May 2002
Posted May 1, 2002
Christie Blatchford - May 6, 2002 -
""
- Toogood Reports.
Posted May 1, 2002
Janet Burkitt - Innocent until proven guilty? May 6, 2002 -
'No More Mr. Nice Guy!' A Federal Way psychotherapist wants men to reclaim their masculinity
By Mark Rahner
Seattle Times staff reporter
When you see one of these
:-)
in an e-mail from Robert Glover, your irony alarm wails.
Glover is the author of the self-help book, "No More Mr. Nice Guy!" (Barnes & Noble, $14.95), and yes, the exclamation point is part of the title.
He's a Federal Way-based psychotherapist, an emerging figure in what's sometimes called the Men's Movement as crystallized by "Iron John" and drum-beating a decade ago. And ironically, he's a nice, extremely courteous fellow.
"Every now and then I'll run into a Nice Guy who says, 'My wife just thinks you're Satan, you're a demon. She thinks you're terrible,' " Glover says.
But others thank him for what he's doing: helping men rediscover their masculinity - or in some cases discover it for the first time - minus the hokey rituals.
Glover has started a cottage industry battling what he calls "Nice Guy Syndrome." He defines it this way:
"A Nice Guy is a man who has been conditioned by family and society to believe that he has to be good in order to be loved."
Specifically, Glover believes contemporary men neglect their own needs to please women and gain their approval. They avoid conflict, behave manipulatively, don't say what they want, won't stop things they don't like and don't know how to communicate with or like other men.
In a thin volume that relies mainly on Glover's professional observations rather than research or statistics, he says Nice Guys don't believe they're OK just as they are. So they build up resentment and frustration that make them and their women miserable.
"No More Mr. Nice Guy!" came out of men's therapy groups Glover conducted several years ago. The same themes kept coming up, so he wrote the chapters to speed up his patients' progress, he says.
Now, in addition to his book and regular group sessions, Glover is planning his first "NMMNG Seattle Summer Institute" for five intensive therapeutic days starting July 27 (at $800 a person), and others in cities around the world.
Macho message
His macho message has landed him talk-radio appearances and an upcoming feature in that venerable men's magazine, Esquire (which, it should be noted, has taken a turn in recent years toward the touchy-feely).
"What I found was that a lot of Nice Guys receive most of their conditioning on how to be male from women, either from dependent mothers or single moms," Glover says. "We have a female-dominated educational system. Growing up in the '60s and '70s, most of those guys heard from angry women about how bad men were and thought, 'I'd better find out what women think is good and try to become that.' "
Glover is tapping into the same vein of male self-assertion and anger that has propelled shock-jock Tom Leykis to success. But he says his emphasis is less on over-the-top schtick than on "getting their needs met in general."
A few of Glover's suggestions for recovering Nice Guys:
Start putting yourself first. "You've got to fill your own bucket up before you can pour anything out of it."
Spend time with male friends. "A lot of guys tell me they don't have male friends because their wives complain when they go out with the guys. I think it's essential for healthy relationships."
Learn to get in touch with your feelings with the guys. "We men do our feelings differently than women do, and that's OK."
Learn to set boundaries. "Nice Guys typically complain that people treat them badly, take advantage of them, hurt them," Glover says. "It's the ability to remove yourself from situations that feel bad."
Glover admits that he, too, is "a recovering Nice Guy." A turning point came for him several years ago. He was in the car with his wife, and he says she'd been crabby with him, a little abusive. He let his resentment stew for a couple of days before he confronted her about it.
"She said, 'You're right, I did treat you badly, but it was your job not to hang around me.' She said, 'It's your job to pull off the road, get out the cellphone and call me a cab, but do it with love. ... Don't pull over calling me names saying, You're this, you're that, I'm getting the hell out of here. Call a cab and say, Dear, I love you, but I'm calling you a cab because I can't be with you.'
"And now we have a term for that: We refer to it as 'calling a cab with love.' I use that with the guys I work with," Glover says.
Your irony alarm may be wailing again. Glover's wife not only gave him a push toward his self-assertion philosophy, but actually dictated the terms of his self-assertion.
"I was too much of a victim to think of it," he admits.
Glover says a lot of his male clients are referred by their wives. Some of them never wanted to be with a wimp. "Before, they were just frustrated: 'Why is he so passive-aggressive? Why won't he ever tell me the truth? Why does he appear to be listening to me but he can't remember anything that's important?' "
Or, as one man in Glover's online discussion/support group phrased it: "Maybe it's something that emanates from you, like the fear a dog can smell. To a woman, it's the smell of wuss."
'Nice Girls' too?
That raises the question: Is this really a male issue or just a wuss issue?
Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist and a frequent commentator on gender issues, sees the matter somewhat differently.
"I think that's a genderless problem. You have both men and women thinking, 'Why am I such a nice guy or nice girl? Why am I being taken advantage of?'
"I tend to think guys who go to those groups are either really angry and need a place to express it, or they're men who are very hurt, often post-divorce, they don't know what hit them, they need their confidence back and they're feeling pretty isolated."
But Schwartz, whose books include "The Gender of Sexuality" and "American Couples," isn't entirely skeptical. Among men, she says, "There's consciousness-raising going on. There's this sense of wanting to claim some territory in the feelings, role models, parenting and teaching areas. These are places that have been ceded to women for the past 90 years."
One barometer of a "cultural shift" taking place is a rise in magazines geared toward men, including long-established Esquire and GQ as well as cheekier Maxim and its offshoots.
"They wouldn't be doing it if men didn't want to read it," Schwartz says.
As for the hand-wringing about men learning to communicate with each other, Schwartz scoffs: "Pick up the phone. I think they're noticing there's some really great stuff there that women own, and they want some of it, too."
But it hasn't been until recently that men could say anything about the issue without getting shouted down or laughed out of the room, according to Asa Baber. He's been at the front lines of gender battles for 20 years as Playboy Magazine's controversial "Men" columnist.
"For many years it was really very lonely," Baber says. "There were a lot of years there where most men just retreated into a shell. Most men over the last 20 or 30 years have not wanted to engage in the gender debate. They just shut up."
Baber agrees with Glover that contemporary guys have tended to allow women to define their behavior - especially amid the increased absence of household father figures since World War II and the rise of single-parent families.
Heroic images
"They are trying to make us into super-polite, super-politically-correct people. But I think that's fading. I hear less and less media specials about how men have to behave, da-da-da-da-da-da. Men have been neutralized, men have had troubles, they've been dismissed, but they're also coming back. And 9/11 didn't hurt."
The standard men-are-pigs patter was deflated after the heroic images that emerged from the disaster, Baber argues. But is there really a Men's Movement?
"There has never been, nor probably should there ever be something as monolithic as the modern feminist movement," Baber says. But whether it's a consciousness raising, as Schwartz described it, or something else, movement of some kind seems undeniable.
"In our own slow kind of grubby way, sort of like bears at the end of the winter, we're kind of staggering out there and sniffing the air and saying, 'Wait a minute, we're pretty good guys and we're not just going to fold anymore,' " Baber says.
'Show 'em your power'
Or as another of Glover's online acolytes puts it: "I learned, when taking some salsa and swing-dance lessons over the past year, that the more I lead the bigger the woman's smile. It's true! Spin 'em hard. Take the lead. Show 'em your power. Be the boss. They'll be grateful that you're a real man. A man who knows what he's doing. Women still get to choose if they want to dance with you."
And if there is a physics of relationships, Glover notes that movement isn't without consequences. If you follow his advice, he says, "You and your partner are going to grow in a way that you never imagined, or it's going to blow this thing to hell and the two of you are going to get away from each other because that's what needs to happen. From experience I've found that's about 50-50."
Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com.
""
- Toogood Reports.
Posted May 1, 2002
Janet Burkitt - Innocent until proven guilty? May 6, 2002 -
As trial begins, school backs teacher, 38, charged with rape of teenage boy
By Janet Burkitt
Times Snohomish County reporter
It's been nearly a year since popular second-grade teacher Susan Lemery left Olivia Park Elementary School amid accusations she had sex with one 14-year-old Marysville boy and fondled another, both friends of her son.
She still is missed at the school - and still is being paid.
Lemery, whose trial on third-degree child rape and third-degree child-molestation charges is to begin today in Snohomish County Superior Court, has collected about $33,000 in wages since she was placed on paid administrative leave last June.
"She's innocent until proven guilty," Mukilteo School District spokesman Andy Muntz said, explaining the paid leave. "Because she has been charged with something doesn't mean she needs to lose her job."
Prosecutors accuse Lemery, 38, of having sexual contact with the boys - both of whom attended school in Marysville and had no connection with Olivia Park - at her Marysville home in 2000 and 2001. They say one of the boys told a detective he had sex three times with Lemery and had sexual contact with her on other occasions.
Lemery "categorically denies she had any sexual contact with either of these young men," her attorney, David Allen, said.
And parents at Olivia Park, where Lemery taught for 10 years, believe her, said Michelle Miles-Booth, co-president of the school's PTA.
"It just sounds ridiculous from what we know of her," she said of the allegations.
Authorities began investigating the case last May, when students at Marysville's Cedarcrest School told a school counselor Lemery had given "energy pills" to students at her house, causing one to become sick.
The students also alleged that Lemery was seen lying on a couch in her home next to the boy she's accused of having sex with, according to an affidavit filed by prosecutors.
A school-resource officer interviewed the boy and when he noticed the teen seemed uneasy, he told the 14-year-old that Lemery "had told him what happened."
The boy's "face dropped, he turned his head away and he began to sob," Deputy Prosecutor Lisa Paul wrote in the affidavit. He then told the officer he'd had sex with Lemery, Paul wrote.
The boy said Lemery told him last April that they couldn't see each other anymore because her husband had hired a private investigator and had pictures of them having sex in the Lemerys' master bedroom, the affidavit says.
After she was arrested, another 14-year-old boy, who previously had denied sexual contact with Lemery, told a detective Lemery had climbed into bed with him, kissed him and fondled him when he was spending the night at her home in October 2000, the court document says.
He said he had been drinking and smoking marijuana with a friend earlier in the night when Lemery drove by them on the street, offered them a ride and took him to her home. She told him her son would be there, but he wasn't, according to the affidavit.
Lemery was arrested in June and charged with two counts of third-degree child rape and one count of third-degree child molestation.
Paul increased the charges against Lemery in December to a total of six felony counts - three each of third-degree child rape and third-degree child molestation.
She said genetic tests showed with near certainty that a semen stain on a comforter from Lemery's bed contained Lemery's DNA and DNA from one of the boys.
Both boys are slated to testify in the trial, which is expected to last about three weeks. Jury selection begins today.
When the accusations first emerged, teachers sent the Lemerys a care package with food, artwork from her second-grade students and cards from adults and children.
Staff, officials and parents at Olivia Park - which is near the Everett Mall - praised her publicly. One parent mentioned that Lemery's students sometimes called her "mom" by mistake.
"She continues to be remembered as a teacher well-liked by her students," said Muntz, the district spokesman.
Miles-Booth, the PTA co-president, said Lemery once spent a day watching Miles-Booth's son and his best friend, who was in Lemery's class, race quarter-midget cars, small vehicles used in youth competitions.
Lemery then organized a school assembly about quarter-midget racing, and made posters with photographs from the races.
"It's still on the wall in our son's room. I just thought it was spectacular," said Dale Booth, Miles-Booth's husband. "I thought she was a neat lady."
His wife said support for Lemery remains strong among parents, who expect she will be acquitted.
"I haven't heard a negative word about her," she said. "We'd love to have her come back to our school."
Janet Burkitt can be reached at 206-515-5689 or jburkitt@seattletimes.com.
""
- Toogood Reports.
Posted May 1, 2002
Helen Weathers - ? May 6, 2002 -
Forgotten Fathers
by HELEN WEATHERS
femail.co.uk - 6th May 2002
When Sir Bob Geldof made a stand this week on behalf of fathers, it touched a nerve with many men who find themselves estranged from their children when marriages end in acrimony.
The singer spoke movingly of the 'universes of grief and deserts of emptiness' he endured after his divorce from his late wife Paula Yates and the subsequent custody battle over Fifi, now 18, Peaches, 12, and Pixie, 11.
Now looking after their daughters and five-year-old Tiger Lily, Paula's child by the late rock star Michael Hutchence, he urged the courts to recognise that men could make better carers and hit out at the idea that mothers are automatically given custody rights.
Here, fathers who have experienced the same 'nightmare' explain why it is the children who suffer by their absence.
Howard Phillips home is filled with photographs of his beautiful, brown-eyed daughter Shanie. His face lights up when he talks about his vivacious, ten-year-old child, and there is no mistaking the pride in his voice when he describes her fierce intelligence.
He will tell you how at 18 months she successfully navigated an escape route from her cot; how she would tell him off if he tried to change the ending of the bedtime story she knew off by heart; and how she could remember exactly who had given her which present on her second birthday.
The memories are still sharp - but as time goes by they become increasingly vague.
For Howard hardly ever sees Shanie now. The last time was ten months ago, when she stayed with him for two weeks. The next will, hopefully, be in June. He cannot be certain, though, because such plans have a tendency to be cancelled at the last minute.
Like many men who have gone through a difficult divorce, Howard Phillips is now largely an absent father - but not through choice.
He is desperate to see Shanie, but she now lives a 13-hour flight away in Singapore, with his ex-wife Natalie and her new husband.
In 1999, Howard begged Natalie not to take their child abroad to live, but failed to persuade them to stay. Since then, his once loving relationship with his daughter has petered out to one telephone call and a couple of e-mails a week.
The emotional distress of being separated from my daughter is immense,' says Howard, a 42-yearold insolvency administrator. 'Every time I see her, I just don't want to let her go.
'I feel as if I am losing her. The past few years have been an absolute nightmare, and the only one who is really suffering is Shanie, because she wants to see both her parents.
'She is becoming more and more withdrawn and unhappy as time goes by. She sends me e-mails saying how much she misses me and that she longs to see me. A child needs both its mother and its father.'
All research would suggest that this is certainly the case. According to two major studies, young children whose fathers are regularly present are better learners, have higher self-esteem, fewer symptoms of depression, and are less likely to have a criminal record by the age of 21.
Four in ten marriages are now doomed to fail, and around 200,000 children each year watch their parents divorce.
In the vast majority of cases, mothers are awarded custody - and research shows that as many as 40 per cent of fathers will lose contact with their children within just two years of separation.
In an attempt to address this problem, the Lord Chancellor's Department earlier this year published its 150-page report, Making Contact Work, to explore ways to improve contact-recognising that some mothers deliberately frustrate fathers' efforts to see their children, and recommending that court orders setting out a father's right of access should be more rigorously enforced.
The pressure group Families Need Fathers - which has 3,000 members - cautiously welcomes such initiatives, but believes the courts remain unfairly weighted in favour of mothers.
Only this week, in a landmark judgment, the Court of Appeal awarded a £300,000-a-year City high-flier custody of her two children, even though for six years her husband had been the full-time parent after giving up his own maritime job to care for them.
After the hearing, the 46-year-old father, who cannot be named for legal reasons, condemned the judgment as an attack on all men. 'What it says is that whatever we do, house-husbands have no rights,' he says.
'The whole thing has been a nightmare. I am convinced that I would have been the better parent.
'If you reverse the roles - so that I had been at work and my wife had stayed at home with the children - there is no way I would have been given custody.'
It remains to be seen how effective these new guidelines will be, but in any case they will probably prove too late for Howard Phillips.
Now remarried and with three more children, aged four, two and six weeks, he feels there is a huge gap in his life which can only be filled by his eldest daughter, Shanie.
Of course, when Howard married Natalie, a 36-year- old former bank worker, in 1991, he never imagined they would split up. They were in love and, initially, very happy together, and when Shanie was born on May 8, 1992, they were both besotted with her.
But soon cracks started to appear in their relationship. Natalie, a fiercely independent woman, felt increasingly dissatisfied with their life.
Money was tight in those early years and they couldn't afford to go out much together, so Natalie started to socialise alone with friends.
The marriage deteriorated to the point of no return when she told him she didn't want any more children with him.
Later, after Natalie had left him and taken two-year- old Shanie, Howard would find out that she had, in fact, met someone else.
There was no future for our marriage,' he says. 'Before Natalie left me, we hadn't been communicating very well and I could see we were incompatible. I didn't realise how bad things were until it was too late.
'In the final months, there was so much tension at home that it was a relief when it ended.
'My main priority was my daughter and continuing to be a proper father to her, so I tried to stay friends with Natalie and be cordial with her new partner.
'He seemed like a nice chap, very laid-back, and I thought that would be good for Shanie.'
This relatively amicable arrangement broke down, however, when Howard met Amanda, the woman who in 1997 would become his second wife. Natalie, Howard believes, became jealous of the warm relationship developing between Amanda and Shanie.
'Shanie would go back home after the weekend, full of the things she had done with us, going "Amanda this and Amanda that", and I think Natalie became jealous of the relationship.
'Shanie often asked if she could come and live with us. Relations between Natalie and I became very tense.'
Then, in 1999, came the bombshell. His ex-wife announced they were moving to Singapore, so her new husband could take up a wonderful job opportunity.
Howard was devastated, and his arguments that it would be in Shanie's best interests to stay in Britain fell on deaf ears.
Shanie puts on a brave face because she doesn't want to upset us,' says Howard, 'but I think she would have been much happier if she had stayed in Britain. All her family and friends are here.
'She doesn't want to be apart from her mummy or her daddy, and if they lived here she could have us both.
'By moving to Singapore, my exwife has put as much distance as possible between me and Shanie. I am not going to drift out of her life. Shanie is - and will always be - my daughter. It is a heartbreaking situation.'
Women's groups rightly point out that some mothers, having escaped violent relationships, do not want any contact with the fathers of their children because they fear continued abuse. Enforced contact, they claim, will put both the women and children at risk.
However, there are fathers who find themselves falsely accused of violence, rape or sexual abuse of their children by some mothers who will resort to any means to get their ex-husbands out of their lives - for reasons of spite, revenge or simply convenience.
This is what happened to John, a 32-year- old civil servant who cannot be named for legal reasons. When he and his wife split up acrimoniously two years ago, he was determined to stay in contact with his adored daughter, now aged four.
John would travel from his new base in London to his home town in the North-East to see his daughter, only for his ex-wife to cancel access visits at the last minute.
She wouldn't even let him give their child presents he had bought for her second birthday, leaving him weeping tears of anger and frustration.
Like most fathers in the same situation, John went to the courts in an effort to establish regular contact.
His ex-wife's response was to go to the police and accuse her former husband of rape. Remarkably, she claimed the alleged rape had happened in 1998 - just nine months after their marriage, and almost two years before their separation - during which time their daughter had been born.
She had made no mention of it in her divorce petition. In short, only when John started demanding his rights to see his daughter did she decide to go to the police.
'My world fell apart when the police came to arrest me,' he says. 'I went white with shock when they said the word rape, and I felt totally humiliated when they led me away in front of my colleagues.
'To see my name written on a board in a police station with the word rape next to it was devastating.
'I had told my ex-wife that I had a new girlfriend, and even though it was she who left me, I believe it was a case of "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned". A few weeks earlier she had told me she wanted to give our relationship another go, but I had refused.
'I was questioned for three hours, and when I left the police station I was shaking. Even though I knew I had done nothing wrong, there was this terror at the back of my mind. I kept thinking: "What if I go to prison for something I haven't done?" '
Five agonising weeks later, John was informed by the police that no charges would be brought, but the whole experience left him so shaken he was frightened of making any further contact with his ex-wife. He hasn't seen his daughter since.
'The marriage broke down because my ex-wife was so volatile and prone to temper tantrums,' he says. 'She was extremely jealous and possessive and was always accusing me of having affairs, which just wasn't true.
When she flew off the handle there was no placating her. The fact is, if a woman accuses a man of violence, she is believed; but if a man admits his wife has been violent to him, he is ridiculed.
'She would throw plates at me and once crashed a china duck over my head. The marriage was beyond repair - but I still wanted to be a father to our child.
'The minute I held our baby in my arms I fell in love with her, and for the first 18 months of her life we were so close. Then, overnight, she was completely lost to me.
'The Christmas after we split up I spent in tears, not being able to see my daughter or even give her her presents.
'All I wanted was to have a relationship with my daughter, and I was prepared to make friends with my ex-wife to achieve that - but she used our daughter as a weapon to hurt me.
'I can't bear the thought of never seeing my daughter again, but I'm so terrified that my ex will do anything to stop me having contact with her that I've given up.'
His solicitor, London-based lawyer Tim Lawson-Cruttenden, believes that there are many men like John and worries about the effects cases like his will have on society in general.
'There are hundreds of fathers like John who want to see their children but can't and you have to think what implications are there going to be for society if these fathers cannot play an active role in their children's lives,' he says.
When the six-year marriage of £50,000-a-year computer programmer Jim broke down, he hoped he could stay friends with his ex-wife for the sake of their only son, now aged 16.
Every other Saturday, 44-year-old Jim would travel from his bedsit in Croydon to the former family home in Brighton to see his son. Often, when it was time for him to leave, both would be in tears.
Contact, however, stopped suddenly nine months after the separation. One morning, as Jim prepared for work, he was arrested at his flat by police who said his ex-wife had complained he had sexually abused their son.
'It took a long time to establish the falsity of her allegations, and during that time I couldn't see my son at all, which was devastating,' he says.
'I don't know why she did it, but all this blew up at the time we were trying to sort out, rather acrimoniously, the financial side of the divorce.
My ex-wife was depressed, and our son was showing signs of disturbed behaviour and having bad dreams because of the divorce, and she started questioning him until she had the answers that she wanted.
'A senior social worker who investigated the case told me that my exwife had - either intentionally or not - implanted memories into his head of things that had never happened.
'She must have known it would be the most effective way of denying me contact. It was horrible to be accused of something like that. I was angry and upset. Knowing that she was telling friends and relatives that I had abused our son, when I was completely innocent, infuriated me.
'After the police told me there would be no charges, social services continued to investigate, and I didn't see my son at all between September 1992 and February 1994.
'Finally, the social services believed me and I went to court for a contact order to see my son. It took a long time to repair the damage, though, because I had missed a lot of his childhood.
'When we saw each other again, he said he'd been told I'd gone away on holiday and didn't want to see him - which was very painful for me to hear.
'A year later, I had to go back to court because my ex-wife opposed me having overnight contact, which was ridiculous. It has cost me thousands of pounds to be able to see my son.
'My ex-wife still tries to convince my son that I'm a nasty person, and he is aware that she made these allegations against me. She still questions him about it now, and I think she has convinced herself something did happen - although we know nothing did.
'All this has had a terrible effect on our son. He is not doing well at school and he has his GCSEs coming up.
'He has been quite disturbed at times, with quite a temper. I love him and I miss him every time he goes home after a visit, but like many parents I worry about his future.
'The law has to recognise that fathers are more than just providers of presents - they do have a role to play. Fathers are just as important to children as the mothers.
'They have a different role and teach different things, but it's important that kids have both parents in equal measure.'
""
- Toogood Reports.
Posted May 1, 2002
Henry Makow, Ph.D. - A transcendental need? April 24, 2002 -
Back in the "good old days," beginning when women were at the apex of the previous Cycle of Bigotry, Victorian principles told us women neither needed nor wanted sex. Then came the sexual revolution, feminism and the Pill, and suddenly everybody was "having unsafe sex and doing recreational drugs in a consequence free environment." How times have changed:
"Conservatives put women on a romantic pedestal. Feminists deny that women need men for ANYTHING. ... My 15-year-old son has also inculcated this message: 'Women don't need sex,' he told me. 'They're just doing men a favor.' ... These messages are dictated by our official gender ideology: feminism. ... The result is that both men and women are not getting enough love.""
As Rene Denfield noted in The New Victorians, in their rush to repudiate all things male, feminists have persuaded us women are largely lustless receptacles of male lasciviousness. That the Victorians were right. Yet the truth, as Naomi Wolf, author of Promiscuities, once admitted with unusual candor, is that if anything, women are "buckets of lust":
"A recent 'independent' movie, The Business of Strangers, explores the effect of love deprivation on modern women. ... The movie shows how career has supplanted family ... Feminism promised that women could have both, but this did not work out in practice."
As the story unfolds, the two female protagonists drug and abduct a man after deciding he's a rapist, and then proceed to "indulge in an orgy of hatred over his unconscious body." But it turns out he is not a rapist. Why, then, the hatred?
"Men are 'rapists' because they are not giving women the love they need. The effect of sexual deprivation on women is resentment and hatred against men."
This is just a movie, of course, a work of fiction. But buried in the story are important insights into our society and its culture of self-loathing:
"The film suggests that the feminist obsession with violence against women is fueled by self-loathing and starvation for male love. Possibly, eating disorders can be traced to the same source. Feminism makes women and men incompatible, and then exploits women's frustration and anger."
None of this is new to readers of The Backlash! It is significant, however, that these truths are told in a well received movie, and point to a fundamental fact of human existence and the relationship between male and female:
"When their connection is stymied, we have the arrested development that is so widespread today. Many women become desiccated and bitter; men, detached and selfish; both, obsessed with sex."
We need one another. Each sex complements the other. For some, that synergy is achieved through the marriage of a stronger and weaker personality. As in Dr. Makow's case:
"Career women are discovering that weak men want strong women. Strong men want feminine women who will amplify them."
This seems a bit strange to me. But then I have Asperger's Disorder, which, ironically, means that, among other things, I'm naturally inclined to equalitarianism. So, by nature, I was easily influenced by the relationship of my Aunt Mary and late Uncle Tom, who complemented one another with equal but different strengths and weaknesses.
But no matter why we come together, the fact contradicting all feminist myth is that to love, we must be loved. Women as much as men:
"They need a man's love in order to love themselves."
It is a need that transcends ideology.
- Toogood Reports.
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