What Every Man Should Know About Feminist Issues

Hierarchy

by Rod Van Mechelen

Copyright 1991, 1992 by Rod Van Mechelen


Without the pressures of sex, men do quite well within the traditional hierarchical organization. Pop-feminists, however, assert that the "male" hierarchical ideology is destructive.

While the high-technologies men have produced within such hierarchies may soon make such organizations obsolete, are they any more destructive than the "pecking- order" hierarchies of women? To the contrary, hierarchies have generally contributed to the survival of the human race, creating civilizations when before, in the early morning light of human history, there ranged only matricentric bands.

Most women are very sensitive about status and their place within a hierarchy. (You Just Don't Understand, Ballantine Books Edition, June 1991, Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., p 51 - 52) They value status (You Just Don't Understand, Ballantine Books Edition, June 1991, Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., p 277), and in a way men do not because, unlike the female hierarchy, the male hierarchy is less about domination than about getting things done.

Teams make things happen. They focus on goals, assign tasks, and move mountains. To do this, the members must know their jobs, know who can tell them what to do, and when to do it. That is the purpose of the hierarchy: the job of the "boss" is to enable the members of the team to get the job done. For men, this is natural.

As Tara Roth Madden notes, male hierarchies fall into the natural order of a team: "Men base their relationships with one another on the team concept they had learned as youngsters in sports." (Women Vs. Women, Tara Roth Madden, p 138) Hence, the "team" hierarchy has been crucial to human survival for thousands of years.

What do pop-feminists offer in replacement? Are female hierarchies somehow better? Not likely: "Women seldom make much of an effort to support one another." (Women Vs. Women, Tara Roth Madden, p 13)

An individual might build a home, hunt game, and gather food in his or her life- time, but a team has a synergy allowing it to build communities, cultivate crops, raise herds of animals, and, thereby, raise everyone's standard of living. For this reason, men will continue to participate in hierarchical behavior because it's essential to human survival. A survival pop-feminists do not promote with their attacks on "male" hierarchies.


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