It’s true.
Men tend to be interested in what new hills and valleys lie just over the geographic horizon, women, in what peaks and depressions lie just over the emotional horizon. Men tend to explore outward, women, inward. Men build nests, women feather them. Men fly, women anchor. A dynamic tension exists between them. If men are the dynamos, constantly straining outward, women are the transformers, harnessing men's restless energy to hearth and home.
Generally speaking, of course.
Speaking generally, when dynamos don’t drive, or transformers don’t transform, civilizations explode into chaos or collapse into apathy. Or both. Such is the nature of life.
Life is the static point between chaos and control. The delicate balance between frenzy and surcease, yin and yang, the essence of masculine and feminine.
Women are like the candle wax that keeps the wick from burning too quickly; men, the wick without which there would be no light. Too much wax, the flame dies; too much fire, the candle is consumed. The dance of gender founds, forms, protects and sustains everything from scrubbing bubbles to mechanical conveyances with too-big tires and loud engines that spout flame and go "vroom- vroom."
Societies that acknowledge and cater to, but do not necessarily enforce, this reality, thrive. Those that do not...well, take a look at our own. The working class has become the working poor, members of the middle class frantically struggle to avoid joining them, the number of single parent households is skyrocketing as men are marginalized, fathers are forced out of their children’s lives and poverty is "feminized" (men who are homeless, imprisoned or dead don’t count), and meanwhile the richest families grow immensely richer. Why? Where has our "patriarchy" gone wrong?
In the July 1996 Atlantic Monthly, Steven Stark notes that throughout this century American policies and programs have grown increasingly "maternal":
The result was that unlike most European states, America had a welfare state constructed not around the "paternal" notion of work (workers' pensions and the like) but around "maternal" programs defending mothers and families, deemed weaker and needing protection.Protecting mothers, families and the weakest members of society is a fine thing; we ought to take care of our own. But how much is enough? At what point do we cross the line between the reasonable and absurd, between providing a safety net and encouraging sloth? How far can we go to provide protection before we exhaust the protectors?
I believe we have crossed that line. Pop feminist transformers have handicapped the masculine dynamos to the point of collapse. Moreover, even as they impose limits on our ability to produce, they demand that we produce more, guaranteeing a backlash.
Should we return to patriarchy? No. Lack of patriarchy is not the problem. A society that maligns men and diminishes dads is.
The need is to restore the balance between the dynamic nature of men and the transformational nature of women. For men, that means the same thing it has always meant: encourage men to, in appropriate measure, explore, learn, create, invent, build, compete, be acquisitive, inquisitive, gregarious, productive, and above all, protective of women and children.
Shere Hite would call that "paternalistic" and "oppressive." See where her narcissism has gotten us.
It means respecting every individual's right to choose who and how they want to be, while also nurturing a sense of responsibility to family and community.
Susan Faludi says women should not be expected to live for anyone but themselves and their own pleasure. See where her hedonism has gotten us.
If some hedonistic kooks or narcissistic whackos want to waste their life away, we should respect their right to do so; however, we have no responsibility to support them. As in the children's tale of the Grasshopper and the Ant, let the Grasshopper while away the warm summer days while the Ant toils; when the winter comes, let them both enjoy or suffer the consequences of their own actions. If the Grasshopper comes begging, he lives by the generosity of the Ant. The Ant has no responsibility to support the irresponsible Grasshopper, but he does have the right to keep and enjoy what he produced in the summer, and anyone who takes it away from him and gives it to the Grasshopper is no Robin Hood, but a robbing hoodlum. A thug who panders to the profligate.
This is where we find ourselves today, with the pop feminist hoodlums promoting female profligacy. That must stop, and it will stop all by itself when our economy collapses. To avoid that, we need to restore the balance. That means voting male.
MacKinnon is in denial. Sad for her, foolish of us if we continue to follow her lead.
Because men and women fall or rise together, voting to foster male virtue fosters female virtue, too.
What kind of policies, then? A few ideas:
The hierarchies, discipline and machines of men built civilization and expanded the horizons of women as a byproduct: male virtues made women’s liberation possible, and made the idea that paternalism is unnecessary seem plausible. Subsequently, we diverted essential resources from the very processes that liberated us in the first place, making further growth problematic.
What does not grow, dies, and right now, America is doing precious little growing: when all economic indicators are taken into account, the prognosis is grim.
This is the inevitable result of policies that penalize rather than reward male virtue. The politics of pop feminism are based on no- or slow-growth, the belief that wealth is not created by hard work, but stolen from the peaceful goddess worshipers by greedy patriarchs, and that the world is a naturally safe place made unsafe by men.
If you subscribe to their point of view, then policies that give women unrestricted liberty to put men on a short leash make sense: Keep men in cages, punish paternalism, line men up to work in chain gang construction crews to build cozy little communes where women can do the rewarding work sexist men now hoard, eat themselves happily plump, and raise goddess-worshipping babies in peace.
The rest of us -- who don’t devote our time to fanatically wailing at the alter of Political Power in Washington, D.C. -- know better. We know and celebrate the differences between women and men; we know balance must be restored before the masculine spirit is extinguished. Burn out the male dynamos, and the female transformers will have nothing left to transform.
Vote pop feminist, and you vote for the continued decline of all that has made modern life and women's liberation possible. Vote male, and in so doing, you will be voting female, too.
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