But what then caught my eye was this longer quote:

The male form of a female liberationist is a male liberationist — a man who realizes the unfairness of having to work all his life to support a wife and children so that someday his widow may live in comfort, a man who points out that commuting to a job he doesn’t like is just as oppressive as his wife’s imprisonment in a suburb, a man who rejects his exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in childbirth and the most engrossing, delightful care of young children — a man, in fact, who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person.

The anthropologist’s eye indeed – perceptive, insightful, yet also respectful of ‘the Other’. Almost the exact antithesis, in fact, of so many of the self-styled advocates of ‘gender-liberation’ that I’ve had the misfortune to deal with for most of my adult life. Where Margaret Mead had argued that the core principle would have to be that “every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man”, instead far too many feminists and self-styled ‘pro-feminist’ men both then and since have patently believed that the only way to ‘liberate’ a woman was to enslave a man – and preferably via as much pain and prejudice as was practicably possible. In short, their method for reducing gender-violence was to increase it as much as they could: and then, when that didn’t work – because it doesn’t, and can’t – keep on ratchetting up the pain in the relentless pursuit of Other-blame.

This mistake affects different countries in different ways. Australia is perhaps one of the worst: for example, for the first ten years that I was there, the Melbourne newspaper The Age never published a single piece that was overtly respectful of men as a gender; and for the next decade, although such items did occasionally appear, they would each invariably be juxtaposed with another much larger article stridently reaffirming the ‘truth’ of the inherent evils of men. As I discovered whilst I was helping two of my lesbian friends recover after they’d ended their relationship in a knife-fight, the domestic-violence agencies defined violence as inherently ‘male’: there was no support available for lesbians (unless they blamed a man – my friends didn’t and wouldn’t, and were firmly told to go away because they were ‘rocking the boat’…!), and certainly no help for any man at all – even though the unlaundered hard-data showed that men were (and still are) the majority of domestic-violence victims in that country. And in my home state it was (and I believe still is) not merely a dismissable but criminal offence for a male primary-school teacher to comfort a crying child. All of this in the name of so-called ‘gender equality’…

Again in Australia, it was clear that many if not most of the ‘pro-feminist’ men I came across were not pro-women at all – in fact far from it, in several cases I personally knew. Instead, they were either lost in a vaguely-Marxist delusion that “it is impossible for one to have more without others having less” – and hence attacked men-as-a-gender (or all men other than themselves and their co-religionists, to be precise) under the mistaken belief that this would somehow automatically make things better for women (it doesn’t) – or else were still obsessively trying to hurt men-in-general as ‘payback’ for childhood hurts from other boys (which is a seriously dangerous form of self-dishonesty). It’s true that I did meet a few ‘pro-feminist’ men who genuinely were pro-women – but in every case they understood exactly Mead’s point that to be ‘pro-women’ we must also be ‘pro-men’. The blunt fact is that the only way that works is to create a frame in which everyone wins – otherwise everyone loses.

It’s not much better in Britain – there’s still the same massive dishonesty about domestic-violence, for example. In so many ‘Western’ countries, the main result of so-called ‘equal opportunity’ in employment has been to re-entrap women back in the same paid-workforce mess as men – a feminist tragedy of epic proportions, given that the main aim of the women’s movement for much of the previous century was to get women out of the paid-workforce, and free up at least some part of the community to repair the ongoing damage created the myopic self-centredness of the ‘money-economy’. (The real need, then and now, is to challenge the inanity and insanity of that economic model – not merely argue about who should or should not have the ‘right’ to not be enslaved in it!)

The Latin countries – for all their complexity and chaos – seem somehow to have a much better understanding of what gender-equality really means in practice, and to me seem much more human overall. In Portugal, for example, it was a huge relief to find it was considered normal for me to play mime-games and visual jokes with small children in their family and social settings; by contrast, back in Australia it was frequently assumed that, as a middle-aged man, I must be some kind of dangerous sexual-pervert if I merely smiled at a child in the street. Which hurts, a lot, that aggressive, pointless, baseless “exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in … the most engrossing, delightful care of young children”: a human, natural smile is merely an expression of the human need to be in and part of – rather than enforced apart from – the society that I’m in. In other words, as Mead put it, ”a man … who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person”.

The sad tragedy is that so much of feminism started out from a drive towards a true equality, but somehow lost its way in a paediarchal flight into a blame-filled fantasy, an increasingly-desperate addiction to ‘Other-blame’ as a means to evade responsibility in any form. Even now, forty or fifty years later, so much of it is still rampantly and obsessively anti-male, even rabidly sexist at times in the worst possible way. Yet it doesn’t work: and the reason why it doesn’t work is that too many feminists have forgotten the simple fact that, just like women, men are human too. Equality cannot truly exist for anyone unless all of us are considered equally human – with all that that implies.

Margaret Mead never forgot that fact: it’s one of the reason I value her work and life so much – and likewise those other rare, amazing and courageous women alongside whom it’s sometimes been my great privilege to work. Yet what strikes me most about Mead, I suppose, is her simple humanity:

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.

Contrast that brief sentence, perhaps, with Margaret Thatcher’s inane assertion that “there is no such thing as society”. I don’t think anyone but Mead could have described the human condition and the true nature of society any better or more poignantly than that.

Interesting insights indeed.

In the previous chapter, ‘MQ-6: The meaning of life‘, we explored major mythquakes that arise from collisions between ways of thinking – particularly science and religion, as ‘social constructions of reality’ that provide definitions of ‘the meaning of life’. Here we go deeper again, to mythquakes that arise from a rather more personal part of the meaning of life – the social construction of gender. Unlike politics or science or religion, whose mythquakes tend to focus around particular rallying-points, the assumptions here are anchored in people’s physical being, and hence distributed much more evenly throughout the social milieu. The result is that when a major mythquake does occur in this domain, its impacts are both locally intense and broadly distributed – creating potential for even higher damage, yet also much harder to identify and to resolve.

The current content of this chapter focusses perhaps too much on Western views of gender, without much link to other cultures – in part a reflection of my professional experience in the work I did in Australia on domestic-violence, and the huge dishonesties around that field and Australian feminism in general, which I also see in perhaps less extreme form in most other Western countries at present. As a result, the chapter-structure probably needs somewhat of a re-think – perhaps an extra intro-section to deal with gender in general, and the complex trade-offs between societal expectations or needs and the biological and anatomical facts that underpin them. I also haven’t done anything here about sexual-orientation (not ‘sexual-preference‘, because in most cases it isn’t a choice as such at all); and the chapter probably also needs to address the biological fact that there more than a mere two sexes – current genetic-research indicates that perhaps as many as 1% of the population would need a ‘none of the above’ box for the ‘Which sex?’ question on most personal-information forms…

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• …and all things nice?
• Snips and snails?
• Patriarchy and paediarchy

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-7: Sugar and spice

Richter 7: Major earthquake. Can cause serious damage over larger areas. Equivalent to around thirty megatons of TNT (largest nuclear bombs). Around one every twenty days on average.

Mercalli IX: General panic; damage to foundations; ground cracks, sand and mud bubble up from ground; considerable damage to well-constructed buildings; reservoirs and underground pipes damaged.

…and all things nice?

[Extends gender-themes in wider scope: some examples of (especially) women's stories built on self-congratulatory wishful-thinking - e.g. "sugar and spice" - and the huge social pressures to hold the stories together when there's little or no foundation to them.]

{My starting-point here was that nasty little childhood doggerel that seems to be common throughout English-speaking cultures: “What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all things nice! What are little boys made of? Snips and snails and puppy-dogs tails!” – assertions that seem in turn to be just about the only background beneath many feminists’ pretence that women are somehow ‘inherently better’ than men. More on that in moment, when we look at domestic-violence and the like in the next section.

The point here is that each culture has its own way of describing and acting on the real differences between males and females – one of which is well-described in Margaret Mead’s acerbic remark that “motherhood is a biological fact, fatherhood is a social fiction”. We also frequently see three pairs of assertions, each of which has some limited basis in biological fact: “men do, women are”, “men think, women feel” (often described more in the negative, “women don’t think, men don’t feel”), and “men are hunters, women are gatherers”. In the past few decades enormous efforts in Western cultureshave been placed on the women’s side of each of those pairs, so that no-one would doubt that women think, or women do; yet the stereotypes on the men’s side have, if anything, been worsened, such that there is even less respect of the reality that men too are ‘human beings’ rather than solely ‘human doings’, or that men too also definitely have feelings which are somehow assigned very low social priority – increasing the social tensions in those cultures, and hence the potential for explosive mythquakes.

Western feminists have also been notorious for making arbitrary assumptions about purported ‘women’s oppression’ in other cultures, without reviewing any of the culture-specific facts, or even asking the opinions of women in those cultures themselves. Many assertions seem to be based on an arrogant, self-centric pseudo-sympathy – “what I would feel if I were to experience that, from my background and culture” – rather than genuine empathy – “what she feels, from her own background, culture and experience”. There has been a great deal of research on this strange form of ‘cultural imperialism’, very little of which has actually been respected in real feminist practice: instead, histrionic ‘awfulising’ about practices in other cultures has been used either to ‘justify’ or to conceal increasingly-extreme anti-male sexism in the West. Some cultures do indeed oppress women, from our perspective; yet the blunt fact is that most Western cultures actively oppress men far more. Self-centred stories about ‘sugar and spice’ are part of the societal processes used to maintain that oppression: the resultant potential for gender-based mythquakes is huge, yet largely unacknowledged, and largely unaddressed.}

Snips and snails?

[Dangers of self-confirming prophecies about assigning all unpleasant characteristics to men.]

{The flipside of the ‘sugar and spice’ myth is ‘snips and snails’, defining all unpleasant human characteristics to men alone. Part of my research some years back was on the disparity between the ‘official line’ on domestic-violence – which purported that women alone were the victims, and at a very high rate [e.g. "one in three women" etc] – versus the physical reality from hard-data such as hospital-records – which clearly indicated that the overall risk was much lower than claimed [one in ten lifetime risk], was roughly the same for both sexes, that by a small margin men were more often victims than women, and that, by a large margin, the most violent class of relationship was lesbian. (I’d actually started that research after two of my lesbian friends had ended their relationship with a knife – fortunately without puncturing each other – but had been aggressively refused any help by the so-called ‘Women’s Help Service’ on the grounds that they had not blamed any man for the assault.) In Australia at least, the disparity is not only huge, but is backed by an enormous amount of social pressure to keep the disparity from becoming known. The potential for destructive mythquakes is, again, huge.

Another characteristic in Anglo cultures has been the systematic denigration of men, coupled with a similarly systematic exclusion of men and most forms of ‘masculine nurturing’ from parenting and child-rearing. Since masculine-nurturing is primarily about teaching safe management of risk, the result has been several of generations of children who have little or no grasp or even awareness of real-world risk and how to minimise and manage it. The resultant mythquakes tend to be localised, but only in the sense that relatively few people are harmed or killed in each individual incident – but the sheer numbers of incidents and their impacts ripple outward throughout the entire societal milieu, often feeding into an unfounded culture of ‘fear of the Other’ or unfocussed ‘fear of the unknown’.}

Patriarchy and paediarchy

[Evasions of responsibility on the part of both sexes; 'patriarchy' vs paediarchy - 'rule by, for and on behalf of the childish'.]

{Overall, much of the ‘gender wars’ appears to be based on evasions of self-responsibility, following the delusion that power is the ability to avoid work. In some cultures men demand that women should cover themselves up so that those men do not have to face the fact of their own sexuality; in other cultures, women demand the ‘right’ “to dress as we please” or whatever, and then complain when others respond to what is, in any biological sense, blatant sexual-advertising. In short, it’s messy, and often magnificently dishonest.

The feminist literature that typified my own adolescence and beyond would frequently rail against the purported evils of ‘the patriarchy’, which in Jungian terms appears to be little more than a lebl for the ‘shadow’ side of those women themselves. One extreme example was a book in which a former colleague used the word ‘patriarchy’ or ‘patriarchal’ literally more than a thousand times as a kind of generalised all-purpose synonym for ‘bad’. It seems to me that the real purpose here is ‘Other-blame’: not so much ‘patriarchy’ as a demand for the ‘rights’ of  ’paediarchy’, “rule by, for and on behalf of the childish” – inherent self-dishonesty, regardless of sex or gender. Since any form of self-dishonesty leads inevitably to mythquakes, there’s plenty of potential for serious problems here – all of which is blamed on that blurry, ill-defined Other, creating an ever-increasing spiral of stress and strain. It’s important to note, though, that although the respective mythquakes are generated from this specific context, they tend to actually surface in other domains – simply because this is usually too close to people’s own self-definition for it to be faced with any real honesty.}

Just rewatching http://girleffect.org to remind myself how to use mystery to setup a presentation

As he says in the post, the site-design is a very good illustration of how to build a story to present an idea. But unfortunately I also looked at the content of the site – and found myself quietly roiling in irritation. Oh no, not again…

Looking at it with a business-anarchist’s eye, I suppose I have to applaud its disruptive intent. But it’s what I would call “kiddies’ anarchy” rather than a true responsibility-based anarchy: the catch is that, as usual, it hasn’t been thought-through properly, and what they’re promoting as ‘the right solution’ will almost certainly cause more harm than good in the longer term.

For a start, it displays the usual rampant sexism of Western culture – best summarised by one of the old feminist slogans, “men are the problem, women are the solution”. In this case, it’s “girls are the solution”, but it comes to much the same in the end – there’s no mention of males at all anywhere in it other than one fleeting, quickly-removed reference to ‘husband’, in the same context as ‘cow’. The underlying model is a straightforward win/lose – we don’t actually have to do much to make things better for girls, all we have to do is shut the boys out of everything and it’ll magically all come out right because ‘girls are the solution’. The real end-result is that the boys, having been shut out of the society, will go off and create their own – which, yes, may well be rampantly misogynistic, and which would be no surprise at all given the way boys are treated. The only way that works is a win/win – everything else guarantees that everyone loses in the longer-term. And I must admit I find it so frustrating that would-be activists like the promoters of ‘girleffect’ still do not grasp that basic fact. Hence one reason for “oh no, not again…”.

The other is probably more subtle: the ‘solution’ is that putting a girl in a school uniform somehow magically leads to that girl receiving a cow which she will then somehow transform equally magically into a whole herd, which she will sell for dollars, and she will become a rich businesswoman, which will be wonderful for everyone. There’s no grasp of even basic economics; no grasp of basic environmental issues; no grasp of where this will fit into the societal context; nothing. Just magic. What it would really do – unless there’s a full socially-grounded structure such as Grameen behind it – would simply entrap the by-now-woman into the wage-culture – in other words, yet another owned not-quite-slave of globalised business, whilst tangling everyone else around her into the same mess, and almost certainly lead to a medium- to longer-term ‘tragedy of the commons’. Oh no not again…

Feminists in Asian countries especially have routinely expressed their annoyance at what they describe as Western-feminists’ ‘smug cultural-imperialist intrusions’ into their own much more complex societal contexts: judging from the content of the girleffect’ website, they certainly have a point.

Nice idea; nice sentiment and all that (if it wasn’t so damned sexist); but overall, I just wish these blasted people would think for once…

Bah.