Live From The Witch Trials

There's a meme that's been present in our culture for a good 40 years or more, & it's this: the idea that the 'witchburning' craze of the 15th-18th centuries was in some way simply a war upon women. That it was in fact a "genocide" (or "gendercide") carried out upon women, a "woman's holocaust", with some of the more fanciful claims of the death toll being as high as 9 million. Dan Brown, in his extraordinarily popular blockbuster novel The DaVinci Code makes the claim that "the church burned at the stake an astonishing five million women."

That figure really is astonishing. It's also almost certainly false.

A couple of days ago I was engaged in one of the many fantastically in-depth discussions about ideas & philosophy & the general human tragedy with my wondrous lover F, & I don't know how but somehow we got onto the witchburnings, & I realized that I really ought to know a little more about the claims being made & what is actually known historically about those times.

So then, first stop, as always, was Wikipedia, whose entry on 'witch-hunt' gave these basic figures for the years 1450-1750:

Region	Number of trials	Number of executions
British Isles and North America	~5,000	~1,500–2,000
Empire (Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Lorraine, Austria and Czech)	~50000	~25000–30000
France	~3,000	~1,000
Scandinavia	~5,000	~1,700–2,000
Eastern Europe (Poland and Lithuania, Hungary and Russia)	~7,000	~2,000
Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Italy)	~10,000	fewer than 1,000
Total:	~80,000	~35,000

The first thing that strikes me immediately about this is that, in the whole of the British Isles & North America combined, over a period of three hundred years, there were in total less than two thousand deaths. That works out around 6 or 7 people a year, & a quarter of those, as you probably already know, were men. An unpleasant business, yes, but hardly a holocaust. To put that in some perspective, more people died in road accidents last year in Britain alone than in all 300 years of witch-burnings.

A note to the aforementioned Wikipedia entry tells us:

 The most common estimates [worldwide] are between 40,000 and 60,000 deaths. Brian Levack (The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe) multiplied the number of known European witch trials by the average rate of conviction and execution, to arrive at a figure of around 60,000 deaths. Anne Lewelyn Barstow (Witchcraze) adjusted Levack's estimate to account for lost records, estimating 100,000 deaths. Ronald Hutton (Triumph of the Moon) argues that Levack's estimate had already been adjusted for these, and revises the figure to approximately 40,000.

While looking for occurences of the '9 million' figure, [which seems to have entered the public at large's conciousness via a documentary film from 1990 called The Burning Times] I came across an interesting site called 'Gendercide.org' which at first glance I took to be simply more feminist propaganda (the words 'gender' & 'patriarchy', which I usually take as flashing neon warning signs, crop up frequently) but on further reading appeared to hold a much more balanced position, & included these further reports on how many people died:

"The most dramatic [recent] changes in our vision of the Great Hunt [have] centered on the death toll," notes Jenny Gibbons. She points out that estimates made prior to the mid-1970s, when detailed research into trial records began, "were almost 100% pure speculation." (Gibbons, Recent Developments.) "On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements," writes Robin Briggs, "a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than genocide. [See, e.g., the witch-hunt documentary "The Burning Times".] This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 per cent were men." Briggs adds that "these figures are chilling enough, but they have to be set in the context of what was probably the harshest period of capital punishments in European history." (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, p. 8.)

Brian Levack's book The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe arrives at roughly similar conclusions. Levack "surveyed regional studies and found that there were approximately 110,000 witch trials. Levack focused on recorded trials, not executions, because in many cases we have evidence that a trial occurred but no indication of its outcomes. On average, 48% of trials ended in an execution, [and] therefore he estimated 60,000 witches died. This is slightly higher than 48% to reflect the fact that Germany, the center of the persecution, killed more than 48% of its witches." (Gibbons, Recent Developments.)

Strangely, even though Gendercide admits that 'over 99.9-plus percent of all women who lived during the three centuries of the witch craze were not harmed', & also that in a number of places (such as France, Iceland & Finland) as many or more men than women were accused & sentenced (in France more than half, Finland almost half, in Iceland it was 90% male) it still feels justified in labelling the witch-hunts 'gendercide', which seems to run contrary to the evidence it lists. An interesting site, though - hard to pigeonhole (it covers the enforced military conscription of males alongside female infanticide, for instance). I recommend giving it a look.
 
A couple more fascinating tidbits from it: the first debunking the widely held notion that the attack on 'witches' was an attack on midwives, thought to be the torch-bearers for the old, 'pre-patriarchal' ways:

One theory, popularized by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in their 1973 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, proposed that midwives were especially likely to be targeted in the witch-hunts. This assertion has been decisively refuted by subsequent research, which has established the opposite: that "being a licensed midwife actually decreased a woman's chances of being charged" and "midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters" than being victimized by them. (Gibbons, Recent Developments; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History.)

And second, that it was an entirely male hatred & distrust of the female that the innocent accused women struggled under:

"women did testify in large numbers against other women, making up 43 per cent of witnesses in these cases on average, and predominating in 30 per cent of them. ... A more sophisticated count for the English Home Circuit by Clive Holmes shows that the proportion of women witnesses rose from around 38 per cent in the last years of Queen Elizabeth to 53 per cent after the Restoration." (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, pp. 264-65, 270, 273, 282.)

Deborah Willis's study of "Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England" similarly finds it "clear ... that women were actively involved in making witchcraft accusations against their female neighbours"

[Alan] Macfarlane finds that as many women as men informed against witches in the 291 Essex cases he studied; about 55 percent of those who believed they had been bewitched were female. The number of witchcraft quarrels that began between women may actually have been higher; in some cases, it appears that the husband as "head of household" came forward to make statements on behalf of his wife, although the central quarrel had taken place between her and another woman. ... It may, then, be misleading to equate "informants" with "accusers": the person who gave a statement to authorities was not necessarily the person directly quarreling with the witch. Other studies support a figure in the range of 60 percent. In Peter Rushton's examination of slander cases in the Durham church courts, women took action against other women who had labeled them witches in 61 percent of the cases. ... J.A. Sharpe also notes the prevalence of women as accusers in seventeenth-century Yorkshire cases, concluding that "on a village level witchcraft seems to have been something peculiarly enmeshed in women's quarrels." To a considerable extent, then, village-level witch-hunting was women's work. (Willis, Malevolent Nurture, pp. 35-36.)

So where did that "9 million" figure come from, & why? Why is that estimate so far out? It's no coincidence that both that number & also the term "holocaust" have come to be used: when we hear that word & think of millions dead we think specifically of the Jewish holocaust of the second world war, in which somewhere in the region of 6 million died.

"What should trouble everyone," write Nathanson & Young, about the aforementioned Burning Times documentary,"is the fact that this film tries to upstage the Jewish tragedy for political purposes, to exploit the suffering of Jews in order to score political points for the suffering of women. Burning claims not merely that women have suffered just as Jews have suffered, but that women have suffered more than Jews and even that female suffering is the paradigm of all suffering." 

The very real horrors of the witch-trials have been inflated & exploited by feminism for political ends, to score higher victim points, to claim greater victim status, which in feminism thinking tends to mean you have won the argument: Who Suffers Loudest Wins.

A final word on this from Sanctifying Misandry, by Paul Nathanson & Katherine K. Young: 

'Even if we could study history exclusively in terms of gender, even if we could reduce history effectively to the story of relations between men and women, misogyny would still be an inadequate explanation. The Burning Times acknowledges several possible causes of the witch hunts, to be sure, but it takes only misogyny seriously. Literary evidence notwithstanding, it is by no means self-evident that all or even most men have ever hated women. What does seem self-evident is that most or even all men have been ambivalent about women. The fact is that, at one time or another - paradoxically, often at the same time - men feel both anger and love for women, both fear and respect, both envy and admiration. Moreover, the same is true in reverse. Most or all women have been ambivalent about men. The same is true of the way all people feel about their parents, children, relatives, friends, and communities. Ambivalence is a universal feature of the human condition, largely because ambiguity is a universal feature of reality itself (or, at least, of the ways in which finite beings perceive the world). The witch hunts surely do represent a period when misogyny took hold. At issue for historians of the witch craze, however, is not why misogyny exists but why it swept away all other attitudes toward women - who included wives, sisters, daughters, even mothers - at a particular time and place. That is a task for historians, not for political activists masquerading as scholars.'

Thoughts on Lady Chatterley

I recently read, for the first time, all of DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover . A marvellous book: rich, deep, & long-resonating, containing great truths & insights into maleness & masculinity, & yet reads like a woman's romance novel. To bridge that gap, to write so well for both sexes is rare indeed, & I can't help but think that, even with all the advantages & developments that writers have had at their disposal since then, still no-one has written better about men & women than this. And perhaps, in this present age, no-one would be allowed to.

The book was was written in 1928, while Lawrence was ill with tuberculosis, & was his last full-length novel. Two years later he would be dead. After finishing it he wrote an afterword - 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' - discussing his thoughts behind its creation, & upon the state of man & woman generally. I am shaken by how prophetic his vision of the future - our future - has been. In particular, the replacing of the family, the tribe, the trade union, & the bond between the man & the woman - which all others emanate from - with the State.

The point he makes is that all states - capitalist or communist - have pushed for the weakening of the family unit, & of the power of the individual. Such is their nature. And Feminism has been state policy all over the western world for at least 40 years - most likely more - & an argument could be made that in fact it has been state policy since the beginnings of the 20th century, with the rise of industrialized labour, & the wartime work of women in WWII being a test run for what was to come: the forcible full-time employment of the one half of humanity which had always previously been exempt from wage-slavery, all under the banner of liberation. That Lawrence saw this, so clearly, within 10 years of the Russian revolution, takes my breath away.

As I said before, I can't help but think that, for all the 'freedoms' we now apparently enjoy, the sexual liberation & freedom of expression we are told we possess (in no small part due to censorship battles like 'the Lady Chatterley trial' of the 1960s), still no-one has written better of, or more deeply about, the eternal mystery of man & woman since then. Lawrence speaks of sex with awe & reverence, & when he does he is speaking of the whole, instead of the parts, of the terrible magnetic compulsion of our unity, instead of the petty grievances & greedy recriminations of our separation. We simply don't see ourselves in that way anymore. But perhaps one day we will again.

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  Extracts from A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928

Everybody, pretty well, takes it for granted that as soon as we can find a possible way out of it, marriage will be abolished. The Soviet abolishes marriage: or did. If new “modern” states spring up, they will almost certainly follow suit. They will try to find some social substitute for marriage, and abolish the hated yoke of conjugality. State support of motherhood, State support of children, and independence of women. It is on the programme of every great scheme of reform. And it means, of course, the abolition of marriage.

Do we, then, want to break marriage? If we do break it, it means we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of the State. Do we want to fall under the direct sway of the State? Any State? For my part, I don’t.

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The sense of isolation,  followed by the sense of menace and of fear, is bound to arise as the feeling of oneness and community with our fellow men declines, and the feeling of individualism and personality, which is existence in isolation, increases. The so-called “cultured” classes are the first to develop “personality” and individualism, and the first to fall into this state of unconscious menace and fear. The working classes retain the old blood-warmth of oneness and togetherness some decades longer. Then they lose it too. And then class-consciousness becomes rampant, and class-hate. Class-hate and class-consciousness are only a sign that the old togetherness, the old blood warmth has collapsed, and every man is really aware of himself in apartness. Then we have these hostile groupings of men for the sake of opposition, strife. Civil strife becomes a necessary condition of self-assertion.

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The blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled. Even scientifically we know it. But therefore they are the two rivers that encircle the whole of life, and in marriage the circle is complete, and in sex the two rivers touch and renew one another, without ever commingling or confusing. We know it. The phallus is a column of blood that fills the valley of blood of a woman. The great river of male blood touches to its depths the great river of female blood—yet neither breaks its bounds.

Two rivers of blood, are man and wife, two distinct eternal streams, that have the power of touching and communing and so renewing, making new one another, without any breaking of the subtle confines, any confusing or commingling. And the phallus is the connecting link between the two rivers, that establishes the two streams in a oneness, and gives out of their duality a single circuit, forever. And this, this oneness gradually accomplished throughout a life-time in twoness, is the highest achievement of time or eternity. From it all things human spring, children and beauty and well-made things; all the true creations of humanity. And all we know of the will of God is that He wishes this, this oneness, to take place, fulfilled over a lifetime, this oneness within the great dual blood-stream of humanity.

Man dies, and woman dies, and perhaps separate the souls go back to the creator. Who knows? But we know that the oneness of the blood-stream of man and woman in marriage completes the universe, as far as humanity is concerned, completes the streaming of the sun and the flowing of the stars.

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Father's Day

There's a meme going round on Facebook at the moment of posting your father or grandfather's picture as your profile photo until after Father's Day. Actually, 'any patriarchal figure will do' is what my friend said when she told me. It strikes me as a beautiful thing to honor, & maybe there's still time to spread the same meme over the blogosphere.

So here's my contribution, my Grandad on my mother's side. My mother wouldn't be here without him. I wouldn't be here without him. And I have his eyes:

"The Women's Movement" by Joan Didion

I've recently been discovering the haunting & original writing of Joan Didion, in particular her book of nonfictions from the late 60's & 70's, 'The White Album' (1979), in which I was pleased & surprised to discover this essay from 1972 upon feminism. Didion seems to have been one of the first to recognize & point out that what we now tend to think of as 'modern' Feminism sprang directly out of Marxism, & that the principle difference was simply the replacement of the word 'Class' with 'Gender'. I am taken aback at just how clearly she saw the shortcomings of the 'second wave' so early, only a year or two into its beginnings, & how relevant & true her comments remain almost 40 years later. It's a remarkably insightful work that rewards a careful reading.

NOTE: This essay has appeared elsewhere on the net in a number of forms but with numerous - & frequently nonsensical - errors. I don't know how or why those errors were introduced but have corrected them in this version to be the text as presented in the original book.

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To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone "oppressed" to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every women, which either does or does not make 51 per cent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. The creation of this revolutionary "class" was from the virtual beginning the "idea" of the women's movement, and the tendency for popular discussion of the movement still to center around day-care centers is yet another instance of that studied resistance to political ideas which characterizes our national life.

"The new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality," the feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone announced flatly in 1970. "It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history." This was scarcely a statement of purpose anyone could find cryptic, and it was scarcely the only statement of its kind in the literature of the movement. Nonetheless, in 1972, in a "special issue" on women, Time was still musing genially that the movement might well succeed in bringing about "fewer diapers and more Dante."

That was a very pretty image, the idle ladies sitting in the gazebo and murmuring lasciate ogni speranza, but it depended entirely upon the popular view of the movement as some kind of collective inchoate yearning for "fulfillment" or "self-expression," a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas and capable of engendering only the most pro forma benevolent interest. In fact there was an idea, and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women's movement would have seemed to have any interest at all.

Marxism in this country had even been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game. They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of "brotherhood."

And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women's movement, and the invention of women as a "class." One could not help admiring the radical simplicity of this instant transfiguration. The notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, "named" and so brought into existence, seemed at once so pragmatic and so visionary, so precisely Emersonian, that it took the breath away, exactly confirmed one's idea of where 19th-century transcendental instincts, crossed with a late reading of Engels and Marx, might lead. To read the theorists of the women's movement was to think not of Mary Wollstonecraft but of Margaret Fuller at her most high-minded, of rushing position papers off to mimeo and drinking tea from paper cups in lieu of eating lunch; of thin raincoats on bitter nights. If the family was the last fortress of capitalism, then let us abolish the family. If the necessity for conventional reproduction of the species seemed unfair to women, then let us transcend, via technology, "the very organization of nature," the oppression, as Shulamith Firestone saw it, "that goes back through recorded history to the animal kingdom itself." I accept the universe, Margaret Fuller had finally allowed: Shulamith Firestone did not.

It seemed very New England, this febrile and cerebral passion. The solemn a priori idealism in the guise of radical materialism somehow bespoke old-fashioned self-reliance and prudent sacrifice. The clumsy torrent of words became a principle, a renunciation of style as unserious. The rhetorical willingness to break eggs became, in practice, only a thrifty capacity for finding the sermon in every stone. Burn the literature, Ti-Grace Atkinson said in effect when it was suggested that, even come the revolution, there would still remain the whole body of "sexist" Western literature.

But of course no books would be burned: the women of this movement were perfectly capable of crafting didactic revisions of whatever apparently intractable material came to hand. "As a parent you should become an interpreter of myths," advised Letty Cottin Pogrebin in the preview issue of Ms. Magazine. "Portions of any fairy tale or children's story can be salvaged during a critique session with your child." Other literary analysts devised ways to salvage other books: Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady need no longer be the victim of her own idealism. She could be, instead, the victim of a sexist society, a woman who had "internalized the conventional definition of wife." The narrator of Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps could be seen as "enslaved because she persists in looking for her identity in a man." Similarly, Miss McCarthy's The Group could serve to illustrate "what happens to women who have been educated at first-rate women's colleges-taught philosophy and history-and then are consigned to breast-feeding and gourmet cooking."

That fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology. They had invented a class; now they had only to make that class conscious. They seized as a political technique a kind of shared testimony at first called a "rap session," then called "consciousness-raising," and in any case a therapeutically-oriented American reinterpretation, according to the British feminist Juliet Mitchell, of a Chinese revolutionary practice known as "speaking bitterness." They purged and regrouped and purged again, worried out one another's errors and deviations, the "elitism" here, the "careerism" there. It would have been merely sententious to call some of their thinking Stalinist: of course it was. It would have been pointless even to speak of whether one considered these women "right" or "wrong," meaningless to dwell upon the obvious, upon the coarsening of moral imagination to which such social idealism so often leads. To believe in "the greater good" is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension. Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism. Nonetheless it was serious, and for these high-strung idealists to find themselves out of the mimeo room and onto the Cavett Show must have been in certain ways more unsettling to them than it ever was to the viewers. They were being heard, and yet not really. Attention was finally being paid, and yet that attention was mired in the trivial. Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue. (This grievance was not atypic in that discussion of it always seemed to take on unexplored Ms. Scarlett overtones, suggestions of fragile cultivated flowers being "spoken to," and therefore violated, by uppity proles.) They totted up the pans scoured, the towels picked off the bathroom floor, the loads of laundry done in a lifetime. Cooking a meal could only be "dogwork," and to claim any pleasure from it was evidence of craven acquiescence in one's own forced labor. Small children could only be odious mechanisms for the spilling and digesting of food, for robbing women of their "freedom." It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir's grave and awesome recognition of woman's role as "the Other" to the notion that the first step in changing that role was Alix Kates Shulman's marriage contract ("wife strips beds, husband remakes them") reproduced in Ms., but it was toward just such trivialization that the women's movement seemed to be heading.

Of course this litany of trivia was crucial to the movement in the beginning, a key technique in the politicizing of women who perhaps had been conditioned to obscure their resentments even from themselves. Mrs. Shulman's discovery that she had less time than her husband seemed to have was precisely the kind of chord the movement had hoped to strike in all women (the "click! of recognition," as Jane O'Reilly described it), but such discoveries could be of no use at all if one refused to perceive the larger point, failed to make that inductive leap from the personal to the political.

Spliting up the week into hours during which the children were directed to address their "personal questions" to either one parent or another might or might not have improved the quality of Mr. and Mrs. Shulman's marriage, but the improvement of marriages would not a revolution make. It could be very useful to call housework, as Lenin did, "the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do," but it could be useful only as the first step in a political process, only in the "awakening" of a class to its position, useful only as a metaphor: to believe, during the late 1960's and early 1970's in the United States of America, that the words had literal meaning was not only to stall the movement in the personal but to seriously delude oneself.

More and more, as the literature of the movement began to reflect the thinking of women who did not really understand the movement's ideological base, one had the sense of this stall, this delusion, the sense that the drilling of the theorists had struck only some psychic hardpan dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish-fulfillment, self-loathing and bitter fancies. To read even desultorily in this literature was to recognize instantly a certain dolorous phantasm, an imagined Everywoman with whom the authors seemed to identify all too entirely. This ubiquitous construct was everyone's victim but her own. She was persecuted even by her gynecologist, who made her beg in vain for contraceptives. She particularly needed contraceptives because she was raped on every date, raped by her husband, and raped finally on the abortionist's table. During the fashion for shoes with pointed toes, she, like "many women," had her toes amputated. She was so intimidated by cosmetic advertising that she would sleep "huge portions" of her day in order to forestall wrinkling, and when awake she was enslaved by detergent commercials on television. She sent her child to a nursery school where the little girls huddled in a "doll corner," and were forcibly restrained from playing with building blocks. Should she work, she was paid "three to ten times less" than an (always) unqualified man holding the same job, was prevented from attending business lunches because she would be "embarrassed" to appear in public with a man not her husband, and, when she traveled alone, faced a choice between humiliation in a restaurant and "eating a doughnut" in her hotel room.

The half-truths, repeated, authenticated themselves. The bitter fancies assumed their own logic. To ask the obvious - why she did not get herself another gynecologist, another job, why she did not get out of bed and turn off the television set, or why, the most eccentric detail, she stayed in hotels where only doughnuts could be obtained from room service - was to join this argument at its own spooky level, a level which had only the most tenuous and unfortunate relationship to the actual condition of being a woman. That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.

But of course something other than an objection to being "discriminated against" was at work here, something other than an aversion to being "stereotyped" in one's sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children. One is constantly struck, in the accounts of lesbian relationships which appear from time to time in the movement literature, by the emphasis on the superior "tenderness" of the relationship, the "gentleness" of the sexual connection, as if the participants were wounded birds. The derogation of assertiveness as "machismo" has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women too delicate to deal at any level with a man more overtly sexual than, say, David Cassidy. Just as one had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion, when told about the "terror and revulsion" experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too "tender" for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the movement, the impression of women too "sensitive" for the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the movement as a rationale for denying that reality. The transient stab of dread and loss which accompanies menstruation simply never happens: we only thought it happened because a male-chauvinist psychiatrist told us so. No woman need have bad dreams after an abortion: she has only been told she should. The power of sex is just an oppressive myth, no longer to be feared, because what the sexual connection really amounts to, we learn in one liberated woman's account of a postmarital affair, is "wisecracking and laughing" and "lying together and then leaping up to play and sing the entire Sesame Street Songbook." All one's actual apprehension of what it is to be like a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it - that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death - could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.

One was only told it, and now one is to be re-programmed, fixed up, rendered again as inviolate and unstained as the "modern" little girls in the Tampax advertisements. More and more we have been hearing the wishful voices of just such perpetual adolescents, the voices of women scarred not by their class position as women but at the failure of their childhood expectations and misapprehensions. "Nobody ever so much as mentioned" to Susan Edmiston "that when you say 'I do,' what you are doing is not, as you thought, vowing your eternal love, but rather subscribing to a whole system of rights, obligations and responsibilities that may well be anathema to your most cherished beliefs." To Ellen Peck "the birth of children too often means the dissolution of romance, the loss of freedom, the abandonment of ideals to economics." A young woman described on the cover of a recent issue of New York magazine as "the Suburban Housewife Who Bought the Promises of Women's Lib and Came to the City to Live Them" tells us what promises she bought: "The chance to respond to the bright lights and civilization of the Big Apple, yes. The chance to compete, yes. But most of all, the chance to have some fun. Fun is what's been missing."

Eternal love, romance, fun. The Big Apple. These are relatively rare expectations in the arrangements of consenting adults, although not in those of children, and it wrenches the heart to read about these women in their brave new lives. An ex-wife and mother of three speaks of her plan "to play out my college girl's dream. I am going to New York to become this famous writer. Or this working writer. Failing that, I will get a job in publishing." She mentions a friend, another young woman who "had never had any other life than as a daughter or wife or mother" but who is "just discovering herself to be a gifted potter." The childlike resourcefulness - to get a job in publishing, to be a gifted potter - bewilders the imagination. The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of the real ambiguities and the real generative or malignant possibilities of adult sexual life, somehow touches beyond words.

"It is the right of the oppressed to organize around their oppression as they see and define it," the movement theorists insist doggedly in an effort to solve the question of these women, to convince themselves that what is going on is still a political process; but the handwriting is already on the wall. These are converts who want not a revolution but "romance," who believe not in the oppression of women but in their own chances for a new life in exactly the mold of their old life. In certain ways they tell us sadder things about what the culture has done to them than the theorists ever did, and they also tell us, I suspect, that the movement is no longer a cause but a symptom.

The Education Gap

The above chart comes from Professor Mark J. Perry's Economics & Finance blog Carpe Diem, where he writes:

It's now official: Women dominate men at every level of higher education, in terms of degrees conferred. Here's the breakdown for graduates of the class of 2009:

Associate's Degrees: 167 women for every 100 men

Bachelor's Degrees: 142 women for every 100 men.

Master's Degrees: 159 women for every 100 men.

Professional Degrees: 104 women for every 100 men.

Doctoral Degrees: 107 women for every 100 men.

In fact, the last time men had more degrees than women at any level was the Class of 2006, which had slightly more men than women for both Professional and Doctoral degrees. For the other levels, it hasn't been even close for decades. The last year that men earned more Master's degrees than women was 1984-1985, for Bachelor's degrees it was the Class of 1981, and for Associates degrees it was 1976-1977 when men earned more degrees than women.

The full U.S Department of Education figures are available here, please take the time to give them a look:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_258.asp


There are two things that immediately leap out at me from this: First of all, it's somewhat surprising to find that even as far back as 1869, something like 1-in-6 Bachelor's degrees were being received by women in America - a relatively small number, admittedly, but higher than I would have expected from that time. The popular image we generally receive is that pretty much until the 1970s all women were forcibly kept away from any kind of higher education. But that seems not to be the case: even by the 1920's - i.e. even before American women "Got The Vote" - more than half as many women as men were leaving colleges with degrees, & that percentage rose every year up until the end of the 1970s, when it became equal.

And that's the other thing that surprised me: just how long the present-day inequality has been going on: Women began to outnumber men from the beginning of the 1980s onwards. And this gap has increased every year up until the present & beyond.

Men are now in a worse place educationally than women were before the 1970s. Clearly something is very wrong with either the teaching methods used or the environment they are used in. Or perhaps there is simply discrimination at work? 

Why are boys failing at school? Why are young men dropping out of college? And why does no-one care?

This is yet another pretty damning refutation of the belief that feminism is, or ever has been, 'about equality'. If feminism were truly 'About Equality' then it would necessarily be the duty of every self-proclaimed feminist to speak out at every opportunity against this disparity, to drop whatever else they're doing & devote their time & energy to this injustice until those numbers are equal again.

And anyone who believed in 'equality' would surely have to agree.

I mean, that's obvious. To everyone. Isn't it?

Hypergamy: The Husband Store

A store that sells husbands has just opened where a woman may go to choose a husband from among many men. There is, however, a catch. As you open the door to any floor you may choose a man from that floor, but if you go up a floor, you cannot go back down except to exit the building.

So a woman goes to the shopping center to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

Floor 1 - These men have jobs.
The woman reads the sign and says to herself, "Well, that's better than my last boyfriend, but I wonder what's further up?"

So up she goes.

The second floor sign reads:

Floor 2 - These men have jobs and love kids.
The woman remarks to herself, "That's great, but I wonder what's further up?" And up she goes again.

The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love kids and are extremely good looking. 
"Hmm, better" she says. "But I wonder what's upstairs?"

The fourth floor sign reads:

Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking and help with the housework. 
"Wow!" exclaims the woman, "very tempting. BUT, there must be more further up!" And again she heads up
another flight.

The fifth floor sign reads:

Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking, help with the housework and have a strong romantic streak.
"Oh, mercy me! But just think... what must be awaiting me further on?" So up to
the sixth floor she goes.

The sixth floor sign reads:

Floor 6 - You are visitor 3,456,789,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at The Husband Store and have a nice day.

There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap

Article from the Wall Street Journal (April 12th) by Carrie Lukas, executive director of The Independent Women's Forum.

A study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that women earned 8% more than men.

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.
In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.

Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay. 
Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.

The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.

Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.

Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.

The Movement to Disbar Mary N. Kellett

by Paul Elam

There are often times that we shake our heads at injustices in the world. Sometimes it seems to be all we can do.  And with so many problems in modern life, and their often systemic, intractable nature, it can be difficult to choose what battles to fight and when.  Because of this we have increasingly become a nation of head shakers, concerned about an array of injustices but often not knowing where to turn or what to do to solve them.
With that in mind we have an opportunity, right here and now, to face down and fight against a terrible injustice, an absolute evil, going on in the state of Maine.
Vladek Filler is about to face trial for a second time on the charge of raping his wife, Ligia.  He was brought to trial the first time by Bar Harbor prosecutor Mary N. Kellett, who has sought to imprison Mr. Filler despite the fact that she knows that there is no physical evidence that he ever committed a crime, and despite the fact that his accuser Ligia Filler, has proven to be a violent criminal, a liar who has been caught in false allegations against her husband, and a physical and emotional abuser of her husband and children with a history of severe psychiatric problems.
Ligia Filler has been referred to as “certifiable” by sheriff’s department personnel who she repeatedly threatened to kill.
Mary Kellett’s professional conduct in this case breeches virtually all canons of legal ethics where it concerns prosecutors, from intentionally misleading jurors to avoiding pretrial discovery to actually asking a law enforcement officer to refuse to comply with a valid subpoena in order to help her conceal exculpatory evidence.
All of this, and many other similar cases, have been conducted under the supervision of Bar Harbor, Maine, District Attorney Carletta Bassano, leading to the almost unavoidable conclusion that the problem is not just one rogue prosecutor, but one in which District Attorney Bassano is an enabling accomplice.
Additionally, all of these events have transpired without so much as raising an eyebrow in local news media.
Given the complicity of her supervisor and the lack of attention by local media, Kellet appears emboldened to continue this reign of terror on the life of Vladek Filler, his children, and other innocents who reside in the community Kellett is supposed to protect.
After having Filler’s first conviction overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct by the Maine Supreme Court, she is coming after him again, putting him through another trial on the same slipshod evidence.
Kellett is not pursuing justice; she is making a mockery of it in ways that border on criminality.  She is out of control and no one with authority over her is doing anything about it.
And given the hubris demonstrated by her actions, it is clear she feels free to proceed with impunity.
We cannot, must not, allow this to happen.
This is a battle worth choosing to fight, and A Voice for Men is not the only place that is happening.  Glenn Sacks at Father’s and Families, the nation’s leader in father’s rights advocacy is speaking out about this story.  You can also read about it at The False Rape Society. This article will also  be running at the-spearhead.com, with thanks to our good friend Mr. W.F. Price.
The organization Stop Abusive and Violent Environments(S.A.V.E.) has taken the even more significant action, sending a Complaint for the Disbarment of Prosecutor Mary Kellett to the Maine Board of Overseers for the Bar.
They have also authored a letter to Paul LePage, the Governor of Maine, referencing the disbarment complaint and making an appeal for an intervention on Mary Kellett on behalf of Vladek Filler and the people of Maine.
And you can do your part.
Write Governor LePage here and respectfully insist on an investigation to the practices of Mary N. Kellett. The message can be as simple as. “For the sake of justice, please assure that Mary Kellett is relieved of her prosecutorial duties and disbarred from the practice of law.”
Write the Board of overseers for the Bar here, and insist that they respond to the allegations against Kellett with an investigation.
Lastly, try to get the media involved.  Bill Trotter does crime reporting for the Bangor Daily News.  You can write email him at btrotter@bangordailynews.com or phone him at 207-460-6318 and ask him to consider investigating this story.
What is happening in Maine is only a microcosm of what is happening across the western world. So regardless of where you live, your insistent message to one or all of these people can help force them to consider looking in to Kellett’s activities. And make no mistake about it, Kellett’s actions, if unchecked, are a forecast of own future. We know this is a witch hunt, but because most are ignoring it, it will spread.  If we take this silently, we have lost in the most tragic and disgraceful of ways.
This is a fight worth fighting, people. If you are reading this, you could be another Vladek Filler, or someone who cares about him. Your children could be hurt the same way his children have And your freedom, even if seemingly secure today, cannot be assured for tomorrow. As long as the likes of Mary Kellett are allowed to practice predatory prosecutions against innocent human beings no one is safe.
And if she is allowed to build a career on doing this, there will be nothing to stop the same from happening where you live.
It is your future, and your move.