Are women obsolete? According to feminists, apparently, the answer is yes.
9 Years ago, Maureen Dowd published her book “Are Men Necessary”, along with a supplied answer of “no”. However, while the book’s title was new, the idea was not. In fact, not even the content of the book was new. A review from Entertainment Weekly called it “a hodgepodge of recycled columns, Dorothy Parker quips, and peekaboo glimpses into the glam journalist’s personal life.” [1]
But Statist Feminism has been crowing about the imminent obsolescence and elimination of 49% of the world’s population for over a century. It was only the rise to a nearly total control of public discourse on gender, emboldening current feminists to publicly brag about their own fascist and genocidal leanings.
Hannah Rosin, another leading light of Gender Statism, claims to have coined the term “the end of men”, jumping on board the bandwagon in 2010 with a Slate article, a TED talk, and then international lionization.
The claim, formulated as a question “are men obsolete?” is also repeated on a yearly basis, most recently in January of 2014 by Dowd and Rosin on the “men are obsolete” side, and two other feminists, Caitlin Moran and Camille Paglia on the “no” side. It’s certainly heartening to hear from at least some female gender ideologues that an entire class of human being still have some reason to be allowed to take up space on sidewalks and breathe public air.
I like to imagine that before they were routed from polite society, members of the KKK might have held private debates about the utility of keeping a few blacks around.
However, amid all the talk of the male human beings being unnecessary or obsolete, it’s worth reviewing a few other offerings from the camp of state feminism.
Women, we are authoritatively informed, are so weak, and so bereft of personal agency, that after consuming an alcoholic beverage, they lose the adult power of being able to make a decision to participate in the act so many women and men drank for the purpose of facilitating in the first place. Namely, to get themselves a piece of ass. A woman participating in sex while drunk is not acting with the self-actualization of an adult, nope. She’s a victim of rape, even if she thinks she wants sex. But what about a similarly drunk man, is he the victim of rape if he has sex while drunk? No, of course not, he’s the rapist in this pantomime.
But the now-prevalent attitude advanced by gender ideologues and Statist Feminists is that a drunk and horny woman making the exact same choices as our hypothetical drunk and horny man – she is uniquely the victim. Obviously then, she is not a competent adult, while if her gender was reversed, and she were a man, the same choice would be correctly treated as an adult act of personal volition. And if we accept the public messaging we are endlessly bludgeoned with, how can we come to any conclusion other than feminine inferiority?
Considered also is what is commonly called the “wage gap.” This is the claim that for every dollar earned by a man, a woman doing the same job earns only a fraction of the same pay. Usually the number is 77%, although the claimed percentage varies.
The reality of the wage gap is that averaged over the entire population, the lifetime earnings of men and women do vary by 20 to 30 percent. However, the reason for these differences are almost entirely based on the choices of career made, on average, by men and women. This has been known to be true, scientifically demonstrate, for literally decades. The reality is that women typically make career choices affording them flexibility, access to family and friends, and the option to take periods of extended leave from the workforce. By contrast, men on average make their career choices far more on the basis of income. This translates to longer hours, less time away from the work force, less flexibility, higher physical risks, and other tradeoffs of quality of life for higher pay.
Of course, in the gender-ideological narrative, none of this reality is ever touched on. Instead, it is a world-wide conspiracy to subjugate women by paying them less for identical work. That this story is stupid, and purposefully omitting significant parts of that strange thing called “reality,” seems of no import to the story’s proponents. If women really were paid only a fraction of the income men are paid for identical work, why would any company hire men at all? The first corporation to discard male employees in favour of female would obviously have an immediate economic advantage.
Some experiments along such lines have obviously been performed: corporations mandated under law to force a certain percentage of female directors. But returning to the unavoidable fact that women and men make different choices on average over their careers, is the question of what drives those choices: women and men are differently valued as human beings. Stated simply, women own their own humanity. The social concept of a woman being a human deserving her own life, freedom from coercion or violence, and freedom from harm does not require any particular accomplishment.
Men, by contrast, live with the concept of the “real man”. This is public personhood dependant on behavior, accomplishment, provision for others, and adherence to consensus evaluation of social attitudes. So when corporations are mandated by law to seat women in senior positions based on sex rather than merit, because of the differing social motivations felt by women and men, those companies under-perform compared to corporations without mandated sexual quotas.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a couple of independent studies on the matter that might help:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1364470
http://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publications/Discussion_Paper_1/2012/2012_03_06_dkp_03.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
But of course, the realities ignored by gender ideologues will continue to operate, regardless of the wishes of the willfully ignorant.
“Women earn only 77 cents per dollar! Oh my god! They’re oppressed! It’s not the choices they make! No no, it’s not the different social expectations men and women live with, no! Noooo! They’re oppressed! Really really, and anyone pointing to evidence refuting this narrative, they just hate women!
Let’s just pause here, and take a couple of deep breaths.
The question naturally emerging is just this: How stupid do we believe ourselves to be, to keep buying into this popular narrative? Because however much we believe ourselves stupid, we become just that stupid.
Women are 51 to 52 percent of the world’s population. When pointing this out to feminists in direct conversation, they have shouted at me that women are a minority, and that 51% is not a majority.
Majority (noun): the greater part or number; the number larger than half the total[2]
For at least the last 30 years, women are also the majority of registered and active voters in almost every western nation.[3]. The difference varies geographically and over time, from 4 to 10 percent.
Had enough concrete reality for the moment? Returning to the populist fiction, we can cling to the fact that most elected representatives are male. Proof that women are oppressed and that men run everything to elevate male interests to suppress or to oppress women. Obama, just like every other US president is male, therefore, he serves the interests of men, ahead of any interests of women, right?
Sorry, but: reality time again. Reading through the language of the Obama administration’s health care legislation, how many provisions exist for women, excluding concern for men, and how many male-specific provisions exist, excluding women? How are costs distributed across the sexes, compared to how much each gender utilizes health care? More care for women, and more cost distribution onto men. This isn’t by itself a problem. At least, it wouldn’t be in a healthy culture in which women and men were not at war with one another. However, it is also obvious that elected politicians, even being mostly male, cater mostly to female interests. The majority of voters are female. And, in the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, a number of provisions exist specifically excluding care for men.
And yet, in almost every element of our culture’s Statist Feminist narrative, women are victims. The “oppressed” majority. A majority who live longer, who dominate by 65% of enrollment and graduation in universities. A majority who consumes more public health care resources. A majority who sends more of everybody’s disposable income, regardless of who earns more on average over a lifetime of work.
I can still hear the crying: “But women are oppressed!”
Has anybody else noticed that domestic violence is increasingly rarely referred to as “domestic violence?” The new label, created and promoted by the actors in the Domestic Violence shelter industry, is “violence against women.” Unfortunately, when domestic violence occurs in the real world, it is almost always reciprocal. That means in male/female couples, violence is initiated and maintained by both parties. A relationship including domestic violence is one with deep underlying dysfunctions, such as PTSD, drug addiction, poverty, mental illness, alcoholism or unresolved trauma from past experience of both parties. All credible and methodologically sound research on DV confirms this, but we now wrestle with the rhetoric of a billion dollar industry pretending only half the problem is real, and the other half is magic’ed out of existence by public propaganda. The shelter industry is driven by the ideology of Statist Gender Feminists, and Canada has over 500 DV shelters catering only to women, and 1 catering to men.
Incidentally, in the smaller fraction of non-reciprocal violent domestic relationships in which there is only 1 aggressor and 1 victim, the majority of the initiators of that violence are women. Piling on top of this is the equally-inconvenient fact that when we include heterosexual and non-heterosexual relationships, gay men have the lowest per capita incidence of domestic violence, and lesbian women have the highest, with heterosexual couples in the middle.
And everybody buying into the continued narrative from Statist Feminism keeps claiming, as loudly and as often as they can, that the gender of majority (i.e. women) is now, and always has been oppressed by the gender of minority (men).
But surely everybody knows our culture is a patriarchy, set up to advantage men at the continued and every escalating expense of women. Right? Right?!
Well, men do dominate in some areas. The jobs with the highest worker death tolls, and highest rates of worker-targeted violence for example. Construction, logging, fishing, law enforcement, taxi driving and so on.
Men also dominate the world of being homeless, comprising 70 to 90 percent of those who live and die on the streets.
Men are 4 out of 5 suicides. Men die earlier in every country on the planet, men are even subject to more rape per capita than women, even if we allow ideologues to exclude female perpetrated rape from their definition of that crime. The term “rape culture”, by the way, was originally coined during the rise of the black civil rights movement to describe the institutional support of the rape by prison staff, and other prisoners, of mostly black, male inmates in American prisons. Now however, in spite of that, the term is used to maintain a fiction that women are victimized by a common social acceptance of female-targeted rape.
While its arguable that many men, and possibly even most men, understand much of this already, they do not dare say so openly because it is culturally forbidden. For men, speaking openly of any of these forbidden realities carries the cost of social death: the loss, by consensus, of public identity as a “good man”.
But the Statist Gender Ideologues we commonly refer to as feminists not only continue to insist on the eternal, ever-escalating victimhood and oppression of women, they also demonstrate an established, persistent pattern of authoritarian, organized censorship of any real criticism of that pernicious, violent and hateful ideology. However, in Toronto, where so much public feminist absurdity has been practiced for the benefit of observers around the world, sponsored by the University of Toronto and the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the feminist “protestors” attempting to silence non-conformists actually put “down with fascists” in their chants.
Supported by the a public University, a national union of public employees, censoring the expression of differing view-point–classic fascist tactics–shouting, among other things, “down with fascists.” I don’t know how to draw a simpler picture without breaking out a box of crayons.
Despite decades of overwhelming public support, public funding, and government support and funding, feminism is the underdog here, right? A permanent federal commission on the status of women. A national office and minister of the status of women, with no such institution addressing the needs of men. Every major university in the Western world operating university-funded women’s centres, and no balancing men’s resources. DV shelters catering only to women, and the fraudulent fiction of sexually one-sided female-victimizing domestic abuse maintained to keep the money flowing. Despite women being the majority of the population, the majority of voters, and consuming the majority of disposable income, we are to believe women, being the majority, are oppressed by the minority who die earlier. The minority who do the most deadly and dangerous jobs, who kill themselves more, who are homeless more, who suffer 60% higher criminal sentencing for identical crimes, and who die 4 to 7 years earlier than women.
If the gender of majority are actually the victims that Statist Gender Ideologues claim, then they must also be the gender of inferiority. There is no other possible conclusion. Feminists are telling us, and have been telling us for over a century, that women are, in almost every way, the inferiors of men. In fact, if you do not believe that women are oppressed, then you are not a feminist. This is not my definition, it is the definition feminists routinely insists on as a critical component of their own narrative. The message from feminism is inescapable – and that message is that women are now, and always have been inferior. In fact, what feminism, our culture’s dominant narrative is saying to every one of us in 1000-foot-high text is that women are obsolete.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_Men_Necessary%3F_When_Sexes_Collide
[2] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/majority?s=t
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_gender_gap
