Domestic Violence Myths Help No One

by Christina Hoff Sommers

"The facts are clear," said Attorney General Eric Holder. "Intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45."

That's a horrifying statistic, and it would be a shocking reflection of the state of the black family, and American society generally, if it were true. But it isn't true.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Justice Department's own Bureau of Justice Statistics, the leading causes of death for African-American women between the ages 15-45 are cancer, heart disease, unintentional injuries such as car accidents, and HIV disease. Homicide comes in fifth--and includes murders by strangers. In 2006 (the latest year for which full statistics are available), several hundred African-American women died from intimate partner homicide--each one a tragedy and an outrage, but far fewer than the approximately 6,800 women who died of the other leading causes.

Yet Holder's patently false assertion has remained on the Justice Department website for more than a year.
How is that possible? It is possible because false claims about male domestic violence are ubiquitous and immune to refutation. During the era of the infamous Super Bowl Hoax, it was widely believed that on Super Bowl Sundays, violence against women increases 40%. Journalists began to refer to the game as the "abuse bowl" and quoted experts who explained how male viewers, intoxicated and pumped up with testosterone, could "explode like mad linemen." During the 1993 Super Bowl, NBC ran a public service announcement warning men they would go to jail for attacking their wives.

In this roiling sea of media credulity, one lone journalist, Washington Post  reporter Ken Ringle, checked the facts. As it turned out, there was no source: An activist had misunderstood something she read, jumped to her sensational conclusion, announced it at a news conference and an urban myth was born. Despite occasional efforts to prove the story true, no one has ever managed to link the Super Bowl to domestic battery.

World Cup abuse?
Yet the story has proved too politically convenient to kill off altogether. Last summer, it came back to life on a different continent and with a new accent. During the 2010 World Cup, British newspapers carried stories with headlines such as "Women's World Cup Abuse Nightmare" and informed women that the games could uncover "for the first time, a darker side to their partner." Fortunately, a BBC program called Law in Action took the unusual route pioneered by Ringle: The news people actually checked the facts. Their conclusion: a stunt based on cherry-picked figures.

But when the BBC journalists presented the deputy chief constable, Carmel Napier, from the town of Gwent with evidence that the World Cup abuse campaign was based on twisted statistics, she replied: "If it has saved lives, then it is worth it."

It is not worth it. Misinformation leads to misdirected policies that fail to target the true causes of violence. Worse, those who promulgate false statistics about domestic violence, however well-meaning, promote prejudice. Most of the exaggerated claims implicate the average male in a social atrocity. Why do that? Anti-male misandry, like anti-female misogyny, is unjust and dangerous. Recall what happened at Duke University a few years ago when many seemingly fair-minded students and faculty stood by and said nothing while three innocent young men on the Duke Lacrosse team were subjected to the horrors of a modern-day witch hunt.

And then there's Iran
Worst of all, misinformation about violence against women suggests a false moral equivalence between societies where women are protected by law and those where they are not. American and British societies are not perfect, but we have long ago decided that violence against women is barbaric. By contrast, the Islamic Republic of Iran--where it is legal to bury an adulterous woman up to her neck and stone her--was last year granted a seat on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended the decision by noting Iranian women are far better off than women in the West. "What is left of women's dignity in the West?" he asked. He then came up with a statistic to drive home his point: "In Europe almost 70% of housewives are beaten by their husbands."

That was a self-serving lie. Western women, with few exceptions, are safe and free. Iranian women are neither. Officials like Attorney General Holder, the deputy constable of Gwent, and the activists and journalists who promoted the Super Bowl and World Cup hoaxes, unwittingly contribute to such twisted deceptions.

Victims of intimate violence are best served by the truth. Eric Holder should correct his department's website immediately.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI. This article originally appeared here.

CUT : Slicing Through the Myths of Circumcision

This is the first Trigger Alert post which actually needs a 'trigger' warning - there are scenes of the actual circumcisions that are bloody & hard to watch, & personally, I had to look away. However, this is a sensitive & thoughtful documentary by the Chicago filmmaker Eli Ungar-Sargon, mainly covering the issue from a Jewish perspective. The full-length DVD of the film can be found at www.CutTheFilm.com

Feminism, Misandry, and Romance Novels

by Zoe Winters

I write romance, so automatically I’m an optimist when it comes to the love potential between the sexes. While I recognize the validity of homosexual and bisexual love, I write heterosexual love. And quite frankly, men and women have a lot to overcome these days.

The general hatred and fear of the opposite sex that I’ve witnessed in others makes me honestly question how anyone manages to overcome the hurdles around them and their psyche in order to engage in consensual heterosexual sex.

I am not a feminist. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate SOME of what feminism has done. I think it’s nifty that women have more career options for those with those particular drives/ambitions in life. I think it’s swell that women are regarded as intellectual and moral equals of men. And I do prize my right to vote.

However, in the long run, I believe feminism on the whole has done more harm than good. I say this because of the huge divisiveness caused between the sexes. Everything is “misogyny,” even honest opinion that actually ends up being correct such as: “for the most part women aren’t suited to being firefighters.” They aren’t. That might burn your biscuits or whatever, but frankly men are physically stronger for the most part. If I’m trapped in a burning building I want a big burly man coming up after me, not a woman who got the job through an affirmative action lawsuit and lowering of the physical requirements for her entrance into the fireman boy’s club.

What is often overlooked is the HUGE amount of misandry floating around our culture. Misandry isn’t talked about that much, so in the event that you don’t know, it’s the fear and hatred of men. Hearing some of the rude, shameful, disrespectful and emotionally abusive bullshit coming out of women’s mouths toward men, and society doesn’t even blink…I have to say there is a lot of misandry.

And women in our culture are trained to fear men. Despite the fact that the biological drive for all but a very small percentage of men is to protect and care for women, not abuse or kill or rape them.

One thing that highly irritates me, enough to rant about it, is the social indoctrination I was raised with as a result of feminism and how highly devalued and degraded traditional female roles have become. Like its somehow beneath a woman to be a wife and mother. Now personally I don’t aspire to motherhood, but it doesn’t mean it’s not a role worth pursuing. I recognize I’m in the minority as a woman who doesn’t want children of her own. And because of that I would never dream to belittle another woman’s desire for children.

Further, while this isn’t always true…in many cases most women do the majority of the cooking, cleaning and child rearing. Now most of them have full time jobs as well. How is this liberation? Someone please explain it to me. I’m not sure how other women are wired, but frankly I just don’t have the DRIVE to work for other human beings that I’m not in an intimate relationship with.

But here is something maybe not everybody fully grasps. Mammalian heterosexual relations work as follows: Aggressive dominant display by the male. Submissive response by the female. Coupling. Game. Set. Match. Humans are the only mammals (to my knowledge, if I’m wrong on this, correct me with some backup research please. I’m willing to be wrong, but I expect actual documentation.), where the female will accept a weaker male.

This is evolution. Male dominance, female submission. This does NOT mean “all men” as a society should dominate “all women.” Nor does it mean abusive behavior is okay. Nor does it mean that people who naturally don’t fit these generalities should follow them. If you’re female and need to be the dominant party because that’s your GENUINE natural drive, and not something you were socially conditioned to think, fine. More power to you. Ya Ya!

It’s just that somehow, after millions of years of evolution, the feminist movement comes along and decides that nature is both shameful and imaginary. So we have the bizarre circumstance of a woman who wants to stay home and raise a family, who doesn’t want an outside career and who frankly is operating on the evolutionary biological norm…who has to “come to terms with” her “shameful” submissive nature. What the hell?

Seriously?

Somehow though, despite all the indoctrination….despite all the shame, and women feeling like they have to be exactly like men…somehow romance continues to be the bestselling genre. And romance mostly features dominant alpha males.

So this ends up being a guilty fantasy instead of any type of workable reality. And it’s sad. For those curious about why so many women end up with abuser after abuser…it can be summed up in what I said about mammalian mating habits. They’re instinctively looking for the “dominant display.” And since most American males have been socially conditioned to be more passive, the ONLY display they have to go on for the most part, is that of an abusive male, who will turn that power against them.

Are we really coming to the place socially where the only way anyone’s desires can be acted upon is through fiction?

Germaine Greer on Male & Female Genital Mutilation

I have to admit, I have a soft spot for Germaine Greer. It's true, of course, that much of her writing is openly contemptuous of men, & therefore surely the very opposite of everything this library should be housing. But beyond all that sorry misandry, she has a good mind, & her own opinions. Of all the major second-wave feminist writings I found The Female Eunuch to be the most interesting, intelligent & (comparitively speaking) fair. And she has, as Dennis Potter once said of her, the courage to change her mind in public, which is a quality I much admire in anyone, & one which should be treasured wherever found. So, I like to hear what she has to say, even if I disagree with the greater part of it.

In her book The Whole Woman (1999) she writes on the double-standard of male & female circumcision. She asks by what standard the West judges those parts of the world that still practice female circumcision when male genital mutilation is freely & openly carried out at home in America on going on two-thirds of all infant boys, & girls cut themselves, pierce themselves & surgically alter themselves in their millions. She was vilified by practically all organized Feminism for this stance, although it seems to me to be an extremely reasonable, moral, & thoughtful point of view, intelligently stated. The following is a condensed extract from it. It's not the right opinion, or the wrong opinion, it's just an opinion that deserves to be heard but isn't.

_______________________________________

Female genital mutilation (FGM) has been condemned as a violation of human rights by the International Conference on Population and Development, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, and the United Nations Family Planning Authority. Male genital mutilation is seldom condemned. Men mutilate the genitals of other men; usually women mutilate the genitals of other women, except where the procedure is carried out by a male professional. In England a doctor will be struck off the medical register if it is found that he has carried out a female circumcision of any kind. He will not be struck off for splitting a penis down the middle so that its owner can insert rings in it fore and aft for the gratification of himself and partners. He will not be struck off but rather encouraged to 'tidy up' the ambiguous genitalia of intersexual newborns, usually by removing the inadequate penis and creating an opening that will pass for vagina, so that the child becomes a girl, regardless of actual chromosomal make-up. And he may massively mutilate built men and women seeking gender reassignment. But he may not carry out any form of female circumcision at the request of a patient or her parents.

Human beings have always modified the external appearance of their bodies in one way or another; one man's beautification is another man's mutilation. Looked at in its full context the criminalization of FGM can be seen to be what African nationalists since Jomo Kenyatta have been calling it, an attack on cultural identity. Any suggestion that male genital mutilation should be outlawed would be understood to be a frontal attack on the cultural identity of Jews and Muslims.

Notwithstanding, the opinion that male circumcision might be bad for babies, bad for sex and bad for men is steadily gaining ground. In Denmark nearly 2 per cent of non-Jewish and non-Muslim men are circumcised on strictly medical grounds; in Britain the proportion rises to between 6 per cent and 7 per cent, but in the US between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of male babies will have their foreskins surgically removed. No UN agency has uttered a single protocol condemning the widespread practice of male genital mutilation, which will not be challenged until doctors start to be sued in large numbers by men they mutilated as infants. Silence on the question of male circumcision is evidence of the political power both of the communities where a circumcised penis is considered an essential identifying mark and of the practitioners who continue to do it for no good reason. Silence about male mutilation in our own countries combines nicely with noisiness on female mutilation in other countries to reinforce our notions of cultural superiority.

To be sure there are influential feminists who are fighting to eliminate FGM in their own countries and their struggle must be supported but not to the point of refusing to consider the different priorities and cultural norms by which other women live. When I explained to Sudanese women that western women sometimes have their breasts cut and trimmed, they were every bit as mystified and horrified as we are by Pharaonic incision and infibulation. Stephanie Welsh, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her photographs of the ceremonies surrounding female circumcision in rural Kenya, described it as 'a wonderful ritual that unifies the tribe. It's very beautiful - except for the circumcision itself.' Welsh's prize-winning photostory traces the lead-up to the climactic ritual: first the girl's mother builds the house where she will live as a woman; then the girl has her head shaved; circumcised women from surrounding villages gather to paint her with red ochre and assure her that she will have no pain; then they hold her down and stifle her cries as her own mother cuts her with a razor and plasters goat fat on the wound.

Male genital mutilation is considered trivial; female genital mutilation is considered devastating even if it involves nothing more than nicking the prepuce of the clitoris to provoke ritual bleeding. FGM takes so many forms that it is doubtful whether it represents a single phenomenon with a single cultural significance. The WHO recognizes degrees of severity of mutilation, one, in which the hood of the clitoris and surrounding tissue are removed, two, in which the clitoris and the labia minora are removed and three, infibulation, widespread in Somalia, Northern Sudan and Djibouti, in which the clitoris and labia minora are removed and raw surfaces created on the labia majora so that they can be stitched together to form a seal over the urethra and most of the introitus of the vagina. The accepted view of what these practices mean can he summed up as follows:

Beliefs and practices regarding Female Genital Mutilation seem to show a desire to control women's sexual experience and reinforce established gender roles. They support a priority of male over female sexual satisfaction (often at reproductive risk to women) and give evidence of profound ambivalence among men regarding the sexual needs and concerns of women.

This is indeed a curious explanation of something that women do to women, because it suggests that they are simply carrying out the desires of men, desires which in these cultures men would never have discussed with them. In Ethiopia circumcision is common but not universal among both Christian and Muslim women; when I asked Ethiopian men whether they preferred sex with circumcised or uncircumcised women they appeared not to know. They could not say for certain whether the women in their own families were circumcised or not. Circumcised women in Sudan told me that it was 'no problem for the sex' but 'a big problem with the childbirth'. They thought they might not have it done for their daughters, because it was going out of fashion, but when their mothers became agitated and said that their granddaughters would be considered ugly and unmarriageable, they said maybe they would do it anyway. These Sudanese women were very sensual and up front about their erotic interests; it is impossible to think of them as having no notion of their own sexual pleasure.

There is also a pronounced cosmetic element in the way women talk of their own circumcision. Many women who are circumcised or infibulated also remove absolutely all their body hair; the depilated, infibulated genitalia become virtually invisible — as they were in all western painting and sculpture very recently. Certainly FGM represents a significant health risk but it must also be a procedure with considerable cultural value because it has survived fifty years of criminalization and concerted propaganda campaigns. The fact that it is both painful and dangerous adds to its undeniable function as ideal in the rite of passage from child to woman. As UN workers in Eastern Uganda found, women would not abandon female circumcision until some similarly significant procedure could take its place.

Though I was among the feminists at Mexico City in 1985 who first raised the problem of FGM in an international forum, I am loath now to pronounce upon its significance as a cultural phenomenon given the occult attachment to self-mutilation that can be discerned in our own culture. This can perhaps be explained as partly an angered response to being defined as our bodies. The woman who cuts her body asserts undeniably and emphatically that there is a self that has power over that body. Time and again we are told by young women who cut themselves that they find release in watching their own blood flow. Self-harming of this kind is not a cry for help nor is it clamouring for attention, because it is secret. It is a genuine attack by the self upon the body, by which mental anguish swapped for bodily pain. Self-harming is older than Christendom, embedded in contrition, penance and expiation and rotten with guilt.

Piercing is no less mysterious to a non-piercer than cutting, but the underlying dynamic is similar. Perhaps we should be considering the possibility that FGM acts in a similar way to assert the individual woman's control over her genitals and to customize them to her specification, which may also be the hallmark of the group to which she wishes to signify her allegiance. If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?

We ought at least to entertain the notion that the African woman is having FGM done for herself and allow her the same access to professional assistance as jen angel can expect. Instead of prescribing improved operating techniques and antisepsis, westernized governments have criminalized FGM and driven it underground, so that the painfulness of the procedure and the attendant health hazards are much magnified. In our own culture girls too young to qualify for professional piercings have been known to do it themselves. I used to teach at a school where bad girls carved their own tattoos with steel pen-nibs and coloured them with school-issue ink.

Thirty years ago parents were not fighting with their sons and daughters over piercings and tattoos. No teeny-hopper heroine sported a stud through her tongue as Scary Spice does and sticks her tongue out ostentatiously to prove it. The tongue stud is supposed to have an erotic function in stimulating the underside of the penis during fellatio. What the Spice Girls' eight-year-old girl fans make of this is anybody's guess. Mothers know that their daughters' insistence on having a nose stud or a navel piercing or a bracelet of barbed wire tattooed around an arm is an act of hostility towards them. The child is asserting her right to alter irrevocably, even to damage and destroy, the body that her mother grew for her out of her own substance. The child thinks she is claiming her own body, wiling her autonomy; the mother sees it as mindless tribal behaviour, pretty much as the 'first' world sees FGM. The mother wants the tattoo parlours closed down, and piercing banned. The law capitulates only so far as to impose an age limit, thus presenting the mutilation even more effectively as a privilege, a goal to be fought for, a sign of adulthood, a rite of passage. Though we might suspect that the child who thinks she needs a nose-ring might be afraid that her face is a blank in need of illustration, that she becomes a piercer and tattooer because rings and tattoos make her visible to herself, we have got to see that this is no more than a continuation of the incessantly stimulated desire in the little girl to bedizen herself, to change her hair colour, to paint her face, and her nails. All these are ways of making herself visible. Or invisible, depending how she sees it.

Christopher Hitchens on Male Genital Mutilation

On the issue of religion i am usually on the other side of the fence* to Hitchens, but on this matter i find i am 100% wholeheartedly in agreement. Male circumcision is practised by most of the societies that practise female circumcision, & more, for the same reasons & with comparable effects. Female Genital Mutilation, however, is considered just about the worst crime imaginable pretty much everywhere in the world, while Male Genital Mutilation is legal in every country & a joke the world over.

There is something to be learned here about how ideology - religious or otherwise - has an uncanny power to blind human beings to the actual reality of what is staring them in the face. If you truly cannot see that taking a razor & cutting parts off of healthy male infant's genitals is the same as taking a razor & cutting parts off of healthy female infant's genitals, then whatever is happening inside you at this very second is that process. Take a moment to step back & look at how you have got here.

For more information on both Male & Female Genital Mutilation please check the 'Resources' sidebar.

Tyrannies

by David Warren

 

One of the truest things said about Iran under the mullahs is "nothing in that country is quite as it appears." This is something journalists should know about Iran, or about any country where ideological misrepresentations of reality have been introduced, on a huge scale, for the very purpose of altering reality.

For the Shah was not the only thing overthrown during the Khomeinist takeover of 1979. In their attempt to reconstruct abiding Persia as a utopian, "revolutionary," quasi-Muslim quasi-state, the mullahs launched an attack on reality itself. Predictably, it has failed and, as we see today, a generation raised entirely on their doctrines and under their watchful thugs shows no gratitude.

Yet, as we saw before, during and after the fall of Communist regimes in Europe, tyranny does not evaporate like the morning dew. It is a spiritual poison, leaching into the soil. The effects of tyranny outlive the regime of tyranny, in the victims of tyranny. A typical side-effect is a kind of double-vision, in which reality and unreality remain simultaneously in view.

It becomes almost impossible to recover reality, because the tyrants so assiduously tampered with it. "The people" still half-believe the indoctrination; conversely, many of them openly embrace real evils, simply because they appear the opposite of the evils the regime embraced. Confusion reigns. Everything has been demonized; time is required, and the longer operations of nature, to sort what is good from what is bad.

Today's column is not about Iran, but I mention the country because we watch from a distance. That is what makes smugness possible. Nothing as horrible as what happens there has yet happened here. We feel secretly superior to people who've had to face circumstances we cannot imagine.

I remember the outrage of a Czech exile, a generation ago (before the Communists had fallen), receiving an uptight, self-righteous lecture from a shallow Canadian acquaintance. The latter said the enslaved Czechs should be blamed for co-operating with their Communist masters. Why didn't they just refuse to obey orders?

He was speaking to a man who had spent 12 years in labour camps for disobeying orders. Yet that was beside the point. The Canadian was speaking about things beyond his comprehension. My Czech friend, who had turned almost purple from his effort to contain himself, said only: "You are a fool." His Canadian interlocutor walked off, looking even more pleased with himself than usual. This Czech could have said more. I will say it for him.

In contemporary Canada we also face tyranny, but of a sort that we have brought upon ourselves in ways no Czechs, no Persians, ever did. There is no regime in Ottawa that seized power by violence, and imposed the "politically correct" ideology on us from a party manifesto. The advance of this tyranny -- of the Nanny State and all its trappings -- has been accomplished in plain view, by incremental advances, with our co-operation.

In two generations, we have witnessed a transformation, and nearly an inversion, of all the moral and ethical principles that guided us through countless generations before. The "revolution" has been accomplished by such means as George Orwell predicted: by changing the meanings of words.

Most overtly it has been done with "rights language" -- by the construction of new, artificial and quite abstract "group" rights that are anathematic to individual freedom. But beneath this, we have watched court and legislative interventions to redefine such basic ideas as manhood, fatherhood; womanhood, motherhood -- a purposeful destruction of the family in the cause of extending the powers of the state. We have likewise watched the religious order of society being systematically undermined, so that atheism or "irreligion" has become the default position from which the state now issues its ukases.

And we have allowed this and more, through the very laxity that shallow Canadian condemned in Czechs. We have accommodated the new powers, for fear of being isolated and ostracized.

I wrote last week about the evil of "feminism," and of the need to reverse its advance. It is typical of the present pseudo-reality that I am then attacked for being "anti-woman." It is further assumed, most obnoxiously, that I blame "women" for feminism -- thus playing the same game, of using one sex as a club to smash the other.

But no, I blame cowards -- most of them men.

Contemporary feminism did not prevail on such argumentative points as Betty Friedan included in her psychotic ravings. The movement had practical sponsors, who, for the most part, weren't female. They were men who wanted "free love" (read: copulation); who embraced contraception because it would free male pleasures from male responsibilities, and turn women very much into "objects" of their desire. That is how men conceded the high feminist ground.

Tyranny -- dehumanization -- advanced, because men failed to be men, women failed to be women, and both sexes pretended to become "persons" on an analogy more animal than divine. And today, nothing in our country is quite as it appears.

© Ottawa Citizen, 2008

Run, Little Man, If You Can

Oldie but goodie from Ilana Mercer :

In every boy there’s a girl waiting to break free. If boys were only encouraged to get in touch with their Inner Whiner, the problems plaguing them in schools and society at large would likely dissipate.

 

Distilled to its essence, this is the position some in the women’s movement are advancing. Feminists once aimed to unseat men, now they are actively engaged in queering them.

 

The new friendlier feminism is oddly attractive to men, who’ve been snarled at for so long by these attack dogs. One such dog in disguise is Carol Gilligan. At the risk of engaging in what liberals call “lookism” (I note that the anti-ageism bigots have taken to deriding Ann Coulter for being in her 40s), here's a photo of her.

 

The tumbleweed hair and the ghoulish grimace ought to be enough to make all men head for the hills. But Gilligan gulls the gents because hers is a slightly more evolved feminism.

 

Most feminists have dedicated their careers to denying the facts of nature, namely that men and women are different. Not Gilligan. On discovering the genders have “differing moral and psychological tendencies,” she devoted herself to elevating the sillier sex’s proclivities. 

 

You see, before they were so thoroughly feminized, “males and masculine persons” settled moral and ethical dilemmas differently to “females and feminine persons”—they were inclined to draw on individual rights and justice. Ladies, conversely, generally like collectivist considerations such as what is best for the group.

 

On observing this, Gilligan morphed psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development from a theory of absolute morality to a theory of relative morality: She decreed that reasoning rooted in collectivism was every bit as evolved and just as that based on individualism.

 

It recently dawned on Gilligan that boys had fallen far behind girls in almost all walks of life. Did this elicit introspection? Did she reflect on the crimes caused by codifying feminism into law? Did she finally confess to what privileging women and “women’s way of knowing” has wrought?

 

Affirmative action, the equal representation of women everywhere (including in sports), progressive teaching paradigms emphasizing group think; the banishing of competition (for which boys are hardwired) and moral instruction (which they generally crave); the demonization of the greatest writers, scientists, and explorers because they were men, the chemical castration of boys via Ritalin—was Gilligan driven to atone for these transgressions against boys and change direction? Did she even make the connection between men’s problems and the “Girls Gone Wild” gains of the women’s movement?

 

Not on your life.

 

In a recent column for Newsweek, Gilligan writes: “That boys are having trouble with school is not news. But images of rough-and-tumble boys not fit for the classroom now may blind us to a problem that has less to do with how boys seem and more with who they actually are—but are not allowed to show.”

 

That men have practically been made over in the image of woman is not enough for Gilligan. Their final “recovery,” as she sees it, lies in embracing the alleged woman within with complete abandon. Or in Gilligan speak, getting in touch with one’s "emotional intelligence," "relational self," and "feeling brain."

 

Gilligan’s credentials for “fixing” problems “scholars” like her have created include “having read ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Catcher in the Rye,’” and thus knowing “that boys and school don't mix.” Her scientific data are as compelling—they’re drawn from a one-case study of a badly abused little boy.

 

As Gilligan tells it, “Four-year-old Sam asked his mother one day, ‘Mommy, why are you sad?’ Wanting to shield him from her sadness, [mom] replied, ‘I'm not sad.’ Then, according to Gilligan, poor Sam sprung his Inner Girl. “Mommy, I know you. I was inside you,” he told his long-suffering mother.

 

No tyke will spontaneously refer to his mother’s uterus unless he has been taught to. This boy sounds as normal as Alexander Portnoy, the antihero of Philip Roth’s eponymous Portnoy's Complaint.

 

But for Gilligan, there’s nothing creepy about a toddler’s reference to his mother’s entrails. Au contraire. She casts the clearly contrived and inculcated womb talk as natural—as just the “kind of emotional openness, sensitivity and connectedness” men are forced to suppress for fear of appearing unmanly. “[B]oys often repudiate these human qualities,” she laments. If they “can be encouraged to embrace them, these qualities will develop, expanding their capacity for relationships and also their sense of themselves.”

 

Vagina monologues or uterus prattle—feminists believe that as long as their insides are being discussed, humanity’s progress is guaranteed.

 

Remember the cult, 1967 British television series The Prisoner ("I am not a number—I am a free man!")? Whenever “Number 6” (the individual) attempted to escape from “The Village” (the collective), a giant balloon called “Rover” gave chase and subdued him. Little Sam’s metaphoric “Rover,” you can be sure, is his mother’s suffocating monster womb.

 

Unless the men’s movement is more concerned with claiming victimhood than reclaiming manhood, its advocates ought not to go along with feminism’s new, kinder castration.

© 2006 By Ilana Mercer

How Negative Depictions Of Men Make Women Look Bad

At last! After a long hiatus the majestic 6oodfella is back, with another park bench sit-down between gender-defenders Hugh Jass & Mary Hinge. I love these, some of the most righteous & funny things I've ever seen. Why won't someone give this guy a TV show? Or at least a slot on Sesame Street..



By the way, if you are interested in some of the points raised here about the methods & agendas of advertising, i recommend doing some research into Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who began many of the modern techniques of advertising back in the 1920's & 30's, by applying his uncles theories of the subconscious to first commerce & eventually politics. There is an excellent documentary on this by Adam Curtis entitled 'The Century Of The Self' which I suggest you take a look at.