Pelle Billing . com

This is the second time I give examples of misandry in the media. If you didn’t already, check out part one.

In part one I listed three different principles for misandry in the media (men are stupid, men need women to get anything right, only women must evolve), and here I’ll list two more.

Principle #4: Blame it on Men

In a Huffington post article, Nora Ephron writes the following:

But now there are two [presidential candidates] and we’re facing Pennsylvania and whom are we kidding? This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can’t even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder — after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn’t believe any of those articles.)

To put it bluntly, the next president will be elected by them: the outcome of Tuesday’s primary will depend on whether they go for Hillary or Obama, and the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them. And McCain is a compelling candidate, particularly because of the Torture Thing. As for the Democratic hope that McCain’s temper will be a problem, don’t bet on it. A lot of white men have terrible tempers, and what’s more, they think it’s normal.

So let’s see what this well known film director/producer/screenwriter/journalist is saying…

1. Even though more than half the people of Pennsylvania are women, all power rests with the men
2. We shouldn’t care about boys’ problems in schools, and young men’s problems to get into college, because those problems are “stupid”
3. Men have all the power, because I say so.
4. White men cannot be relied on, and often have terrible tempers.

She doesn’t offer any proof or even logical reasoning why this is so. Without hesitation, she say things that would be completely unacceptable if she wasn’t talking about men. Could you imagine anybody getting away with saying those things when addressing women or jews, to name but two groups?

Principle # 5: Men Are Expendable

In the following video novelist Isabel Allende gives a talk at TED, which is where some of the smartest people in the world go to discuss Technology, Education and Design. If you don’t care to watch all of it, then start watching at 14 min 30 s:

This is what she says:

1. Empower women and we’ll get peace and prosperity
2. Most war casualties are women and children
3. There is a Marxist class struggle between men and women, just like there are between actual classes in society
4. Every man can at least abuse his woman or his child
5. Old men have to die off before real change can occur

After the talk she gets a standing ovation. I’m not sure why. Is it because she wants old men to die? Or because she lies about the fact that more men die in wars than women? Or because she thinks all problems are caused by men and will be solved as soon as women get more power? Or is it because she baselessly alleges that all men abuse women and children? Or is it simply because she regurgitates the common feminist mantra of women fighting a Marxist battle of the classes?

All we can know for sure is that misandry runs deep, otherwise she wouldn’t get a standing ovation.

In this post I want to give an overview of a controversial subject that cannot be avoided by anyone interested in gender equality. Please let me know in the comments if you disagree with any of the facts of conclusions that I list, since I believe that this is a subject that deserves a deep analysis.

Here’s the bullet point overview:

• To this day, no human civilization has been run by a matriarchy (i.e. women having most of the positions of power). One by one the anthropological claims of having found a tribe or culture with female governance have been disproved. Currently there are no verified examples of predominantly female governance.
• This means that men have always had the majority of the high status positions, in every known society.
• Not all men want status, but it appears that men are much more likely to make the sacrifices necessary to reach an important position in society, regardless of whether the price to pay is deteriorating health, less time with family or even risk of dying.
• Since the absence of a matriarchy is a cross-cultural phenomenon, we cannot look for an explanation in cultural variables. Thus, we turn to biology.
• What biological factors could there be? We have knowledge about girls and women who were exposed to abnormally high testosterone levels in utero (for various biological reasons, one of them being the medical condition CAH). These girls, who have been affected by testosterone as their fetal brains were developing, are more likely to be interested in a style of playing that is generally considered “boyish”.
• Furthermore, from age 11 these girls are more likely to be interested in having a career (Dittman et al, 1990a) and less likely to want to have children or be a stay-at-home mom than other girls their age. This is something that happens even though the girl is raised as a girl, and expected to behave like a girl. As grown women, they are more likely to have a high status career (Purigoy and Koopmans, 1979; W Gallagher, 1998; Bancroft et al, 1983)

Personally I consider these bullet points to be a strong piece of evidence for innate differences in behavior between men and women (though there are certainly lots of other good pieces of evidence).

This brings us to one of the “hard problems” of gender equality: how can we accept that there are differences between men and women on a group level, and not allow this to lead to discrimination? How do we separate the individual from the collective? I’ve already written about this problem once, but it continues to fascinate me. If you have any interesting ideas to share, then let me know.

(The title of this post has been borrowed from the author Stephen Goldberg, who’s written a book on this very subject.)

Today I want to share a tongue-in-cheek list about feminism that was originally posted on feministing.org.

Feministing.com is a well-known feminist blog, and to the best of my knowledge, feministing.org was a spoof site pretending to be the real Feministing blog. It is now long gone, but here is a quote from the spoof site:

Young, middle-class, college-educated white women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on our own behalf on issues that affect our lives and futures because we’re so horribly and obviously oppressed.

Feministing.org provides a platform for us to comment, analyze, whine about our unending victimization, and (best of all) COMPLAIN CEASELESSLY!

One of the texts posted on the site was a list that made fun of feminist ideology, both to have some fun but also to critique the internal inconsistencies of the feminist framework. Please note that I’m not posting this list to make fun of equity feminists and other feminists who are honestly fighting for equality between the sexes (however, those feminists are not very vocal in the gender discourse).

The list below is addressed to the feminists who take up space in the media, the blogosphere, and yes - even in political circles:

1. Feminism requires you to talk about “equality” for both sexes but some sexes are more equal than others.
2. God could be a womyn, but the devil is most certainly a man.
3. We’re equal to men, and this makes us morally superior to them.
4. We are equally capable of doing anything a man can do and men can’t do anything right.
5. We must scorn behavior which is associated with stereotypical masculinity while whooping with praise when the same behavior is exhibited by womyn.
6. We must demand that womyn be allowed into military combat because we’re equally capable of smashing-in the faces of vicious terrorists. But we also laugh at the idea that a husband could be the victim of a wife’s physical abuse because everyone knows that women are never violent.
7. We seek to stop “violence against womyn” but girl-on-girl violence and lesbians who batter their partners don’t bother us quite as much.
8. We attack the gender-stereotypes that portray womyn negatively as we gleefully embrace the ones that portray womyn positively. It’s customary to invert this rule for “you-know-who”.
9. Helping womyn succeed is not nearly as satisfying as seeing men fail.
10. “Power” in the hands of men is always destructive, selfish, tyrannical and harmful. This same “Power” in the hands of womyn is always democratic, nurturing, honest, good for the environment and good for humanity.
11. Men of quality support womyn’s equality but womyn never have to do anything to prove that they are “of quality”.
12. Finally, us feminists are absolutely not anti-male and that’s why we rarely have any positive things to say about those penis-having bastards.
13. Women are just as good at everything as men are, except for things at which women are better.
14. We feminists are equal to men, and that gives us the elevated authority to pass judgment upon them.
15. If you’re not female then your opinion doesn’t count, you sexist bastard.
16. Any criticism of feminism is a form of Hate-Speech. A feminist’s own speech is allowed to be as hateful as she wants it to be.
17. If somebody has the temerity to criticize the behavior of feminists, you should dismissively sneer that they’re attacking “strawfeminists”– absurdist caricatures who don’t exist. Feel free to resume your usual attacks on strawpatriarchs every day of the week.
18. The only feminist you are officially allowed to criticize is Valerie Solanas. That’s because a feminist has to literally advocate the extermination of half the planet before the rest of us start to wonder if she’s got a screw loose.
19. You have 10,000 years of grudges to seek vengeance for in your single lifetime.
20. Collective guilt and collective punishment are anathema to a society which fulfills the feminist goal of treating people as individuals, which is why us feminists must constantly intimate the collective guilt of men and suggest that they need collective punishment.
21. You must demand that a father shoulder half of any effort to raise “his” children as you simultaneously demand that a mother be granted automatic sole custody of “her” children after divorce.
22. Whether or not you feel “offended” is the central principle to how the world should be re-organized.
23. A feminist must say “Patriarchy” at least ninety-seven times per hour. The ten millionth time you say “Patriarchy” you will trigger a shower of confetti and receive a fabulous prize.
24. As a feminist, you are opposed to the spread of stereotypes. But don’t let that stop you from constantly stereotyping men as being an over-privileged class of dimwitted exploiters who always get everything they want.
25. Ovaries good, testicles bad.
26. We believe every woman should have unrestricted access to any kind of abortion, no questions asked. We also believe that abortion should be tightly restricted in China to prevent millions of potential girls from being robbed of their lives.
27. We feminists must demand aristocratic levels of deference while never behaving with aristocratic levels of gentility.
28. We must grouse continuously about traditionalist expectations of women while we conveniently forget to pay half the check on our dinner-dates.
29. Men avoid us because we’re too gosh-darned smart.
30. If a man works 60 hours a week to support a wife who cooks and cleans, the man is a lazy shit who exploits his wife.
31. If a woman works 60 hours a week to support a husband who cooks and cleans, the man is a lazy shit who exploits his wife.
32. If the majority of women do not call themselves feminists, the root problem lies with the majority of women and not with feminism.
33. We demand respect for all women and their diversity. That is why we dismiss, infantilize, mock or denigrate stay-at-home moms, traditionalist women, pro-life women, Republican women, Catholic women, Protestant women, Mormon women, Orthodox Jewish women, Muslim women who don’t object to hijab standards, Hindu women who don’t object to dowries, women who care about their weight, women who wear cosmetics, female researchers who study innate behavioral sex-differences, women who look forward to marriage, women who warn about giving birth after the age of 40, sorority sisters, cheerleaders, girls who like playing with dolls and any other woman who doesn’t slavishly dance to our tune. Except for them, we demand respect for ALL women and their diversity!
34. Falsely accusing a man of rape is a great way of raising his consciousness.
35. If a teacher were to beat black boys more than white boys, we’d excoriate him for hateful discrimination. If the same teacher beat only boys, that’d be fine.

In my last post I argued against raising children in a way which is incongruent with the rest of society. Children aren’t responsible for challenging or developing the current gender roles, parents are. Rather than trying to quell the natural instincts of children, I believe in the importance of identifying and working with the areas in life that are gender neutral.

Children tend to organize themselves into same-sex peer groups. Boy and girls usually prefer very different styles of playing, with girls opting for role playing and emotional sharing, while boys do activities together that don’t require as much emotional intimacy - at least not through talking.

Restricting children’s styles of playing is not something I believe in. Children need to be allowed to explore their environment in the way that they are hardwired to do. By hardwired I don’t mean that all girls and all boys are the same, I simply mean the way that each individual child is hardwired.

Trying to force children to play in a certain way is not a good idea as far as I’m concerned. A child’s creativity is developed through play, and continuously interrupting and stifling this creativity can hardly be good for the child’s development and self-esteem.

Obviously parents need to control certain behaviors such as bullying or fighting, but actually dictating what your child does when playing is akin to implementing communism or fascism in your child’s universe. Playtime is the first area where a child explores his or her autonomy, and the very act of interfering with that process decreases said autonomy.

On the other hand, children need to be socialized into responsible citizens, if we’re interested in maintaining a civilized society. This means that parents need to claim part of their children’s time, in order to raise them responsibly and help them become well-adapted adults.

In other words, the flip side of parents letting children play the way they want in order for them to explore their creativity, is that parents and adults need to be proactive in teaching children how the world works and what is expected of them.

Some of the gender neutral areas that parents can and should affect, regardless of whether it’s a boy or a girl who’s being raised, are the following:

• Education. The importance of studying and doing well in school needs to be equally emphasized for both sexes.
• Chores. I think that boys and girls alike can benefit from learning about cooking, woodwork, car maintenance, baking, etc. Unless you’re exposed to all kinds of chores, there is no way to find out what is interesting to you. Only teaching boys traditional male chores, and girls traditional female chores, is limiting in my opinion.
• Work ethic. If you work, you get paid. If you do not work, you do not get paid. Children who aren’t taught about the relationship between performance and rewards usually have a hard time adjusting to adulthood.
• Moral code. In postmodern circles it’s not uncommon to claim that all morality is relative (which is interesting, since “all morality” constitutes an absolute claim). I don’t believe that to be true at all, even though there certainly is a subjective component to morality. The common mantra of “you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone else”, is eventually nothing but a moral cop-out. Kids are constantly looking for structure and meaning in their world, and removing all structure and meaning will not help their development. Parents need to dare to speak out about their own views on legal matters, friendship, sexuality, etc.

So… not everything’s about gender. Children are perfectly capable of managing their own gender specific behavior when playing and hanging out with their friends, and the role of parents and adults is more than anything to socialize kids into educated and morally responsible adults who can contribute meaningfully to society. The tendency to let these gender neutral areas slide is a dangerous one, and intuitively I feel that there could be a connection here to boys’ deteriorating performance in school.

Raising children is no easy task, and it just got even more complicated.

In traditional societies there never was much controversy around gender. Boys were boys, girls were girls, and the gendered behaviors that children displayed were both expected and accepted. The downside was that any boy or girl who behaved in an atypical way was likely told by his or her parents to change and be more gender typical, while also being ostracized by other kids (which is still the case - children can be cruel).

Post-traditional Approaches

In postmodern circumstances that are heavily influenced by feminism, gender is often believed to be mostly or fully a product of social and cultural programming. This can lead to theories (and in some places actual practices) on how it would be desirable to raise kids differently, and try to eradicate the social constructs that create femininity and masculinity.

Using kids as guinea pigs in a gender experiment might be tempting for those who strongly believe that gender is a social construct, however, I believe that it is deeply unethical. If a subset of adults believe that gender roles are 100 percent socially constructed, and that this is a problem, then their task is to try to change the adult population, not the children.

If the core belief is that girls and boys become the way they are by modeling adults, then the adults are the ones who are responsible for implementing change, not the kids. Raising kids in a way that is incongruent with the societal expectations that they will meet as a adults, can hardly be something that is conducive for happiness and good mental health.

Besides, what moral authority will you have if you are incapable of doing something yourself, while expecting your child to do it? If you yourself are a thief, then you are modeling criminality for your child, regardless of what you tell them about stealing.

Children and Play

The preferred way to surgically engineer change in children’s gendered behavior seems to be controlling what toys they can play with. This approach can be used by parents, or gender “experts” in preschool.

I’m not talking about parents giving their kids a wide range of toys to choose from, which I think is great, but parents or teachers actively enforcing certain styles of playing. Ways of doing this include breaking up same-sex peer groups and only allowing mixed groups, or forcing children to play with toys that are usually preferred by the opposite sex.

A Sane Way Forward

Actively breaking up same-sex peer groups doesn’t make any sense, since children spontaneously organize themselves into these groups. Claiming that children model their parents or other adults in this area might seem like a tempting explanation, but when you actually think about it adults are not nearly as rigid as children. Most parents hang out with a partner of the opposite sex, and when parents have a party or get-together there’s usually a mixture of men and women.

For those of us who believe that gender roles are neither the fixed entities described by traditional societies, nor the 100 percent fluid entities postulated by postmodern feminism, the rules of engagement remain the same: if we want our children to be freer in their gender roles, then we need to model that kind of behavior in ourselves first, before they can follow suit.

Children are not guinea pigs, they’re an integrated and vulnerable part of society.