Sex, Lies & Feminism - Chapter 10: The Equality Lie

CHAPTER 9
THE EQUALITY LIE

Introduction
One of the biggest lies of the Feminists is that they stand for equality. So successful have they been, and so widely accepted is this lie, that they are shocked whenever anybody defies the conventional wisdom to point out that their too-loud declaration is as naked of truth as the emperor who had no clothes.

When Feminist radio interviewer Kim Hill asked me to define Feminism, for instance, she was surprised when I stated that equality is not one of their central concerns: they take individual issues and define what they mean by "equality" with respect to those issues in isolation from everything else.1

For example, as we have seen, Feminists demand the same amount of prize-money for women tennis players as men get, all the while ignoring how women already make more per game than men. Or, for that matter, how tennis should be integrated the same way other fields are. Let's put an end to this "separate but equal except when it suits us" nonsense. Another example is how women got the privilege of voting without the obligation of conscription into the armed forces. Or how Feminists got the abortion laws liberalised, but only for mothers. Fathers have no choice, just the obligation to pay child-support for non-aborted children !

So what Feminists are really working toward is selective gender equality – they select the issues, define what "equality" means then dictate the agenda. What this proves is that "equality" is little more than a buzzword for them: a banner under which they rally the troops and baffle their quarry. Were they genuinely concerned about it, they would invite Masculist groups to join them in a coalition to choose the issues, determine the standards and work together to establish real gender equality.

The equality lie
Feminist play fast and loose with words like "equity" and "equality," but seldom with precise meaning. What they really think about the relative worth of men and women only becomes clear when you catch them off-guard – when they think they are talking about something else.

Fran Wilde, a former Mayor of Wellington, New Zealand, is a Feminist. In her mayoral election campaign she even went so far as to hold a public meeting on what it would mean to turn Wellington into a Feminist city. According to a report in the Dominion newspaper, at the Anzac Day Service of Commemoration (a public holiday intended to honour New Zealand's war dead) held at the Wellington Cenotaph, she said:

“Remembering men who died in war was important but it was equally (my emphasis) important to recognise the often-overlooked sacrifices and experiences of women.”

Her use of the word "equally" is astonishing, because about 1000 New Zealand men were killed in the Second World War, about 3000 were wounded, and about 2,000 were taken prisoner. We can add to this number the thousands of men who were killed, wounded or captured in the Boer War, the First World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and various United Nations peacekeeping operations. To Fran Wilde, what these thousands of men went through was "equally" balanced by a group of fifty nurses who went to serve in the Middle East in the First World War – plus one woman who set up canteens and clubs for troops and worked to prevent venereal disease amongst the troops. The total number of these 51 New Zealand women who were captured, wounded or killed is precisely zero. In addition, most of the men involved were conscripted against their will by governments that had been elected by a female-majority electorate !

Admirable though the women's work was, most of us would agree zero women dead is a smaller number than several thousand men dead. Evidently, however, Feminist maths disagrees. In their ideology, the work of 51 women is worth as much as work and deaths of thousands of men. And there you have the Feminist view of sexual "equality" in a mathematical formula:

The deaths of thousands of men equal a mere lifestyle inconvenience to 51 women.

Any Masculist who is aware of Feminist oppression of men will no doubt see this as a gross underestimate of Feminist disregard for the rights, interests and sacrifices of men – but at least it gives us some idea of the scale of the problem!

One long-term result of Fran Wilde's meeting on making Wellington a Feminist city, by the way, seems to have been the subsequent implementation of penis-envy as civic policy: male-only and female-only toilets were abolished, in favour of unisex ones. The Feminists behind this move appear to hate urinals, because women have no use for them, and because they are a solid reminder of men's and women's undeniable anatomical difference, which flies in the face of the Lesbian Feminist drive to make everyone as unisex and androgynous as possible. Feminists in Sweden have been mounting an explicit campaign against urinals, whereas in Wellington one can only speculate as to the underlying agenda behind an otherwise inexplicable change.

Liberal Masculism
There is a huge Feminist research and propaganda industry in western countries and the United Nations (e.g., Women's Studies departments, Ministries of Women's Affairs, the American Association of University Women, the National Organization for Women, Ms. magazine, etc.), which, under the deceptively appealing cloak of "equality" has flooded the political landscape with issues they have unilaterally selected, defined and "solved." Because they allow men's pressure groups no input into this political process, men's rights are eroding. For example:

1.men's rights in the family (divorce, separation, custody, access, matrimonial property, paternity, etc.);
2.men's rights in the workplace (sexual harassment, equal employment opportunities, affirmative action, etc.);
3.men's right to life and health (longevity, spending on men's health, circumcision, conscription, etc.);
4.men's legal rights (the invention of still more male-only crimes and still more female-only excuses – "syndromes" – for crimes, the decriminalisation of any predominantly female crimes, and increases in the present penalties for male-only crimes).

The sky is the limit, as far as Feminist-inspired change is concerned. The only real limit is the inventiveness of Feminist researchers. It could get even worse, which is why I am happy when we manage to slow down or stop the Feminist juggernaut - never mind turning it around !

On the health front, New Zealand government funding is provided for cervical cancer screening and breast cancer screening, but not for prostate cancer screening (or testicular cancer screening, for that matter). The excuse given for this apparent discrimination is that prostate cancer screening is less reliable, but scandals about errors in cervical cancer and breast cancer screening keep cropping up, so it's obvious that those procedures are not reliable, either. Waiting-lists for surgery for male diseases are probably allowed to grow longer than those for female diseases. For example, General Practitioner Russell Pridgeon was quoted in the Dominion newspaper of 20 April 2001 as saying that:

“...18-month waiting lists for men needing prostate surgery at Invercargill's Southland Hospital in 1991 would never have been allowed to occur if the patients had been women.”

Some writers, such as Christina Hoff Sommers (1994: Who Stole Feminism?, Simon and Schuster), make a distinction between Feminists who are concerned with equality/equity and those who aren't, but I think this is an artificial distinction. In terms of their political tactics in democratic societies, Feminists of whatever kind find it useful to invoke the words "equality" and "equity." No Feminist, in practice, is actually aiming to producing overall sexual equality.

By this I mean that no Feminist has ever proposed convening a conference of men's activists and women's activists for the stated purpose of hearing all points of view and arriving at a solution which would provide equality across the board from everyone's point of view. For example, at a New Zealand law conference Canadian law professor Sheilah Martin proposed there should be a treaty between men and women. Via email I suggested to her that Men's Rights groups should be represented at any such conference. She sidestepped the issue, saying what she had in mind were treaties like countries such as Canada and New Zealand have with their pre-European minorities, with women playing the role of minority class.

Such treaties typically involve the government (which the minority help elect) on one side and the designated minority on the other. In Martin's proposal, this would take the form of a treaty between the government (elected mostly by the female majority) on the one side and Feminist groups on the other, with no representation for men's or fathers' groups. In other words, the constitutional equivalent of a kangaroo court, as are most bodies that are set up at the instigation of Feminists.

A fair amount of confusion surrounds the words "equality" and "equity" in the political arena. The word "equity" means something like "fairness," and everyone is or says they are in favour of fairness. The problem, in political theory, is choosing the standard by which we decide what is fair or equitable. That is where the word "equality" comes in. The idea in western political thought is that the ultimate and possibly only way to be sure of producing an equitable state of affairs is to produce an equal state of affairs between all parties involved. Gail Tulloch (1989: Mill and Sexual Equality, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf) draws attention to the difficulty of being clear about what we mean by "equality":


"Equality itself ... is an incomplete predicate....equality is a relational concept and must be based on a common attribute. A plank may be larger than a piece of cake. A dog and a cat are different, but not thereby unequal. It is hard even to pose the question whether a cat and a rose bush are equal. The only kind of sense that could be given to such a speculation is to imagine a situation where my cat is persistently using my prize rose bush as a scratching-post and progressively ring-barking it in the process. But here I am not really asking whether the two are equal, and trying to decide the issue that way; rather, I am sorting out my priorities, in terms of the relative importance to me of the two items, on a scale of belovedeness – perhaps to decide which stays and which goes." (op.cit.,181).

"A plank may be larger than a piece of cake" she writes, but (she implies) we never ask if a plank and a piece of cake are equal. Why? Tulloch implies the reason is they don't share any common attribute. Equality is a relationship between two or more entities, and there is no relevant attribute or parameter (Tulloch believes) in respect to whether a plank and a piece of cake enter into any sort of relationship. But is this actually true? No. In terms of price (relative value), for example, we can sensibly ask whether the price of a plank is equal to, greater than, or less than the price of a piece of cake. Economics is a great leveler. Likewise for the parameters of length, height, weight, volume, mass, density, sugar-content, combustibility, buoyancy, rigidity, conductivity, and so on. We can quite sensibly ask if a plank and a piece of cake are equal with respect to these criteria.

However, we still have to explain why Tulloch chose a plank and a piece of cake, no matter how incorrectly, as an example of non-comparable items. The likelihood is Tulloch – like most people, no doubt – sees the functions of a piece of cake and a plank in human society as so distinct that the idea they have any common attributes did not occur to her. The political point is, the issue of equality is relevant only when the functions of what we are comparing are similar. If we want to compare men and women, as Feminists always do, then the first thing we have to ask is whether the functions of men and women are sufficiently similar. I am not suggesting it would be impossible to compare them if their functions were too dissimilar. But, as with the plank and the piece of cake, it would not be particularly relevant to compare them if their functions were too dissimilar.

This is the core of the paradigm shift Feminism has meant to human history: the pre-Feminist or non-Feminist position was that, on the whole, the functions of men and women are and should be distinct, hence the question of equality is irrelevant. The Feminist position, of course, has always been that the functions of men and women should be more or less identical and they should be treated equally while carrying out these identical functions.

This explains the paradox of the wartime strength of the Feminist movement. The fact that society called upon women to assume the occupational roles vacated by male military conscripts or volunteers makes the functions of men and women in society seem (however temporarily) much more similar, hence the notion of equality becomes more apparently relevant. This despite the fact that virtually only men were having to sacrifice their lives in the front-line !

So the core question is whether the functions of women and men in society can ever be identical, such that true equality between men and women can be established. Some Feminists are striving toward this goal by trying to produce unisex, or multi-gendered societies. Liberal Masculism would be in general agreement with the motives underlying this agenda if (and this is a big "if") men were given equal input into the processes of sexual politics. Otherwise, men and women will end up with identical roles -- except that men's roles would retain those burdens which women don't want.

Conservative Masculism
While Conservative Masculists do not flatly reject the idea of equality, they give higher priority to equity, because the relationship between the sexes is significantly different from the relationship between the various social and racial groups that the model of "equality" was first applied to:

"(C)ourts cannot treat women in the same way that they do racial minorities. ... government may not provide different treatment or facilities to the races.... No such rule can be framed with respect to men and women, because our society feels very strongly that relevant differences exist and should be respected by government. To take the most obvious examples, no city could constitutionally provide separate toilet facilities for whites and blacks but certainly may do so for men and women. Similarly, the armed forces could not exempt one racial group from combat duty but surely may keep women from combat." (Bork 1990,329)

Men and women, after all, enter into the one and only primary relationship that is essential to the preservation of our species. It is a mutually dependent relationship. In addition, there are physical differences between men and women which make their sexual roles different, and which impact laws on such issues as rape (see the chapter on rape).

One of the chief goals of any society is to assure its own survival through successful procreation and upbringing of offspring. This is usually achieved through cooperation and interdependence of the sexes. Medical technology will eventually offer other significant options, but it is perhaps too soon to speculate on the exact ramifications of such changes.

Technological options notwithstanding, this interdependence complicates the Feminist attempt to apply their "equality" model to male-female relationships. Simply put, if distinct groups must cooperate and by nature have complementary (rather than identical) roles, is equality necessarily meaningful – let alone appropriate or desirable? If not, should we work out some criterion of equity based on something other than equality – such as "equivalent rights and responsibilities"? (Van Mechelen, 1993, www.backlash.com/book/light.html)

Sexual dimorphism
Feminists often pressure women by telling them they ought to want to supersede traditional female roles. This consciousness-raising takes place at/in Feminist meetings and women's studies courses, movies and television shows, and magazine and newspaper editorials. They encourage women to enter traditionally male-only occupations, even when these occupations are manual and low pay and status.

Many men, of course, agree that the work formerly reserved for men is somehow more important than women's. Indeed, many men are taught (brainwashed?) to believe this from the cradle, because many aspects of the male role involve certain sacrifices and disadvantages (e.g., lower life expectancy, risk-taking, machismo, chivalry, military conscription) that men might not be willing to accept were there no compensations in the form of (apparently) higher status.

Traditionally, women had a quieter sense of their own superiority to men which enabled them to face the different sacrifices and disadvantages their traditional role demands. Feminists, however, seem to believe women's traditional role is inferior, and this role-confusion (penis envy?) is the true cause and origin of Feminism. Many of their foremost writers, beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft, have been practising lesbians or bisexuals, so this may explain the role-confusion. (Camille Paglia, a prominent bisexual anti-Feminist may be the exception that proves the rule. She may call herself a "Feminist", but that is almost compulsory for American women nowadays, and doesn't actually mean anything.)

This does not prove Feminists were necessarily wrong; since objective factors, such as improved contraception and labour-saving devices in the home, have meant that it now makes sense for women to assume parts of the traditional male role. But how far should this blurring of the boundaries between gender roles go? Sexual dimorphism may provide the answer.

Sexual dimorphism (males having different physical characteristics from females) is common among living organisms that reproduce sexually. Sometimes dimorphism is supplemented or replaced by non-visual cues, such as smell, etc., or by gender-specific behaviours. Obviously, it would be very inefficient, from the point of view of the survival of a given species, if members of a species found it difficult to distinguish the males from the females.

Among humans, gender roles help distinguish men from women. I do not mean to suggest we would become extinct if male and female roles became identical, as long as other cues, such as clothing, cosmetics, hair-styles, voice-pitch, etc., remained. Ironically, some people are so worried by over-population they might advocate discarding all gender distinctions as a means for limiting human reproduction. Feminists, however, seem to think it sufficient to state that male and female roles could be made identical. They then write/talk as if the fact that they could be made identical proves we should make them identical. Again, their hidden assumption seems to be that men's and women's roles could not be equal unless they were identical. For Alexander, the key issue is freedom of choice:

"(W)omen's place in life has in the past limited their opportunities for achievement, both intellectually and creatively. Responsibility for childbearing and household management left little time for most women to fulfill their intellectual and creative urges. And if civilization has been poorer because of this, it has also been poorer because men, too, have been forced to play a stereotyped role that leaves part of their humanity undeveloped." (Alexander: A Woman's Place?, Hove:Wayland, 1983, p.17)

As usual, there are many hidden assumptions in this typical piece of Feminist complaining. What proportion of the female population normally experiences strong "intellectual and creative urges"? I would think this an issue only for a small but articulate proportion of the middle class.

Moreover, do the types of responsibilities men traditionally shoulder give them more time than women to fulfill any intellectual or creative urges? In truth, many women, including Feminist writers, have the time to fulfill their dreams precisely because they have relatively undemanding, sometimes even parasitic housewife-roles which, thanks to labour-saving devices, the Pill and working husbands, leave them plenty of time for activities which their exploited husbands, caught in the rat-race, cannot afford to indulge in. If these women had demanding full-time jobs, how much time would they have to write books about how sorry they feel for themselves?

Feminist laments, such as Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique", which complains about the problems of being a suburban housewife, are comparable to the whining of a spoiled child. Particularly when compared to what men have endured in two World Wars and other regional and civil wars. Feminism epitomizes the generalisation that people who rise up in revolt are often already very privileged! Female TV news anchors, for example, frequently gloss over fatal male casualties in theatres of war to concentrate on what to them are the much more horrific cases of non-fatal rape that occur in such environments. When conflict is reported in news broadcasts, there is usually some reference to how many women and children were among the casualties. Why should women be singled out – are their lives worth more than those of men ?

Women in the West complain about how "oppressed" they are, blithely dismiss any problems men may encounter, and expect us to care? Why should we? How has civilisation suffered from the fact that many women have been cooking, cleaning, and caring for children when they might have been in coal-mines getting dirty faces with the men ? Feminists have no compelling answers. Does civilization benefit more from coal-mining than from child-rearing? Do Feminists really care? Is their agenda really about what's ultimately better for society, or is there something else?

Usually the Feminists' focus is on making women independent of men through jobs and child care. Why would they want to make women independent of men? The typical response of extreme Feminists is that men rape and abuse their wives and girlfriends. But this is not supported by the facts, as I explain in other chapters. So what is the real reason? Feminist ideologues have not liked men at the personal, or sexual level, and all their hate-propaganda is merely a projection of their psycho-sexual orientation.

Feminist misandry aside, if more men were doing the domestic chores and raising children, wouldn't civilization be "poorer" for being deprived of men's creative and intellectual talents? And if this allowed these men to "develop part of their humanity" that would otherwise be undeveloped, wouldn't this also mean the women who replace them in the workforce would then be deprived of this valuable part of their humanity? Any man who is persuaded by such Feminist arguments would have to be extremely gullible, henpecked or sexually needy. Unfortunately, many men are all three.

Women tend to try to "marry up" (in socio-economic terms). But because so many women now have good jobs, they are finding it harder to find a man to marry up to. That is, the demand for relatively high-status, high-income men is outstripping supply. When the demand for a thing goes up relative to supply, the price per unit of that thing follows. In the context of sex, this means women try harder to make themselves ever more sexually appealing to get the attention of the men they deem desirable. As sexual competition between women for this scarce resource escalates, the emotional and physical consequences to women can be considerable, making Naomi Wolf's dire warnings in The Beauty Myth pale by comparison.

There are definite differences between men and women, as Tiger (1970) point out, which will probably never disappear naturally. Sex hormones, for example, such as testosterone, which causes assertiveness, a heightened sex-drive and aggression in both primates and humans. Even before puberty, boys have more testosterone then girls – but after puberty the difference in testosterone levels between the sexes is dramatic.

Then there are the different average rates of maturation between girls and boys – in both humans and primates. Indeed, some male primates take twice as long to reach maturity as do females of the same species. These differences in human maturity are measurable, and they are constant across human cultures. It is not necessarily a bad thing to mature slowly, since immature creatures learn faster than mature ones. So men may actually learn more than women, because they mature later. And this may tie in with the greater size of men's brains, compared to women's brains. This sex-linked difference is not caused by men's greater over-all size, since big men don't have bigger brains than small men, and big women don't have bigger brains than small women. It would be impossible to get research funds to investigate this question in a Western university, I suspect, since the Feminists would be afraid that the conclusions would not be to their liking !

Additionally, there is objective evidence that women smile more than men. Sex differences of this kind appear even in infants as young as two days old. Some scholars take smiling to be a sign of submissiveness. They therefore conclude that women are genetically programmed to defer to men. Whether or not this is true, it does not make the female role inferior: if avoidance of confrontation is one reason women live longer than men, then perhaps we should consider it a superior strategy.

Finally, there is menstruation, which Feminists try to gloss over as much as possible. Reporting on the research of Katherina Dalton, Tiger (1970, p. 212) writes:

"(R)oughly 40 per cent of women suffer from a variety of distressing symptoms during the final week or so of the menstrual cycle (other researchers see a higher figure).... 46 per cent of the female admissions (to mental hospital) occurred during the seven or eight days preceding and during menstruation; at this time, too, 53 per cent of attempted suicides by females occurred.... 45 per cent of industrial employees who reported sick did so during this period; 49 per cent of crimes committed by women prisoners happened at this time and so did 45 per cent of the punishments meted out to schoolgirls.... who were prefects and monitors doled out significantly greater numbers of punishments to others during the menstrual period, and she raises the question of whether or not this is also true of women magistrates, teachers and other figures in authority."

Clearly, men and women are not identical. Therefore we can not measure in any straightforward way whether or not they are "equal" to each other at any given time and place. As a society we must determine the appropriate equivalencies between men and women in those areas where we differ most fundamentally. That is, we must strive for equity rather than equality.

A certain degree of complementarity of roles between the sexes must inevitably be accepted. It is contrary to natural justice for us to judge women and men by separate yardsticks only when it prevents women from being shut out of certain occupations (e.g., the police and professional sports). Therefore, we must either use separate yardsticks that benefit men as well, or abolish all such yardsticks.

Conclusion
We have now put to rest the lie that Feminism is about sexual/gender equality. The Men's Movement requires that we bring this into the open. Sweeping it under the carpet allows the Feminists, who largely control the Sex War agenda, to switch between various implicit notions of equality according to what best suits their political purpose at any given time. And this is often to the detriment of men, children and society.

We need to negotiate a Sexual Contract between Masculists and Feminists which will include a notion of equity/equality that we all agree on. This might or might not be based on actual "equality" between men and women, though the factors listed above make that unlikely. In the absence of actual equality and identity between the roles of men and women, there would have to be trade-offs between the relative advantages of the male and female roles, as there were in the Western past, and as still exist in many parts of the world. This trade-off would outline a path for the future development of western societies. At this point, you may be asking yourself:

1. Which path?
2. Why?
3. Where would it lead us?
4. Why would that be a good destination?

I do not attempt to answer these questions, here. There is a range of possible answers which others have already proposed. I may write about my own suggestions in a future book, but for the time being I suggest we leave the matter for negotiation between men's and fathers' groups on the one side, and women's groups on the other.

In this connection, it is heartening to see that in March 2001 Austria, in a World First, has created a department for Men's Issues, in the Section on Youth, Men, and Special Family Issues of the Ministry for Social Security and Generations.