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On Men and Women
I have a friend of Italian descent who moved to
Italy a few years ago. While she was
job-hunting there, a prospective employer expressed interest in hiring her --
and fondled her breast.
When she wrote to
me of this, I was heart-broken and frightened.
Resisting the temptation to tell her to just flee, I said she would have
to decide if she could bear working for someone she would constantly have to
fight off and resist.
She didn’t take
the job. But she said that her
experience is common in Italy. She was
facing the real thing, Old World machismo.
According to an
article in Playboy years back,
breasts are “very aggressive.”
But there is
nothing inherently aggressive about swellings intended for nursing a baby. The aggression lies in the hearts of men.
Why?
Male
dominance/female subservience is virtually universal in the world. Cultures that have little else in common
share patriarchy.
According to
anthropologists, this has not always been the case. So I reject the theories of evolutionary psychologists in this
matter. To be attributable to human
evolution, a behavior has to be something universal to the human species, such
as laughter or religion. Patriarchy is
not.
The most primitive
type of hunter-gatherer society functioned as an Athenian democracy. Indeed, it was more democratic than ancient
Athens, because there were no slaves, and women and men were equal.
What changed?
One thing all
modern societies have in common is that they have gone through the agricultural
revolution, with its attendant division of labor, including a warrior class.
Few women would
willingly give birth to cannon fodder.
So if you want a standing army, you’ll have to subjugate women.
Also, if you want
to pay a man to die for you, it will help if you convince him that it’s
masculine to not be in touch with his feelings, for his feelings will surely
rebel against what you’re asking. You
will tell him that his weeping mother and sobbing lover are inferior beings
whose desires should be ignored. They
are to be manipulated for male purposes, the only legitimate purposes.
No doubt, the
details of the process were different in different cultures. But a universal phenomenon must involve
universal factors.
The agricultural
revolution allowed the rise of civilization, with its notable progress in art,
science, and statecraft. But, as I like
to say, a centipede has more legs than Madonna, but they aren’t as pretty. We
paid a high price for civilization, such as the loss of freedom for ordinary
people, the dramatic increase in pollution, and the debasing of religion, which
involved changing it from simply the effort to connect with ultimate reality
into a powerful, supernaturally based means of social control.
Today, the average
person has more freedom, religion is less often a tool of the state, and our
pollution-generating ecological innocence is largely over.
Though many would
disagree with me, I see women still far from having achieved equality. A man can have a substantial career and
still have a family, but, basically, a woman still cannot. She must choose between a career and
motherhood in a way that a man does not have to choose between a career and
fatherhood.
The depth of the
problem is reflected in the fact that many people don’t even see it as a
problem.
Yet it may be
overcome.
War is inherently
destruction-causing, and technology has enhanced the efficiency of weapons of
mass destruction to such an extent that their destructiveness exceeds in
magnitude any possible reward of waging war.
The day may yet
come again when nobody dies for a living.
And there is no
shortage of women who are ready for equality.
An Italian researcher asked Italian women why they were having fewer
children than previous generations.
The answer was
that the women don’t feel they owe children to the men, whom they describe as
expecting their wives to take care of their needs the same way their mothers
did.
In essence, the
women feel that when you already have a big baby to take care of, there’s no
advantage in having more.
Our future may depend
on our paying better attention to women.
There is a
tendency for men to assume that things known mostly to women are things men
don’t need to know. For instance, men
don’t need to know as much as women know about women’s undergarments.
The same is not
true of many other subjects. For
instance, sex.
When I was a
child, I was told not to have impure thoughts about sex, but was not told what
kinds of thoughts about sex are pure.
It took me 20 years to find out.
But I’ve more
recently discovered that Madonna already knew.
On her Immaculate Collection DVD is the video
of Open Your Heart. In it, she’s a dancer in a porno theatre
where men watch her from masturbating booths.
The song includes the words, “I
think that you’re afraid to look in my eyes,” and the men are. In fact,
they are less sincere and more childish than the young boy outside who isn’t
allowed in.
The men’s feelings
are filled with shame and denial and disrespect for her, while the boy’s
feelings are filled with wonder and awe and admiration for her.
Suddenly, she’s
there and kisses the boy. She’s dressed
just like him and goes off with him, playing in a nonsexual way.
That she kisses
him on the lips not only shows approval of his feelings, but approval of their
sexual nature.
She’s plainly
saying what I took a very long time to figure out:
The kind of
thoughts about sex that are pure are our first thoughts, the thoughts of a
newly pubescent child. The purity of
boys' sexual feelings is probably the main reason women are often attracted to
young boys.
Madonna spoke for
millions of women, with a message that is hard for men to learn.
So-called “women’s
intuition” is something that results from society’s not inflicting on girls the
emotion-suppressing discipline that it inflicts upon boys.
When men complain
that they do not know what women want, it is only because they don’t listen
when women try to tell them.
Women are not
mysterious, men are. It is men who
don’t believe it’s masculine to know their feelings, much less share them
honestly with women. As a result, women
are fooled by men far more often than the other way around. While the lumbering cluelessness of men can
make them endearing, it can also make them dangerous.
Women should have
complete control over how men treat them.
Being nice to women is far more pleasurable than abusing them, and just
as important, it’s the best way to discover what nature intended you to be as a
man.
Physically, women
are the bearers of humanity.
Emotionally, to a disproportionate degree, they bear our humanity as
well.
Richard W. Fox teaches astronomy, physical science, and physics at various Chicago-area
colleges and universities. His work has appeared in the Dana Literary
Society Online Journal, The Taj Mahal Review, Ascent Aspirations and
in other places.
E-mail Richard W. Fox
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