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[box type=”note” icon=”none”]There is a problem with the women in this culture. [/box]
[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]es, I know, there are problems with men, too. Believe me, I have heard about them for the last forty years. Some of it true and fair, much of it neither. It was a necessary dialogue just the same. So is this.
To understand this we need a brief look at history. Women, in the past, were denied voting rights, couldn’t own land and didn’t have much access to employment that would give them the freedom to make it on their own.
This needed to change, and of course, did, as can be confirmed with a cursory glance at the world around you. I laud those changes and would not turn back the hands of time if I could. But there is a problem in how we got here.
The reality is that the gender roles of our history were traps for both men and women. Women were assigned to home and children; men to sacrificial roles as protectors and providers. The simple but accurate truth of the matter is that we developed those roles to facilitate the survival of the species. And when the time came, we set out on the often complicated path to change. Most men embraced those changes and to this day continue to do so.
The problem here, and it is a monumental one, is that your knowledge of these historical events is largely shaped, convoluted rather, by feminism. Feminists taught you that your history with men was of unremitting evil; that you were chattel, slaves to men who held all power and wielded it over your lives in a system of sadistic, male dominated governance. They even gave it a name.
Patriarchy.
It is a word that has become synonymous with oppression. But feminists are loathe to acknowledge to you that “Women and children first,” was the patriarchal mantra, and that much of the social norms, even when misguided, were a product of a code adopted for the sole purpose of preserving your life. It wasn’t always fair, but the unfairness wasn’t always yours. Men died by that code, and trained their sons to do the same.
[box type=”alert” icon=”none”]The fact that we still do is evidence that while gender roles have undergone drastic change, the job is incomplete.[/box]
So what happened as a result of this systemic pattern of half-reality? Feminist distortions were increasingly embraced, and intertwined with the legitimate need for change, while men did what they usually do. They reacted to the message and not the messenger, standing up for and supporting your right to freedom from expectation based on your sex; to stand aside and yield, as it were, as you walked out of the entrance to the metaphorical cave.
Many of you spit on us on the way out. Many of you still do. It has to stop.
This isn’t just about decency. And it is not just about the chasm of mistrust that separates us from each other, or the legions of the walking wounded from this godforsaken gender war. It is about our future. The vilification of men that you have accepted as appropriate now translates to catastrophe for our sons; for your sons, your husbands, your fathers and your brothers.
The problem is that what we say, think and feel about people invariably translates into what we actually do to them. Nowhere is this more evident than with our sons, in the here and now. If you take an honest look at the academic environment to which our boys are subjected, you will see that their masculinity itself is under attack with ideology that teaches them they are inherently flawed.
Christina Hoff Sommers documented this in her highly recommended book “The War Against Boys.” She writes, “The pedagogy is designed to valorize females, such as teaching history in a woman-centered way. Boys are to be inspired to revere Anita Hill and to “enjoy” quilting. At the same time, schools discourage activities that are natural and traditional to boys, such as playing ball together.”
She goes on to say, with sad accuracy, “Most parents have no idea what their children are facing in the gender-charged atmosphere of the public schools.” What Sommers didn’t add to that but I will is the fact that most parents have no idea about this because they choose not to. As girls and girls programs increasingly flourish, boys are falling to the sidelines in ever growing numbers.
The results of that are chilling. Boys are more likely than ever to drop out of school and engage in delinquency and other problems. They are representing less college graduates every year (40% and dropping quickly). With this diminishing education and wholesale marginalization, they are on a fast track to being the “second sex,” that position that so many feminists touted as the greatest evil of human history when they claimed it applied to women. This is the lasting legacy of spitting on men and your sons will not be the exception.
Young men now grow up to be destroyed in corrupt family court systems where women are encouraged to and even praised for using their innocent children like pawns in order to drain the father of assets. Those same children also have their badly needed connection to their fathers severed in the process. And when those exploited, abused children start quite naturally to act out and get in trouble, we blame the father who was removed against his will, for of all things, being absent.
[quote float=”right”]Are you offended by this letter? Does it make you want me to shut up and quit criticizing women? Then that is what you will teach your son[/quote] And the “freedom” women gained on this frenzied path of vengeance and victimization? It doesn’t appear to have settled well. Women are growing increasingly violent. They are matching men in domestic violence, blow for blow, and they are causing the lions share of injury and death to children in the home. All while feminists insist that domestic violence can only be defined by men assaulting women.
But we don’t speak of these things. We are not supposed to. In your position as the identified victim, and mine as the identified perpetrator, there is supposed to be an indelible silence on these matters. For the most part, there is. And that silence is destroying us.
It is a silence that is maintained with the collusion of shallow, weak men and misguided, self-serving women who despite their insistence on an image of independence actually feed parasitically off the men in their lives. In other words, I am talking about most of our culture. The only answer I can think of is for men, and for women, to change.
Perhaps you will consider this before concluding that men’s rights activists are whiners or woman or products of bad mothers. With an open mind you might actually coclude that most men’s rights activists are men who above all else, seek justice. For their children, for themselves, and ultimately for you.
I hope that a few of you will read this and consider it the next time you hear someone say “men are pigs,” or when you hear a woman refer to her first born child as “the insurance policy,” or before you giggle at the thought of acts of savagery by women like Lorena Bobbitt or Katherine Becker. Or even before you nod your head in unconsidered agreement with whatever generic negatives about men happen to be making the rounds. All of this can and will be visited on your sons, and their sons.
I hope too, that some of you look at your sons and ask yourselves what kind of world in which you really want them to live.
When your sons choose wives and marry, I hope you consider the agony they will go through when “taken to the cleaners” and robbed of their children in the family courts. You will be forced to stand by powerlessly and watch them have their hearts ripped out. As always, it will look much different to you when the system you help maintain with your silence crushes your son, and not just some obscure, unknown male whom you quietly think is getting what he deserves. It will happen to more than half of them.
The best prevention for this last one is to teach your sons to choose carefully; to scrutinize a woman before committing his life and labor to her; to evaluate her morals and values as a woman prior to putting a ring on her finger, or even whether it is wise any more to marry in the first place. But how can we do this if we keep teaching them that such evaluations are the stuff of misogyny? Indeed, how can we do this if scrutinizing women at all is such a taboo?
Are you offended by this letter? Does it make you want me to shut up and quit criticizing women? Then that is what you will teach your son when it comes to making himself vulnerable to the woman he chooses to marry. I hope he does not become one of the countless that take their own lives during the process of a divorce. I hope he does not have a mother that will wear blinders to the truth that this could happen if he does not have the skills, or the information, to choose wisely.
And therein lies the rub, ladies. It is indeed time, just as it was for men, for women to be held to scrutiny, and to account. More importantly, it is time for women to do this on their own. I’ll do my best to provide a fair and compassionate mirror in my writings. It is always up to you whether that mirror is a place you want to look.
