable and significant. Scandinavians celebrate “gender equality,” and travel to the other side of the world to find somebody actually worth marrying.
To sum it up, it must be said that radical feminism has been one of the most important causes of the current weakness of Western civilization, both culturally and demographically. Feminists, often with a Marxist world view, have been a crucial component in establishing the suffocating public censorship of Political Correctness in Western nations. They have also severely weakened the Western family structure, and contributed to making the West too soft and self-loathing to deal with aggression from Muslims.
Although feminism may have strayed away into extremism, that does not mean that all of its ideas are wrong. The women’s movement will make lasting changes. Women have occupied positions considered unthinkable only a few decades ago. Some things are irreversible.
Women pretty much run men’s private lives. Marriage used to be a trade: Female nurturing and support for male financial and social security. In a modern world, women may not need men’s financial support quite as much as they did before, while men need women’s emotional support just as much as we have always done. The balance of power has changed in favor of women, although this situation may not last forever. This does not have to be bad. Women still want a partner. But it requires men to be more focused on doing their best.
A study by scientists at the University of Copenhagen concludes that divorce is closely linked to poor health, especially among men. The research indicates that the death rate for single or divorced males aged 40-50 is twice as high as for other groups. The research has taken into account whether there are other factors that could lead to an early death — such as a mental illness and having grown up under poor social conditions. “Considering the high amount of children growing up in broken homes we do believe that the study is very relevant. “It proves that divorce can have a serious consequence,” and that we may need a prevention strategy. John Aasted Halse, psychologist and author of numerous books about divorce, agrees.
The apparent contradiction between female dominance on the micro level and male dominance on the macro level cannot be easily explained within the context of a “weaker/stronger sex”. I will postulate that being male first of all is some kind of nervous energy, something you need to prove. This will have both positive and negative results. Male numerical dominance in science and politics, as well as in crime and war, is linked to this. Women do not have this urge to prove themselves as much as men do. In some ways, this is a strength. Hence I think the terms “The Restless Sex” for men and “The Self-Contained Sex” for women are more appropriate and explain the differences better.
Daniel Pipes keeps saying that the answer to radical Islam is moderate Islam. There may not be any such thing as a moderate Islam, but there just might be a moderate feminism, and a mature masculinity to match it. In the book Manliness, Harvey C. Mansfield offers what he calls a modest defense of manliness. As he says, “Manliness, however, seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad.” Manliness can be noble and heroic, like the men on the Titanic who sacrificed their lives for “women and children first,” but it can also be foolish, stubborn, and violent. Many men will find it offensive to hear that Islamic violence and honor killings have anything to do with masculinity, but it does. Islam is a compressed version of all the darkest aspects of masculinity. We should reject it. Men, too, lose their freedom to think and say what they want in Islam, not just women.
However, even a moderate version of feminism could prove lethal to Islam. Islam survives on the extreme subjugation of women. Deprived of this, it will suffocate and die. It is true that the West still hasn’t found the formula for the perfect balance between men and women in the 21st century, but at least we are working on the issue. Islam is stuck in the 7th century. Some men lament the loss of a sense of masculinity in a modern world. Perhaps a meaningful one could be to make sure that our sisters and daughters grow up in a world where they have the right to education and a free life, and protect them against Islamic barbarism. It’s going to be needed.
Insightful, well-written and on the money – as usual. Deserves a wider readership.
Very very good. It made a very good point about the pervasiveness of radical feminism too; initially many of the positions took me aback and revulsed me by gut reaction, even though logically they were entirely correct. I find that quite interesting.
I enjoyed reading this. You’ve put together alot of the stuff I’ve been thinking about for a while now into a cohesive whole.
Excellent article, as we’ve come to expect from “Vienna”. Couple of observations I’d like to offer…
1) There is a huge market for advice on relationships (both for men and women). One of the biggest niches for guys is what’s generally known as the “seduction” market. It’s interesting that the advice from pretty much all of the experts in that area is for men to be “leaders” or “real men”. The cardinal rule is “Don’t be a wimp” so it’s no surprise what’s going on in Scandinavia where men have been reduced to “wimpdom”.
2) Modern marriage arrangements in the West have become a bad deal for men. Hence it’s no great surprise the change in men’s behaviour that you note and “commitment phobia”. We guys might be stupid but eventually even we catch on the fact that we’re being exploited!
3) Politicians still don’t seem to understand that the decline in fertility rates is largely a consequence of collectivism and the welfare state. The combination of active propaganda and destructive policies against the traditional family plus the wealth-sapping consequences of high taxation have inevitably led to people choosing not to have as many children.
4) There’s no question that we are living in an era of change in the structure of social relationships between men and women. The old form has gone and it’s not clear what will replace it on a long term basis. I’d suggest that the answer will probably lie in what Stephen Covey calls “interdependence”, that is 2 independent individual choosing to enter a relationship for their mutual benefit. Hey, isn’t that what successful relationships have always been about?
That’s my 2 cents. Thanks again for an excellent article.
What a refreshing break from group think. Where did you go wrong?
One wonders what would happen if, in a land where radical feminists are powerful, there evolves a “man’s strike”. That is, imagine if men acted like the women from Lysistrata and refused to court women, refused to work for a living, and refused to fight to defend their country. That is, there would be a “civic mutiny” against the state, where men would refuse to cooperate in their own emasculation.
Not only is falsely accusing all men of rape unfair, but it is the kind of bigotry that encourages men to remain virgins for life. Do Scandanavian women want to become so deprived of companionship that they start hiring gigolos? Do they want their society to become completely sterile?
The historical reason for democracy in the first place is to symbolize the power of a nation at arms. Essentially, it was “one man, one vote, one rifle”. The puzzling aspect of women’s suffrage is how the right to vote has not been accompanied by a desire by women to bear arms.
What radical feminists want isn’t true matriarchy, as matriarchy actually frees men to become more warlike than patriarchy does. (Think of Spartans or plains Indians…) No, what radical feminists seem to want is the emasculation of men!
As I’m reading through this piece I pause to comment . . .
A blaring loophole may exist in this statement:
“The Ombud’s duties are “to promote equality and combat discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability and age.”
No where in that statement is there a duty to combat discrimination against religion.
BAN MOHAMMEDAN IMMIGRATION . . .it’s not sexist, racist, not ethnic discrimination, not age discrimination – at the extreme perhaps it’s a form of insanity but mohammedism is not a recognized mental disability. . .yet.
back to reading the rest. . .
ok, finished. Another amazing essay from Fjordman.
I am a mom of 4, my best friends are moms of 4 or more children too. We happen to be politically conservative.
My acquaintences (married or divorced) each have one or two children and remarkably each are liberal – including my own parents, brother and and in-laws. Unfortunately, they are all from the school of “fighting terror only begets more terror”. UGH!
Coincidence? I think not.
YESS!
yes, indeed.
My ex-wife was a vehement feminiist,but at the sight of a cockroach, she would revert instantaneously to gender based rolls. 😉
Nothing nurturing about it either. just
Kill it, KILL IT, KILL IT!!!!!!!!!
Great article.
But Muslims are feminine. They are allways worried about how others see them. They make a lot of noise over ewery small thing. They get scared and upset about things that are completly harmless, like a cartoon. They are afraid to go to puplic toilets becouse dirty people might have been there.
Also I dont think honorkilling are maskuline in any way. Its true that men want to impress others and make a name for themselves. But women have just as strong an urge not to be dislikes or disrespected by anyone. In the cartoons its allways the woman corecting the mans tie. Its the woman mostly who worries about what others think.
The word “honorkilling” sounds maskuline, I agree with that. But these killings are not done out of any sense of honor. They are done out of shame. Its the feminine worry about what “others” think taken to the extreme.
I thgink I agreed with everything else 🙂
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Fjordman … it appears I must have inspired you somewhere along the way!
I have been saying much the same things (minus the Swedish & Norwegian perspectives) in scores of postings on the Internet, over the past 4 years, including various forums and in numerous Comments at FrontPageMagazine. When I started out I was (or so it seemed) one of the very few males speaking/writing in such stark terms.
I have also been calling Islam a Cult for about the same length of time. Since the 9/11 wake-up call, Mission Impossible has never acknowledged Islam is a religion, and will never do so.
Anyway, its good to see (at last) that the realization about Feminism being a corrosive influence has finally become a readily acceptable premise for most. Once this understanding becomes mainstream (the witch) Hillary Clinton is history.
I see the end of Marxism (in all its forms) on the horizon. Rejoice.
Feminism was OK at its beginning, when it was about letting women who wanted more than a life of staying at home get outside. That’s actually quite similar to the West’s present (but neglected, even by feminists themselves) goal of liberating Muslim women.
But then feminism morphed into Radical Feminism, which isn’t about women’s liberation but about creating utopia by changing the existing order (hmm, now where have I heard this before?). Under Radical Feminism, all women are required to have careers and behave like men, and those women who wish to stay at home are branded traitors now, and would be prevented from staying at home if Radical Feminism were to establish rule. Yet more birds of a feather with Islam!
I’ve been saying similar things as well. The first mistake feminists made was to claim that men and women were born the same and cast in to “gender roles” by society. There are quite fundamental physiological differences between men and women, beyond the obvious physical ones, and these differences are what prime men and women for the roles they play in life.
Their second mistake was to say that women didn’t need men. Men and women are complementary, each taking on roles that the other is less able to acomplish, so that together they become something greater than the sum of their parts. Each on his or her own is incomplete.
Real fedminism was supposed to be about equality. Men and women should be given exactly the same chance at life, and nothing more. The problem with that sort of environment (if you’re a militant feminist, at least) is that most women and most men would simply adopttheir accustomed roles and be happy in them. Men and women would be equal partners in life. That sort of arrangement lacks the revenge element that modern feminism is engaged in.
Women, in my experience, know how to get revenge in much more subtle and brutal ways than a man could ever accomplish. A typical man would lure the obeject of his revenge in to an alley and beat nine kinds of crap out of him, whereas the typical woman sets up a complex and long-reaching plan for total and absolute umiliation, that leaves no bruises, but that destroys their victim’s social standing and mentail security. These particular feminists decided long ago that they would get revenge for the oppression of the past. Unfortunately their appeals to earth goddesses and the “sophia” wisdom cult that they claim preceeded the patriarchy are flawed. Ancient fertility goddesses, far from being a sign that women used to dominate the world, were created by men, otherwise they wouldn’t have been naked and pregnant.
Most women are submissive by nature. They will go along with any fad and work hard not to stand out, to fit in and go with the flow. To understand women is to understand ‘the psychology of crowds.’
The desire for a quiet life is why so many women live with abusive partners – male or female, why once liberated from one they look for another.
The whole of the feminist crap is just propagated in the magazines – I even saw it in Wellesley College, MA where even German translations were feminist claptrap – and women acquiesce in what they are instructed.
At school girls excel where the teacher marks and fail where the examinations are independent; they comply and rarely rebel; accept and rarely question.
The whole bunkum about feminism in The West is really about boarded a train as a passenger rather than laying track. The men are feminised too to see their social castration as somehow essential and fair. The postwar era of the West as such has been feminisation whether through plasticisers leeching into food or female hormones entering the water supply.
Women will do as they are told – look how readily women convert to Islam to conform to their spousal demands, it is a desire to be taken care of and not to have to make decisions. Lots of women don’t want to make decisions or to act independently but to be treated as little girls.
The whole of modern Western society is a joke. Try buying a model tank or toy gun in Britain or Germany ? Only tearaways can get real guns, noone can own a handgun legally in Britain, nor buy a toy one in a shop…………yet violent crime is rampant.
Women are great for having a weepie over dead Dianas, calf exports, coal-fired power stations, or Pershing II rockets…………it is always the same over-wrought, hormonally imbalanced, slightly loopy Cindy Sheehan types who emote all over the TV camera. This is hysteria.
That is why women give in to whatever threats are made, it is for a quiet life, succumb to violence and conform.
On topic, but in a more uh, earthly vein….
I remember reading about two or three years ago that radical Swedish feminists (a redundancy, it seems) tried to ban upright urinals for men, because it somehow projected masculine dominance or power.
Did anything ever come of this? As crazy as it sounds to us in America, it sounds crazy enough that Sweden would try it.
It obviously took a lot of effort to put this together.. I just want to thank you for such fine reading.. Its gonna take me a while to absorbe this whole piece, but I feel that I’m not goin to have any great revelation, but see it as only supportin what I have felt for a long time.. Hey, Baron.. Thanks, I needed this !!
Nice article, wow.
Just wanted to raise an eyebrow at this, from another comment:
“it is the kind of bigotry that encourages men to remain virgins for life”
In my experience, no amount of bigotry could be a strong enough force to encourage such a thing…
I don’t know about that. We men are sensitive souls at heart; we can never understand why the women are always making fun of us for doing what comes naturally (hitting things with a hammer, digging holes, building houses and shooting stuff). Some turn to random casual sex. Others decide that they can’t even face women and stop seeing them at all, except where necessary. Others wonder if, perhaps, they need to act more like women to be their friends again.
We’re simple like that.
Of ocurse it never works for long. A man’s natural tendencies will force their way out eventually when supressed, so a man pretending to be a woman will start acting like a very angry man.
You clearly know a lot about some radical feminists, there are large swathes of feminism that you are ignoring. You absolutely cannot lump all Western feminists together. After all, what does ‘feminist’ mean? ‘A person who believes in social, political and economic equality for men and women.’ That describes a hell of a lot of people nowadays (women AND men)!
And yes, just as there are misguided and extreme people all over the world, there are some misguided, extreme feminists. Fair enough, quote them if you like. But do not tar us all with the same brush. Do not assume that we are all persecuting Western men, or see Western men as the sole oppressors. Few modern-day feminists are trying emasculate men, imply they are stupid or unecessary or any of the rest of it. The few that are tend to get disproportionate press coverage – although frankly I rarely hear any of these opinions expounded that you have described here, other than on anti-feminist websites where selective quoting from (often very dated) feminists is used to try to undermine modern-day feminism.
Personally, I think feminism has far more urgent things to worry about than initiating gender war. Many of my friends who identify as feminists would describe one of their major concerns as the treatment of women in some non-Western cultures. The inequality that makes women unable to negotiate contraception-use even with long-tern partners, and deliberately culturally excluded from knowledge of reproductive functions and thus protecting their own health, has global consequences not only poverty of women but also their reproductive health, and the spread of HIV/AIDs amongst both genders. The exclusion from the economic sphere of women, which results in them being forced into exchanging sex for financial support in a great many African countries, from a very young age. These situations are the concern of millions of feminists, health workers and politicians.
About the Muslim issue you have raised. I am just as shocked as you by the treatment of women under Muslim regimes, although treating women badly is not exclusively a Muslim thing, and neither is it in the nature of Koran- just severely distorted cultural interpretations of it.
Don’t assume all Muslims are the same, as a basic academic point, stereotyping a gender or a religion or a race is guaranteed to land you in a plethora of innaccuracy. Not only inaccuracy, but as I’m sure many people must have observed before me, you come dangerously close to inciting racial hatred. Can I respectfully suggest you go out and meet some devout Muslim people. I have, and despite being a girl, I can safely say none of them have beaten me up yet…
Reminds me why I have virtually given up on former friends who are invested heavily in career and intellectual identity with modern feminism.
This article gives me hope of engaging them again — on new terms.
“and neither is it in the nature of Koran”
You haven’t read the book much, have you.
Granted, the christian bible, read today, looks fairly oppressive as well depending on which bits you read, but when xodus and Leviticus were written women had no rights, and suddenly they were given all kinds of writes under hebrew law. The Koran grants women some rights, but it proscribes them very severely, and reduces them to the status of property. This is some 3000 years after those rights were handed out in the hebrew scriptures. Further, the following scriptures show a clear progression of female emancipation, to the point that, when Paul is writing his letters, we see women and men together in church, women preaching the gospel and women treated as equals to men.
Obviously things went downbhill a bit afterward, but my point is that Islam is hardly a neutral player. Islamic rule wound the clock back for women, taking their rights back some thousands of years relative to the surrounding cultures, and they have not progressed at all since then.
These muslim men might have been quite courteous to you, but that’s because they saw you as a valuable commodity rather than a human being. Would you smash up a car you didn’t own?
I abhor as much as you the treatment of women as property. I would argue that a literal interpretation of nearly any religious text, without regard to how society has changed since then, is dangerous. This would be true of both the Old Testament and the Koran. However, like Christians with the Bible, few intelligent, devout Muslims read the Koran literally and uncritically. Granted some do, and this is where some terrorism stems from… But a great many Muslims don’t.
To your final point, I can see how you might think that, but as a critical, feminist young person I think I’m actually quite attuned to when I’m being treated as a commodity, as a piece of meat, or as a human being. (I am constantly aware of being more politely treated in shops by male assistants than less attractive girls behind me..) That angers me greatly.) Anyhow I can honestly say with certainty that the devout Muslim men of my acquaintance treat me as a human being and as an equal.
Grass,
You might be interested in looking up the numerous articles such as this one about the bad experiences of non-Muslim women who marry Muslims. If you think this article is likely to be unrepresentative, perhaps you could supply some more representative ones.
‘A person who believes in social, political and economic equality for men and women.’ That
————————-
I believe in that aswell, let us do away with afferimitive action, alimony, welfare, and child support.
There, its more equal now. Men are tired of funding women’s so called ‘independance’ from us. Through high taxes, and other ways of extracting wealth. You are equal right, then you do not need cruthes to compete with men.
Equal right? Crutches (sp)
affirmative
‘independence’
(sp)
Brilliant – As usual.
I think Fjordman’s analysis of feminism, and the deleterious effects of too much in the mixture of societal conventions and values could equally be said of secularism. In the sense that he feels Islam is too masculine, it is also starved for secular influence. They seem to operate in an inverse ration.
By the same token, Europe, which is starved for some of it’s old religious/sacred tradition which was the wellspring for liberal democracy, is now too feminized. In both cases, there’s a hypothetical “perfect” mixture which would avoid the pitfalls of either extreme.
Although it probably kills most Europeans, and certainly the majority of Muslims, to hear it, I think the U.S. comes closer to hitting the right mix of sacred/secular and masculine/feminine than anywhere else I’ve traveled or read of.
Keep writing Fjordman – You’re the Harriet Becher Stowe, (pardon the gender confusion), of the battle against militatnt Islam.
Verlch,
No, I’m saying exactly the opposite – we’re not equal. The opportunities that life affords women are by no means equal to those of men, even in Western society.
We are not equal so, yes, some action – what you call ‘crutches’ -is necessary, or things won’t change.
(Although, by the by, why call child support a crutch for women? Why should contributing to the financial support of a child, whom you played an equal part in creating, be viewed as an generous favour to the woman?)
Snowpea..
That was a great article. I realy liked the spirit it was told in.
la.bueche . . .
You said–“Although it probably kills most Europeans, and certainly the majority of Muslims, to hear it, I think the U.S. comes closer to hitting the right mix of sacred/secular and masculine/feminine than anywhere else I’ve traveled or read of.”
I agree. The problem with discussing “feminists” is that it’s one of those terms that can mean anything. I like to think that “true feminism” promotes individuality, rather than asking all men to be alike and all women to be alike. Similarly, society should not shun women with children who want to work, nor should it force them to work. Just as in any other endeavor, individuals should be able to do what they want and are able to manage.
Sweden certainly seems to have gone over the top in coming up with arbitrary rules made by totalitarian types. They’re not too strong on other human rights, from what I can determine–through Fjordman and others. I really think that Americans–because of our history and our pragmatic views of things–are more able to accommodate a wider variety of opinions than countries that were influenced by the French Revolution/Marxist ideas of social engineering.
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mytzilplk —
Unfortunately, I had to delete your comment due to its language and content.
As I have often said, we try to run a PG-13 blog here, because the older children of homeschoolers are sometimes directed here to further their education.
I realize that Fjordman’s topic contains some sugestive references; but still, no need to make it more salacious.
If you want to re-state your point in a more oblique manner, that would be fine with me.
Thanks.
I have been close friends/relatives of moslem women in the US. One fled with her child to a distant state and got legal sanctuary immediately. One stayed with her husband. Violence became a way of life. Even knives. When violence first began, she went to her ‘imman’ to ask for help with her husband…. but received a silent version of “what do we care?”
In contrast, any Christian preacher, sunday school teacher, lay worker, must by law, report any violence or sexual abuse to the police.
Upholding the law equally would be wonderful here. Moslems today get a pass.
Feminism is proof positive of the Hegelian dialectic. It was so very successful that it not only bred the seeds of its own destruction but may well have torn down the very society that created the surplus that allowed its genesis in the first place.
Now it seems that society has turned on the covens that inherited liberal feminism and twisted it into something that would be evil were it not farcical. Faculties of “women’s studies” are now hothouses of increasingly shrill and nonsensical anti-male rantings, and they are dying the same death “Black Studies” did in the 70s after everyone grew up and realized that African tribal politics hold some relevance for cultural anthropology but very little for the western job market.
Good riddance to feminism. Thanks for everything.
Rush Limbaugh’s reading portions of this article on his show today. He’s citing the Brussels Journal as the source.
Good to have the word, and Fjordman’s insightful analysis, spread to a wider audience.
Heroyalwhyness —
Please make long URLs into links; otherwise they mess up the post page width.
heroyalwhyness said…
Over at DhimmiWatch there is a related article discussing the current confrontation between recently acquired feminism and newly installed security via sharia in Somalia . . .
link
An interesting article. Basically, radical feminism has succeeded in destroying the old social structure as relating to genders without bringing a viable alternative. Moreover, they have created equality under law – but not equality in culture, especially as women perceive it.
The traditional male/female roles are not a function of “nature”. They’re a function of cultural conditioning. Women can be very efficient combat soldiers. Women can be very efficient providers. In the same way, men can be very efficient nurturers etc. But these roles continue to be viewed through the cultural prism of gender roles.
Radical feminism is not about reshuffling or confusing gender roles, then – it is about negating traditionally male roles altogether. Feminists created a vaccuum and refused to fill it.
All this while women make better snipers and pilots, for instance, than men – but women do not enlist to such roles because they are still perceived as “masculine”.
So what is needed? A cultural shift to compliment the legal one, and a saner feminist discourse. Then women will be able to defend themselves from assaulters – a kick between the legs from a woman is no less discouraging than kick from a man.
I have never bought into the feminist cant because, being from the South, I want men to be men; to open doors for me; to kill anyone who would attack hearth and home; to bring home the bacon; to go fight for me and my children; and to know that is the man’s job. I have taught grades 8 through post-graduate and I say, Give me MEN. Good ones, strong ones, men who stand their ground, who wear their boots high and their jeans tight, who walk with a swagger, and who kick a… and don’t bother to take names. Feminists have been hoisted on their own patard. They came at the situtation incorrectly. I have written on this much earlier in writing career. Women came storming the gates; wearing suits and carrying briefcases. Many came qualified. Problem is that they wanted to be “equals” of men when in fact women should have entered the work world as an example, by seeing how their strengths compliment the strengths of men, not weaken them both in the process.
About the feminists seeking the Muslim world, they have been like teenagers seeking to know their limits. Men took them seriously. While women should have access to jobs and be qualified and receive equal pay, they should not have the edge because they are women.
They should have the opportunity because they are good. As far as the Muslim men latching onto the “victim” status, take my word for it strong women have no use for whimpy men. No use at all, not now, not ever. Said from a feminine lady, not a feminist.
The Racoon said –
“The traditional male/female roles are not a function of “nature”. They’re a function of cultural conditioning. Women can be very efficient combat soldiers. Women can be very efficient providers. In the same way, men can be very efficient nurturers etc. But these roles continue to be viewed through the cultural prism of gender roles.
What is this statement based on? How could anyone empirically know what these roles are based on?
I think – barring evidence that I doubt will ever appear – that the cultures we fashion are a reflection of our true nature. There’s a reason things end up the way the do, and sweeping statements to the contrary, the great majority of people throughout recorded history have adopted these roles because they were natural, obvious, and comfortable. You can always find exceptions – but in general I think this is way bigger than some idea that got grafted onto the dominant culture.
Cultures evolve slowly, organically, based on broad consensus of their constiuents. Especially in areas as primal as gender roles, things just don’t work that way.
la.bueche – we can know it because many women succesfully take these roles. And you cannot ignore the prevalent differences in education, starting at infancy.
Look, the chief difference between men and women is that men have greater muscle mass. From this stems traditional male dominance of certain professions.
And yet, with the invention of the bow and arrow, this became much less relevant; with the invention of the rifle, it became totally irrelevant. We seldom work with our muscle nowadays in the West – and this includes warfare, the critical point of gender differences.
And I disagree about cultural changes. Some are almost instant from a historical point of view – like emancipation or the spread of atheism, for instance. Cultures usually evolve fairly rapidly when the technological changes present necessitate or facilitate a change.
Actually no, the chief difference between men and women is in the brain. Our brains are wired for different tasks. The biggest difference is to do with problem solving. Men are wired up to solve problems in a linear fashion (one knot at a time), and the problem solving areas are closely linked with the pre-motor and motor cortexes. Women, meanwhile, are wired to solve several problems at once, and their problem-solving is closely wired to the speech centers. In this way, women ten to want to reach consensus when solving problems, whereas men want to just get on with it.
This is, of course, a generalisation. 90% of the time it’s right for 90% of the people. It’s a classic bell curve. 🙂 You can always point out people who contradict the generalisation (my wife, for instance, who is very linear compared to most women) but they don’t prove it wrong, merely that it doesn’t apply to everyone all of the time. That’s because we aren’t all the same person, and of course our development will vary a little. It’s still a general fact, though.
Ever wondered why a man goes silent when he’s troubled? It’s not because he’s just being tough. A man, generally, goes silent because he’s thinking. He shuts down to better concentrate. Later he might go and start putting a shelf together (probably badly, but that isn’t the point).
The first behaviour is a hunter thing; since men were the traditional hunters they had to spend a lot of time sitting still and staring at things. Men see problems as something to be killed, so they will “hunt” it by sitting very still and concentrating on it.
Men also see problems as something to be solved rather than talked about. That’s why other men will wander off and start doing.
Women, on the other hand, were tasked with guarding the camp, gathering food, feeding children and anything else that happened to be there. Women have greater peripheral vision than men for a lot of reasons related to this. They’re also more verbal, the better to share information about feeding spots, potential enemies and where all the kids are.
Men and women have complementary roles. There’s no point in trying to deny the mental differences between us, as in doing so you reduce us. Men and women need to work together and use their skills in different areas to become a better whole. That’s what marriage is about.
Excellent article! Some points:
Wondering why women are so much in favor of Islam is the wrong question. The better question is “Why are European elites in favor of Muslim immigration?”
One factor is that the immigrants ensure that voters cannot do away with the Welfare State without civil war. The elite like the Welfare State — the high taxes ensure that upstarts from the middle class will find it very difficult to rise into the elite strata. The elite are threatened by a meritocratic environment, where commoners with brains and energy might supplant them. What the elite want most is security in their position, for the duration of their lives.
Female members of the elite are not threatened by violence from Muslim immigrants. Street crime is not an issue to people who can hire as many armed guards as they need.
Male members of the elite might benefit from some degree of breakdown in the social fabric. Remember, it was the breakdown of the Roman Empire that led to feudalism, where every member of society had to become the servant of some feudal lord who could offer protection. Many men of the elite would love to enjoy the perks of being a neo-feudal lord.
Now, for women of the middle class and below, a breakdown of the social order would be very ugly. They do not have the cash to pay for an armed group of men to protect them. And the average man is unlikely to choose to lay down his life for money. This is why “patriarchy” came into existance — not as a male plot to oppress women, but as the best way for WOMEN to motivate men to be willing to work hard for, and fight to the death to protect, them and their children.
racoon,
Before you go on too much about strength being irrelevant in modern combat, please go strap on 20 pounds of body armor, put on a backpack with 50 pounds of ammo and gear, and go running up and down alleyways and jump over a few fences, why don’t you?
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Archonix,
Unfortunately it’s just not that simple. All – yes all- of the gender ‘differences’ you have cited can be equally well explained by social psychology; by looking at the way in which boys and girls are differentially socialised. Boys and girls are born into very different social worlds, which teach them different ways to think, problem-solve, play and relate to others.
No one has yet managed to separate nature and nurture with any confidence.
Papa Bear – been there, done that (I’m a retired IDF Nacha”l Recon). This ain’t about strength – it’s about perserverance and endurance, qualities which women have in at least equal measure to men. Ever noticed how the smallest and frailest-looking guys make the best support, with a SAW that’s almost as long as they are? There is no amount of physical strength that can carry you on a 120 K march through ankle-deep sands with 40 kilo of gear on you – it’s pure willpower and endurance.
And I know a few women (combat pilots) who went through harder stuff than that in their training.
There’s this woman I used to know who always had abusive relationships. She was this huge Brit, built like an APC, with fists the size of my head. She could have crushed me in a bearhug, and I am a very large man myself. There is no reason other than purely mental why anybody should be able to beat her up. This is the consequence of stupid and wrong upbringing and social influences.
Gender neutral psychologists have tried to de-role ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ behaviors, and objects, but Nature, which wisely created two complementary (and complimentary) genders, re-erupts.
An example: when a girl was give ‘boys toys’ and a male child was given ‘girls toys’, the girl took a hammer, wrapped it in soft cloth, and cooed to it and rocked it like an infant.
The boy, meanwhile, removed the head from the cute baby doll he was given and used it a a ball to bounce it off a wall.
Different drives and desires have evolved in our discrete genders from many millenia of field ‘experiments’.
Males, reduced to essentials, are organized by Mother Nature and Father Time to be the “expendable brutes” protecting the nest. (Not that it isn’t fun, if existentially dangerous.)
Women, on their parallel path, have grown into the bearers and prime teachers of the beloved children of both.
A constricting pose if a patriachally-poisoned culture reduces ladies to ONLY this status or possibility.
Islam is such a gender reductio ad absurdum.
That any sane woman allows herself to be subsumed by the Koran’s misogynistic arrogance says more for the lack of educational opportunities allowed by Muslim men than anything inherently subservient about the women trapped within Islam.
As women’s knowledge grows, Islam’s power withers.
In many ancient (and more profound than Mohammad’s) myths, Women are the Earth and Men the Sky. They join to create the living World.
The land, without fertilizing rain, is barren. And rain, without the goal of soil is sterile.
Only together can you incarnate Creation.
Vive la differences!
Profitsbeard,
I agrree with your opinion of female Musim subservience, education is the underlying key to independence in today’s world. If you are denied education you are inevitably oppressed and structurally disadvantaged.
However, you cannot be serious in selectively quoting one un-referenced, problematic-sounding experiment as ‘proof’ of anything.
In the psychology research community such studies continue because, I promise you, as yet no one has been able to satisfactorily prove the relative weights of nature/ nurture in gender difference.
Excellent, well-researched and well-presented essay! Thank you.
In response to earlier posters’ comments on ‘literal reading of religious texts’, I suggest that you read Baha’u’llah’s Writings, for He (claimed to have) brought the Will of God for THIS Day, and He literally states the equality of men and women, while reaffirming a nuclear family based on mutual respect, equality, courtesy and justice.
The world-wide Baha’i Community is living these values, more or less successfully as we learn and adapt, around the world in EVERY nation, with humans of EVERY racial/ethnic background…
I doubt they would have looked the other way while their daughters were harassed by Muslims. In some ways, this makes present-day Scandinavians worse barbarians than the Vikings ever were.
Well, i guess that’s what happens when former Viking nations let thsemselves get infiltrated by people who believe in a book with verses such as:
Lot offers his daughters to a mob of angel rapers. 11:78
Zoe Darling, what is better? A book about dirt coming to life, all by accident, and oxygen coming into being by tiny microbs whose sole existence was to live, and to die to produce oxygen, so trees could form.
Never such a microb has been observed!!!