Читать книгу Feminism: The Ugly Truth - Mike J.D. Buchanan - Страница 18

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Henry Miller 1891-1980 American novelist and painter: Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion) (1949)

Feminists contend that erroneous beliefs about the different natures of men and women partly account for the ‘oppression’ of women over the course of history, and continue to be used in the modern era to justify ‘discrimination’ against women. They invariably attribute observed differences between boys and girls, as well as men and women, to ‘social conditioning’, although this leads them to some farcical positions.

An example may illustrate the point. While feminists flatly deny there are differences between the brains of men and women – despite clear evidence to the contrary, including physiological evidence – they credit women with superiority in some areas of cognition, as exemplified by the bizarre ‘women’s ways of knowing’ theory we’ll be exploring later. How can the two positions be equated? They can’t, unless feminists believe ‘women’s ways of knowing’ arise from an organ other than the brain. Maybe they’ll let us know some day which organ is involved.

The overwhelming consensus among leading psychologists in the modern era is that there are fundamental differences in the natures of gender-typical men and women. It’s important to stress the term ‘gender-typical’ because feminists with mind-numbing frequency point to men and women who act in non-gender-typical ways (women becoming engineers, men becoming nurses…) and would have us believe that in time as many women as men will become engineers, and as many men as women will become nurses. There’s no evidence of such a trend. Women’s progress has largely been in fields to which they are naturally inclined anyway (e.g. medicine), and all too often (as with medicine) the progress can in large measure be attributed to gender equality programmes.

In claiming that men and women don’t have fundamentally different natures, feminists are as wrong as members of The Flat Earth Society are wrong about the shape of our planet.

Why do men still swallow the myth that women are an oppressed gender? For a possible answer to this we turn to a remarkable book first published over 40 years ago, Esther Vilar’s The Manipulated Man (1971). In her new introduction to the second edition of the book in 2008 Vilar made the point that in the original edition of the book she underestimated men’s fear of re-evaluating their own position:

‘The more sovereignty they [men] are losing in their professional lives – the more automatic their work, the more controlled by computers they become, the more that increasing unemployment forces them to adopt obsequious behavior towards customers and superiors – then the more they have to be afraid of a recognition of their predicament. And the more essential it becomes to maintain their illusion that it is not they who are the slaves, but those on whose behalf they subject themselves to such an existence.

As absurd as it may sound: today’s men need feminists more than their wives do. Feminists are the last ones who still describe men the way they like to see themselves: as egocentric, power-obsessed, ruthless, and without inhibitions when it comes to satisfying their animalistic instincts. Therefore the most aggressive Women’s Libbers find themselves in the strange predicament of doing more to maintain the status quo than anyone else. Without their arrogant accusations the macho man would no longer exist, except perhaps in the movies. If the press didn’t stylize men as rapacious wolves, the actual sacrificial lambs of this ‘men’s society’, men themselves, would no longer flock to the factories so obediently.’