The headline this morning said, “North Carolina girl wrestler dominates boys to become first ever female state champion.” She was praised not just for winning the championship, but mainly for winning it against boys. Girls are winning acclaim by beating boys, and this encourages them to compete with men later on. Perhaps soon there will be a Nobel prize for women who can defeat the most men.
It appears that girls are being encouraged to beat boys, not only in wrestling but in everything else. Girls are encouraged to go to college and make something of themselves, whereas it appears that boys—having toxic masculinity—are no longer being encouraged to actualize themselves. At present girls make up 65% of undergraduate programs, while boys are at 35%. Girls are earning higher grades than boys, and boys are showing up in large numbers at college counseling offices to talk about their low motivation.
When 100 new Congresswomen won seats in Congress in the 2016 elections, they were congratulated not just for being elected, but for being women who were elected (and not men). When the U.S. Women’s Soccer team won the World Cup, the team was celebrated not just for winning the championship, but for being women who won a championship when U.S. men have failed to do so.
It seems there is now an ongoing competition between males and females. There is a competition to see which sex earns more. There is a competition to see how many women CEOs there are compared to how many men CEOs. There is a competition to see how many women managers there are compared to men managers. There is a competition to see how many women lawyers, doctors, Senators, Presidents and candlestick makers there are compared to men. There is probably even a competition with respect to how many women bank robbers there are compared to men bank robbers. In all aspects of U.S. life women are being encouraged to surpass men. A few years back, women were talking about equality. Now they are talking about empowerment.
For years now, men and boys have been trashed. Little boys now appear to grow up to hear their mothers or female teachers or some woman somewhere telling them that males, particularly white males, are the cause of all the world’s problems and that little boys are toxic and born toxic. Parents and teachers condescend to them from birth on. Males go into school and are forced to attend training programs to tame their wild masculinity and to learn how to treat girls and women with respect. Men are told they are “sexists,” “Misogynists,” and “male chauvinists.” If they trash a woman, they can lose their job or even be convicted of a crime. In every way, feminists have tried not just to outdo men, but to eliminate them.
The narrative that one often hears is “men oppressed women for thousands of years, and now it is women’s turn to be on top.” Nobody ever explains how men oppressed women. It is assumed that because women stayed at home and gave birth to children and raised them, while men went out and got jobs and ran businesses and managed the government, that this constituted the oppression of women. Some have compared women to slaves and used terms like “domestic slavery” to describe women’s position in society historically. It is as if women were forced to have children and take care of them against their will, or face a firing squad. Or perhaps each and every husband beat their wives if they failed to take care of the kids or the house or the pet dogs. That is a ridiculous notion, but that’s nevertheless how radical feminists think.
The narrative is that men are not only enslavers, not only responsible for all the world’s troubles, but also for all the wars throughout history, for systemic racism, for nuclear bombs, for global warming, for the pollution of the ocean, for the bubonic plague, for the government corruption, for deforestation, for the fall of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, for the melting of ice cream, and for all the husband-wife conflicts in all the families in all the neighborhoods in all the cities in all the countries in every part of the world.
However, while this race to gender superiority seems to be galloping along like a herd of mindless cattle, trampling anybody who gets in the way, hell bent on making sure no man is left standing, a single question rises up with a desperate need to be answered: When Congress is run by women, when the CIA is run by women, when the Salvation Army is run by women, when all trucks are driven by women, when all football players are women, when all postal workers are women, when all companies are run by women, when the United Nations is run by women, when all fires are put out by women, and when all the skyscrapers in the world are being designed and built by women, who is going to give birth to, nurture, and raise our children?
In the race to gender superiority—in the feminist characterization of motherhood as “domestic slavery”—the job of being a mother has been depreciated. When men and women are competing at every level, how can they achieve the cooperative and complimentary state that is required to be good parents and to raise healthy children? How can they understand the complexities of human behavior? How can they be open-minded enough to seek out the truth with regard to the important issue of gender relations?
When people are caught up in a race, they are no longer thinking of questions like these. They are driven and goal oriented; they are racing along with blinders that only permit them to see the one goal and not to consider all the ramifications of achieving that goal.
In doing couple’s therapy I have come across this same problem, particularly if the woman in the relationship has a feminist bent. Her aim is not to achieve an equal, cooperative, and mutually respectful relationship with her mate, but to control and dominate him, and eventually to surpass him. Such women are disturbed. A disturbed person is not able to do the work entailed in having a healthy relationship; she is not able to be open-minded and cooperative. There is, unfortunately, a large segment of women who need to feel superior become women who want to destroy men and take away their confidence. They are the ones who will benefit from this gender competition with its goal of defeating men.
But society in general, and culture in particular will not benefit from this competition. It will not benefit those who want equal opportunity for all. It will not benefit those who are concerned about the new double standard in parenting that favors girls and disparages boys. It will not benefit those who are concerned about the importance of motherhood and the forming of good mother-child attachments in early childhood.
Years of psychoanalytic research have showed the importance of families that have both a father and a mother, families in which parents are on the same page in raising children, families in which parents cooperate rather than compete. All of this research is now out of the window.
What will the next generation of children be like? Perhaps they are already here. After years of propaganda, feminists have created the society they want. And every day, the divisiveness of our society is increasing and the political unrest is mushrooming and our social problems are worsening. Perhaps things will have to completely fall apart before they get better.
