THE WAR AGAINST PATRIARCHY

Dr. Daniel Amneus

Feminist Ellen Goodman writes of the Beijing women's conference of 1995, and warms
up to her subject by citing Nancy Reagan's advice to girls, Just say no. It's platitudinous,
but good advice: obey the rules, be chaste, and you'll have a happier and more stable life,
you'll benefit your children and your husband and society. "It sounds like the easiest thing
in the world," says Ms. Goodman--which it is. But she tells us take a better look and "you
can see just how easy it isn't." If this sounds like Ms. Goodman is getting ready to
aggravex the patriarchal system she hates--it may be just that. [Los Angeles Times, 14
Sept. 1995]
The international community assembled for the women's conference finally
agreed that a woman's human rights included her right to be free of sexual
"coercion, discrimination, and violence."
Again very platitudinous. Ms. Goodman seems to be looking for something she can call
controversial and she finds it in this:
In the most controversial provision to come out of the health committee for
conference approval, the nations declared that equal sexual relationships between
men and women required "mutual respect, consent and shared responsibility."
Ms. Goodman interprets this as follows:
For the very first time, they asserted that women across this world have the right
to say no.
She has told us that the simple counsel to girls to "just say no" is not all that simple. This
is evidently a preliminary to what we have here, which is advice not to girls who need to
be integrated into the patriarchal system by postponing sex until marriage, but to women
whose sexuality also needs to be integrated into it by marriage and the creation of
families. What is the "shared responsibility" if not the responsibility for the proper
procreation and socializing of the offspring resulting from their sexual activity; and what
is the "right to say no" if not the right of the woman to deny sexual access to the male
with whom she shares the responsibility? Ms. Goodman is a skilled journalist, able to
hedge and finesse around direct statements and to imply what she means rather than say
it. Let's see whether there may be a hidden message here.

When does the woman give her consent? When does she have the right to say no? Each
time there is sex? (This is the matriarchal idea, which insists on the Promiscuity
Principle, where the woman retains the right to control her own sexuality.) Or, as in the
Antioch College rules, at each stage of each sex act? Or may the woman's consent be
given once and for all by her marriage vows? This is the patriarchal rule which has until
recently been assumed, and in consequence the law until recently was that a husband
could not be charged with raping his wife.

Ms. Goodman does not regard marriage as giving the woman's consent, for she says: "It's
not even 20 years since Oregon changed the common law that said a woman could not be
raped by her husband." Perhaps the question is not whether women have the right to say
no, but whether they have the right to say yes to their marriage vows--or if so, what does
yes mean? One suspects that Ms. Goodman and her feminist sisters would like to have it
both ways, that women should have the right to say yes to their marriage vows and expect
as a quid pro quo that the husband's marriage vow to love, honor and protect and provide
for her shall be and shall remain binding--even if the marriage is ended by divorce. But
the expectation of the new Oregon law and of Ms. Goodman and the sisterhood is that if
the man wants sex and the woman doesn't she is privileged to go on a sex strike and he
can do nothing about it. This will make the wife the boss--but it will deprive her, and
other women, of much of the bargaining power formerly conferred by the institution of
marriage. It means that marriage makes no difference in the sexual relationship between a
man and a woman, that marriage is nothing but cohabitation plus a piece of paper, that as
Brenda Hoggett, former English Law Commissioner, responsible for family law, says,
Family law no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or
any other union. It has adopted principles for the protection of children and
dependent spouses which could be made equally applicable to the unmarried.
In other words it will enforce the man's responsibilities to the woman (and the children
who will of course remain in her custody) but make no demands on the woman.
In such circumstances [continues Ms. Hoggett], the piecemeal erosion of the
distinction between marriage and non-married cohabitation may be expected to
continue.
This is the idea, is it not?--to get rid of marriage, or make it meaningless, marriage being
the institution which was formerly supposed to give the man the right to have a family--
which feminists wish us to interpret as meaning the right to rape his wife. Getting rid of
marriage (in feminese: the right to rape his wife) makes the woman sexually
independent--the ghetto pattern, matriarchy. She's clever: She sees how to use the horror
over rape as a means not so much to prevent rape as to undermine patriarchy.
Logically [continues Ms. Hoggett] we have already reached a point at which,
rather than discussing which remedies should now be extended to the unmarried,
we should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to
serve any useful purpose.1
Ms. Goodman is cleverer than Ms. Hoggett, but they agree on the basic idea: a husband is
no more than a boyfriend, since the wife never agrees to share her reproductive life with
him, never gives up her privilege of calling it all off. The consequence must be-- indeed
is, and is intended to be--the destruction of the patriarchal system and a return to
matriarchy. This is what is at stake in the feminist/sexual revolution, one of whose
banners reads "Stop the raping of wives." This destruction of patriarchy, we are becoming
increasingly aware, has been the grand goal of this revolution all along. Women hate
patriarchy and its sexual regulation of them and now are demolishing the whole system
which originated only five thousand years ago and made civilization possible by allowing
men to share as equals in reproduction, thus creating the two-parent family and allowing
children to have fathers. The process by which patriarchy was created has been thus
described by feminist Gerda Lerner:
The appropriation by men of women's sexual and reproductive capacity occurred
prior to the formation of private property and class society....Surpluses from
herding were appropriated by men and became private property. Once having
acquired such private property, men sought to secure it to themselves and their
 heirs; they did this by instituting the monogamous family. By controlling women's
sexuality through the requirement of prenuptial chastity and by the establishment
of the sexual double standard in marriage, men assured themselves of the
legitimacy of their offspring and thus secured their property interest.2
On what better, more socially useful motives could men act? They sought to benefit their
children (also their wives) by insisting on the Legitimacy Principle, that children must
have fathers, that women should accept sexual regulation and live in families. The
feminist/sexual revolution, as indicated, is attempting to reverse this and return to the
earlier Stone Age matriarchal arrangement, where the reproductive unit is headed by the
female. This is evidently what Ms. Goodman means by "rewriting the sexual script."

"In China," continues Ms. Goodman, "the women of the world began to rewrite the
sexual script. They asked what sexual relations would look like if women had the
permission and felt the power to say yes and no."

The women of the world, she says--making no distinction between married and
unmarried women. Marriage and the creation of a family make no difference, Ms.
Goodman and Ms. Hoggett believe, in the relations of the sexes. (This is of course the
reason why they want to be called "Ms.," which obfuscates the difference between
married and unmarried women.) The woman does not share her reproductive life with a
man. This is the ghetto pattern, the common mammalian pattern of dogs and cats and all
other mammals since the dinosaurs were young two hundred million years ago. This is
rewriting the sexual script indeed. The male has no importance, no role, once he has
performed his minuscule sexual function--except that he must continue to perform forced
labor for his former sexual partner, since she owns his offspring. California's Governor
Wilson is on their side: "If you abandon your responsibility to your child...you forfeit the
freedoms and opportunities that come with being a responsible citizen. We cannot and
will not tolerate parents who walk away from their children."3 Also President Clinton:
"Any parent who is avoiding his or her child support should listen carefully. We will find
you, we will catch you, we will make you pay."4

Men's consenting to this spoliation means the death of the family and civilized life based
on the family, the death of patriarchy. This is what is now going on.

This development requires the assistance of the legal system, which routinely gives the
offspring to Mom if the man and the woman split. It requires the assistance of politicians
who must proclaim the sacredness of motherhood and the obligations of fathers to
subsidize the "rewriting of the sexual script," the abolishing of patriarchy, of marriage,
and of their families.

This is why there is so much crime, educational failure, illegitimacy, demoralization,

sexual confusion and the rest, all of it highly correlated with female headed families.
Feminists and ACLU types regard this as progress. Men see it going on but are
bewildered and simply stare at it like deer caught in headlights, not knowing what to do.
What makes it difficult to understand and combat is the naturalness of matriarchy:
matriarchy is what happens when the artificial props required for patriarchy are not
understood and not put into force.

Ms. Goodman's piece is one example of the constant mole-ing and mining and chipping
away at patriarchy. Few readers will perceive the seriousness of what is at stake--perhaps
Ms. Goodman herself doesn't.

She implies that since AIDS is sexually transmitted, a women who rejects sex with her
husband is protecting herself against AIDS. She speaks of "a village where wives are
infected with AIDS because they cannot even say the word condom to a husband." And
this: "AIDS counselors tell us too how many American women feel powerless to protect
themselves." Protect themselves against what? Against AIDS or against sex with their
husbands? Why bring in AIDS counselors to give this information unless Ms. Goodman
wishes to imply that husbands who insist on their "marital rights" are insisting on
infecting their wives with AIDS? One is reminded of Ashley Montagu's definition of
venereal diseases as those men give to women. Where did the men get them?

The most fundamental fact concerning a society is its kinship system. Women prefer the
female kinship system, that of the Indian squaw and the ghetto matriarch. They will
endure poverty and squalor rather than submit to the sexual regulation which enables men
to have families and children to have fathers, the preconditions of civilized society. "The
young office worker who earns barely enough to rent her own apartment," say feminists
Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs,
the married woman who brings in her own share of the family income, even the
single mother on welfare, have more sexual options than a "kept" woman, married
or not. In fact, one reason for the stigmatization of welfare, and hostility to it, is
undoubtedly that it offers women independence from individual men and, hence, a
certain measure of potential sexual freedom. Male fears of women's sexual
independence are at least partly responsible for the cruelly inadequate level of
support available.5
These women, who want "independence from individual men" can achieve it because
they are privileged to drag their children into the welfare/matriarchal system and the
single-mother/divorce system and, in the latter, the law will make fathers subsidize them
and the fathers will suppose that doing so means doing the right thing and the judges will
suppose they are doing the right thing in forcing the fathers to perform forced labor for
the benefit of another person since the other person is a mother and motherhood is sacred.
Welfare is "cruelly inadequate" in comparison with what patriarchy offers mothers, but it
offers women what they most want, something better than a high standard of living--
sexual de-regulation. The sexual de-regulation of women has as its consequence the de-
motivation of men, whose realization that they cannot have families is demoralizing and
makes men underachievers and more likely to turn to booze or drugs and crime and other
social pathology. The ghetto pattern. As George Gilder says:
The key problem of the underclass--the crucible of crime, the source of violence,
the root of poverty--is the utter failure of socialization of young men through
marriage.6
In the ghetto, this is accomplished by welfare, which makes males superfluous. In the
larger society, it is accomplished by making marriage meaningless and making divorce a
means of liberating women's sexuality by enslaving ex-husbands. Brenda Scott describes
how this works in the ghetto:
When the speaker asked how their mothers described their fathers, the answers
were anything but positive. Without exception the girls had heard their mothers
say, "I don't need that man." When asked how that affected their opinions of men,
the girls seemed negative as well. They all seemed to want a family, but they were
reluctant to ever live with a man.
The message this carries to a young inner-city black male growing up in a female-
dominated home is clear. They are not needed. If mom doesn't need his father,
why would any family need him?7
These roleless men commonly try to blame their miseries on white racism, which, as
George Gilder shows, is not to blame at all. He says:
If racism explains next to nothing about black poverty and crime, what does
explain it? What is the real cause, so unspeakably unwelcome that it drives
opinion toward almost any other explanation, however false or unsavory? The
chief cause of black poverty is welfare state feminism. Thirty years of affirmative
action programs have artificially elevated black women into economic power over
black men.8
Gilder points out that black female college graduates outearn black male college
graduates, and, in the underclass, welfare endows female headed households with
disposable incomes 28 percent higher than typical jobs:
It is an unpopular fact of life that in all societies and in all races monogamous
marriage is based on patriarchal sex roles, with men the dominant provider.
Welfare state feminism destroyed black families by ravaging the male role of
provider.
Matriarchy, he points out, is not rule by women, but female headed households. The
power of the matriarchs of the ghetto ends at their door: "[Y]ou will find the 'matriarchs'
cowering in their triple-bolted apartments in fear of...gangs of young men...Men either
dominate as providers or as predators." Elsewhere Gilder has this:
The belief, pervasive in Washington, that there are hundreds of thousands of
ghetto men miserably jobless brings rueful smiles, at least to the faces of men on
Clinton Avenue. Washington has already created many alternatives more inviting
than work. For example, to most people paid unemployment is obviously
preferable to many jobs in America....A job was a last resort, for which one
appealed if one's woman, having lost hers, or messed up her welfare, demanded
it.9
What Gilder fails to see is that women, though they want the benefits of marriage, hate
the institution itself because it regulates their sexuality. Gilder's female friends are
civilized--properly socialized ladies who accept the patriarchal system. He thinks all
women are like this, but they aren't. Most women, or at least most liberated women, chafe
against and resist sexual law-and-order. They do not yearn to impose it on men; they
yearn to get rid of it. Take another look at what Ehrenreich, Hess and Jocobs say: women
will tolerate ghetto poverty rather than tolerate sexual regulation. Listen to feminist
Madeline Lee complain about "trying to overcome in a single generation the accumulated
weight of ages of repression, double standards, and antisex, antiwoman thinking":
I'm sure there are women who have truly integrated their feminist understanding
with their unruly psyches and successfully sloughed off the remnants of repressed
childhoods [read: sloughed off patriarchal socialization, sexual law-and-order],
but the women I spoke with were not among them. Nevertheless, what rang clear
and consistent through all their individual stories was the determination that they
were not going to be responsible for transmitting repression and confusion [read:
patriarchal socialization]. Even if it's difficult, they feel they should be open about
their own bodies, tolerant of sexual diversity, encouraging of their daughters'
explorations....You have a right to your own morality.10
When she speaks of "our [=mothers'] eagerness to free our daughters from old constraints
and limitations," she is talking about the same thing Hoggett is talking about: getting rid
of the patriarchal system and marriage--the same thing that Ellen Goodman hints at, less
directly yet clearly enough. Women hate it--and Gilder thinks they are trying to impose it
on men. He says:
For in general, civilization evolved through the subordination of male sexual
patterns--the short-term cycles of tension and release--to the long-term female
patterns.11
Women have had to use all their ingenuity, all their powers of sexual attraction
and restraint to induce men to become providers. Society has had to invest
marriage with all the ceremonial sanctity of religion and law. This did not happen
as a way to promote intimacy and companionship. It happened to ensure civilized
society.12
"The problem," says Gilder, "resides in the nexus of men and marriage. Yet nearly all the
attention, subsidies, training opportunities and therapies of the welfare state focus on
helping women function without marriage. The welfare state attacks the problem of the
absence of husbands by rendering husbands entirely superfluous."
Women prefer it that way. They will put up with the poverty and squalor of the ghetto in
order to have it that way. Feminist literature is filled with laudation for single black
mothers: white feminists want the lifestyle of single black mothers for themselves. Hear
Debold, Wilson and Malave:
Many African-American girls manage to hold on to their voices and their belief in
themselves in adolescence, more so than white or latina girls. To do so, they draw
on strong family connections and communities, and on the role that women play
in those families and communities....13
This is why they live in the ghettos.
In order to relieve the pain of the poor, [continues Gilder], our society must come
to recognize that their problem is not lack of jobs or lack of money but moral
anarchy originating with the establishment and most sorely victimizing blacks.14
OK, but it does not originate with the establishment; it originates with women
themselves, motivated by a furious desire to get rid of patriarchal socialization and
control and get back to the "natural" mammalian, two-hundred-million-year-old pattern in
which the reproductive pattern is headed by the female--who permits the male to be an
occasional interloper. The establishment is their willing handmaiden in bringing about
this rearrangement. The greatest share of the establishment's guilt belongs not to the
welfare system but to the legal system, whose divorce courts routinely replace father
headed families with mother headed ones and then compel the exiled fathers to
retroactively subsidize the destruction of their families and the placing of their children in
matriarchal households. Most of these female headed households are created by females--
for the purpose of getting rid of patriarchal regulation. The welfare and legal systems are
accomplices after the fact.

Feminist political scientist Jane Mansbridge says she found in interviews with low
income welfare mothers that they prefer AFDC over dependence on men, and don't view
welfare as dependence because it gives them and their children independence from the
control of men who were not good for them.15

This idea, that women are, and ought to be, sexually independent, is central to the
feminist/sexual revolution, the major idea of which is to wreck the patriarchal system by
denying men the right to have families and denying children the right to have fathers. The
more women with these "sexual options," the more illegitimacy, the more divorce, the
more messed-up kids there will be.

Here are some examples of how this "rewriting of the sexual script" is working:

A divorced father by name Thomas Mulder writes Dear Abby as follows:

DEAR ABBY: I was so moved, and felt such appreciation for your Father's Day
column. I would like to acknowledge what a valuable message it carried. You
said:
"A 21-gun salute to the divorced father who has never uttered an unkind word
about the mother of his children (at least to the children) and who has always been
johnny-on-the- spot with the support check."
Abby, those words brought tears to my eyes as I sat quietly reflecting on the
seventh year I have celebrated Father's Day without my children. It struck me as
amazingly sad that in seven years of being there for my children--and always
providing child support--I've never received a thank- you. My morale has been
worn down over the years by the stereotyping of divorced fathers as "deadbeat
dads."
Abby, if I never get a "thanks," I'll survive. Reading the public thanks in your
column for a principle I've upheld not only for the sake of my children, but for the
sake of fathers and children everywhere, is a powerful remedy for the sadness I
have carried. For any recipient of support out there who has thought of saying
"thanks," but never did-- I'd bet it wouldn't hurt.

May I offer a sincere "you're welcome" from a loving, supportive dad?

THOMAS MULDER

Abby's reply:
DEAR THOMAS: You may--and thank you for the thank you. How sad that those
unsung heroes--divorced dads who never miss a payment--are all too often
 unappreciated. It would be so easy to just walk away and not fulfill the
responsibilities to their children. Yet you, and many like you, sacrifice to see that
your children are fed, clothed and educated.
You are to be commended for loving your children enough to be a responsible
father.16
All so magnanimous. Thomas Mulder speaks of "the principle I've upheld." What he has
upheld is matriarchy, to which he has contributed his children and his family and his
income. All he gets is the joy of imagining himself to be a great guy. He is being
masochistic and it is the knowledge on the part of judges that the world is full of
beautiful, noble, magnanimous--and masochistic--men like Thomas Mulder that causes
them to routinely discriminate against them. If Thomas Mulder is so noble and
magnanimous, why didn't the judge place his children in Thomas Mulder's custody? He
didn't because he knew he could depend on Thomas Mulder's magnanimity and he
couldn't depend on his wife's magnanimity to perform corresponding services for him and
the kids if he placed them in his custody. The wife would simply have laughed at the
judge. Thomas Mulder asked for what he got, which was injustice in the service of
matriarchy. The judge replaced his father headed family with one headed by the mother
because he supposed it was natural to do so. Also the easy thing, the thing that all judges
do and have done for a century. Patriarchy, like the internal combustion engine, is
artificial. But it works. The judge knows that patriarchal families, families headed by
fathers, produce better behaved, higher achieving children but he can't see his way
through to the conclusion that he ought to keep the father as family head rather than
contribute to the expansion of matriarchy.

A Georgia judge named Robert Noland invariably places children of divorce in the
custody of mothers and justifies what he does with this: "I ain't never seen a calf
following a bull. They always follow the cow. So I always give custody to the mamas."
The reason Judge Noland never saw a calf following a bull is that cattle don't live in two
parent households. If we want to live like cattle Judge Noland has the right idea--it's
natural. But mother-headed households generate three-quarters of society's crime and a
disproportionate amount of illegitimacy, educational failure and demoralization and drug
abuse and the rest of our social pathology.

Judges like Robert Noland and sentimental masochists like Thomas Mulder are the
primary causes of America's social pathology, doing more damage than the "welfare state
feminism" Gilder writes of. The judges can't see the damage they are inflicting because of
the time lag. Judge Noland may try a divorce case in the morning and place the children
in the mother's custody. He may try a criminal case in the afternoon and send a man to
prison for robbing a liquor store. The chances are three out of four that the criminal he
sends to prison grew up in a female-headed household just like the one he himself created
that morning when he tried the divorce case. He sees no connection between the two
cases because the children he placed in the mother's custody were toddlers and the
criminal he sends to prison probably belonged in the teen-and-twenty age group where
most crime is committed.
In 1980 crime jumped an astonishing 17 percent. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates
was flabbergasted. Nothing in the economy, he said, could account for such an increase.
What did account for it was the enormous increase in female headed households created
by illegitimacy and divorce--by the breakdown of patriarchy--in the mid-1960s--and by
divorce court judges like Robert Noland and by sentimental masochists like Thomas
Mulder.

By 1980 the toddlers placed in female headed households in the mid-1960s had become
teenagers--and then the chickens came home to roost and there was a 17 percent increase
in crime and a horrendous increase in illegitimacy, which would produce today's messed
up kids. Feminists regarded this as progress, meaning that women were becoming
increasingly de-regulated. Female de- regulation in one generation means poorly
socialized children in the next, troublemaking boys and promiscuous girls and second
generation illegitimacy. This is what's going on and accelerating--the present generation
is worse than the last. Judges still suppose mothers ought to have custody of children and
accordingly still throw men out of their families--and men like Thomas Mulder imagine
themselves to be decent chaps for tolerating and subsidizing it.

The divorce court judge discriminated against Thomas Mulder because he expected him
to behave more responsibly than his ex- wife would have behaved. Thomas Mulder
obliged. He agreed to finance the destruction of his family.

This is the worst kind of social policy. Daughters say they don't want to live the kind of
lives their mothers led. What will Thomas Mulder's sons say? If they have any sense they
will say that they don't want to live the kind of life their father led-- played for a sucker
and bought off with the right to be sentimental about his own victimization and settling
for a pat on the head from Dear Abby. The sons don't want to play the judge's game,
Thomas Mulder's wife's game, the feminist game: being willing to subsidize matriarchy,
the destruction of their families, the placing of their children in a female headed
household where they are far more likely to become delinquent.

Thomas Mulder's case is one more victory in the War Against Patriarchy. This is a war
partly fought and lost on the battlefield of Thomas Mulder's own mind: he imagined
himself to be doing a good thing in paying for the wrecking of his family, much as Indian
wives once regarded suttee as meritorious: it was an honor to immolate themselves on the
funeral pyres of their dead husbands. The custom ended when the wives woke up to the
silliness of what they were doing. When will the Thomas Mulders of America wake up
and put a stop to the silliness of paying their ex-wives to drag their children into the
female kinship system?

In the mid-1960s nobody paid much attention to family breakdown. Feminists assured us
that divorce and illegitimacy didn't mean "the family" was breaking down. The family, as
Betty Friedan and the sisterhood explained, was merely undergoing development,
adapting to social changes such as feminism. There are many forms of "family," the
nuclear family "of Western nostalgia" being one, not the best, not adapted to modern
changes in society. When President Carter called a White House conference on the
family, the first thing the feminists did was to re-name it the White House Conference on
Families. Another victory in the War Against Patriarchy.

According to the Los Angeles Times of 15 October, 1995, "President Clinton urged the
nation's men Saturday to join him in pledging to "never, never lift a hand against a
woman."

(There is more domestic violence against husbands than against wives,17 and most child
abuse is inflicted by mothers, but it is of course politically incorrect to say this.)
In his weekly radio address, Clinton noted that as Americans followed recent
news events, issues of domestic violence against women and children have
vaulted into public awareness and divided the nation...."For too long, domestic
violence has been swept under the rug, treated as a private family matter that was
nobody's business but those involved," Clinton said. "Now everyone knows it is
cowardly, destructive of families, immoral and criminal to abuse the women in
our families."...He praised the Senate for agreeing "with me to fully fund the
Violence Against Women Act," a provision in his anti-crime package that calls for
longer jail terms for spousal abuse and increased federal funding for police,
prosecutors and shelter operators who assist battered victims...."The real solution
to this problem starts with us, with our personal responsibility and a simple pledge
that we will never, never lift a hand against a woman for as long as we live,"
Clinton said.
What he is saying to wives is that they may be as provocative as they wish, and if their
provocation causes the Old Boy to do something about it the government will jump in
and side with Mom against Dad. Women like to be told this sort of thing, like to be told
that they are blood-drained slaughtered saints victimized by ravening male beasts. This
promotes the War Against Patriarchy. "Government policy will not solve the problem,"
[Clinton] said. No; it will exacerbate it, which feminists think is good since it makes a
further contribution to the War Against Patriarchy. Married women, despite feminist
propaganda to the contrary, are safer than single women, safer than married or single
men. What married women hate is the sexual regulation that goes with marriage; it is to
this hatred that Clinton is really making his appeal. The violence, like "marital rape" is
code language for this.

Another example. Katherine Anthony, niece of Susan B. Anthony, hated sexual regulation
and favored unwed motherhood. "The right to motherhood," she wrote, "is another ethical
idea freely agitated by the Mutterschutz movement. There would seem to be little need to
defend a human right so manifest. Yet popular opinion is still far away from assimilating
the idea of motherhood as a right."18 She does not indicate whether the woman's right
implies the further right to be supported by the father, who enjoys no comparable "right
to fatherhood."

Another. William Hetherington's wife deserted him and their children and ran off with a
boyfriend. Following her breakup with the boyfriend, and facing the prospect of losing
custody of the children and losing the status accompanying such custody, she proposed to
Hetherington that they should be reconciled. The reconciliation provided her with the
opportunity of accusing him of marital rape. Hetherington has now languished in prison
for ten years for a "crime" of which he is innocent, a crime which is becoming a public
scandal comparable to the Dreyfus case of a century ago. The most obvious parallel
between the two cases is that the prolongation of Hetherington's incarceration serves only
the bad purpose of saving "the system" from exposure for its incompetence and its
arrogant contempt for simple justice, and saving the reputation of the judge, Thomas
Yeotis, whose weakness of character and wish to play shabby chivalric games created the
Hetherington scandal.

Judge Yeotis said he wanted to make Hetherington "a symbol to all mankind"--by
demonstrating that a wife who accuses her husband of marital rape must be a victim.
Before such a politically correct judge all the woman needed to do was dab her eyes with
kleenex and wonder what a poor little weak woman like herself would do if she didn't
have a big strong judge like Yeotis to protect her. The big strong judge's cheap judicial
chivalry didn't cost him a thing. He passed that cost on to Hetherington in the form of a
sentence of 15-30 years in prison for the crime of having had sex with a wife who had
deserted him and their children to run off with a boyfriend--and then proposed a
reconciliation. All that was required for the woman to get what she asked for was the
political correctness of Judge Yeotis and the willingness of the legal system to ignore due
process of law in the interest of being politically correct.

Until recently in rape prosecutions it was customary for the judge to read Sir Matthew
Hale's rule that the jury ought to "view the woman's testimony with caution. The
accusation is one easily made and hard to refute". No more. Feminists tantrumed at the
suggestion that a woman might be untruthful, and the legal system, always their willing
hand maiden, removed Sir Matthew Hale's "commonsense admoniton". "Woman", said
Sir William Blackstone, "is the favorite of the laws".

In 1987, Joseph Gallardo of the state of Washington raped a ten-year-old girl, was
convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, after which he was deemed to have paid
his debt to society and was released. There is a difference between raping a ten-year-old
girl and having sex with one's wife on the occasion of a marital reconciliation. There is a
difference between a sentence of three years and a sentence of 15-30 years, a difference
suggesting that Hetherington's offense is five to ten times more serious than Gallardo's.

The marriage contract has always been understood as a sex contract. If it were not a sex
contract, marriage would be reduced to meaninglessness--which is perhaps the real
intention of the feminists who clamored for the new law, as it is evidently the intention of
Ms. Hoggett and Ms. Goodman. It was Hetherington's misfortune that he came to trial at
a time when the issue of "marital rape" was being publicized by these feminists as a
grievance against the patriarchal family and men in general. One result of this agitation
was the passing of the law under which Hetherington was incarcerated, the law which, in
effect, declared that marriage gave husbands no right to cohabit with their wives. Black's
Law Dictionary, a standard reference work, calls rape "the act of sexual intercourse
committed by a man with a woman not his wife and without her consent." The new law
has the effect of removing the words "not his wife" from this definition, thus making the
status of the husband identical with that of a non-husband. Truly, a victory for the War
Against Patriarchy.

This is a logical corollary to the often-stated feminist demand that a woman has the right
to control her own sexuality-- in other words that a married woman has the right to
cohabit with a non-husband (commit adultery) regardless of the marriage contract and
that a married man has no more right to cohabit with his wife than does any other man.
Such an interpretation of marriage strikes a deadly blow at the very core of civilized
society.

The new law is anti-male, of course. It is also anti- marriage, anti-family and anti-woman.
The woman's primary contribution to the marriage is her willingness to share her
reproductive life with a man and thereby enable him to have a family. The woman's
willingness to make this offer and the man's willingness to make the complementary offer
to love, honor, protect and provide for the resulting family are what make civilization and
social stability possible. The condition of the ghettos shows what happens when the
marriage contract becomes meaningless or irrelevant. The new law makes the woman's
offer to share her reproductive life meaningless by declaring that she may renege on her
offer at any time she chooses. It makes her a moral minor who cannot enter into a stable
and enforceable contract upon which a man--and society--can depend. Granting the
woman the right to renege on her contract makes the contract worthless and deprives the
woman of most of her bargaining power in the marriage marketplace. It is hard to
imagine anything more damaging to society--or to women.

The contract is worse than useless. If it had not been for the contract Hetherington would
be a free man. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that since the passage of this law
the most dangerous place for an American husband to be is in the marital bed. (That's a
slogan to set alongside the anti-abortion bumper-sticker "The most dangerous place in
America is a mother's womb.") An adulterer would never be treated as Hetherington has
been treated.

The Book of Common Prayer formerly declared that marriage was (among other things)
"a remedy against sin." One must wonder whether the lawmakers who hurriedly passed
the law under which Hetherington was condemned considered what its consequences
would be in terms of family breakdown, divorce, adultery, incest and domestic violence,
consequences which include the sins against which marriage was formerly deemed a
remedy.

The injustice of the treatment given Hetherington is acknowledged by the offer made to
him to commute his sentence to time served if only he would admit guilt by plea-
bargaining--and thus save face for Judge Yeotis and "the system." This is what the case is
now all about--covering up the sleaziness of what has been done to Hetherington in hopes
that the public will become bored with hearing about it or that it will somehow go away.

Another case. Louis Chatroop, a computer consultant living in Des Plaines, Illinois,
apparently a decent chap according to his ex-wife, his former father-in-law, his children,
his girlfriend and those who know him, but accused of stalking his ex-girlfriend, to whom
he loaned $3,800 and who accused him of stalking her when he asked her to return the
money. Her story was later embellished by the further accusations that he had pointed a
gun at her and followed her in his car for twelve blocks. He fell into the hands of another
chivalrous judge who gave the woman an order of protection and took Chatroop into
custody and held him without bond on the strength of her accusation. He has since
February 7, 1995 spent his time sleeping on the floor of the overcrowded Cook County
jail. "The accusations are lies. I had no contact with her whatsoever. She decided to go
after me because of the civil lawsuit [to get back his $3,800] and look how easy it was for
her to ruin my life."

As Eric Zorn, columnist for the Chicago Tribune, says "A man presumed innocent by law
has suffered the privations of conviction without the benefit of a trial or full adversarial
hearing, all based on the testimony of a woman with whom he had a major dispute over
money."19 Chatroop, self-employed, has lost all his clients and has no money, has
drained his retirement funds and stopped paying child support for his three sons. He has
no criminal record but the law says he must be held in jail until his trial--because he has
been accused. Another victory in the War Against Patriarchy.

A similar story is the case of James Anderson, who has languished in an Oregon prison
since 1989 because of an obviously false accusation by a disturbed woman named Donna
Rowland, a drug addict and alcoholic with whom Anderson had consensual sex. They
were in a drug treatment center and became friends, Anderson not knowing that she had a
history of falsely accusing men of sexual abuse. She had been discharged from the
treatment center and was wandering the streets of Salem alone, homeless and broke when
she got the idea of accusing Anderson of rape, as she had accused other men in the past.
She testified that she never met Anderson, though it was common knowledge at the
treatment center that they had been friendly and dined together. Her accusation was that
he had violently broken into her room and violently raped her. She accused the treatment
center of

Another chivalric judge who places political correctness above his oath of office is
Richard Denner of the Los Angeles Superior Court, who got sympathetic with all the
women who wandered around his family court division. "So," says the Los Angeles
Times of 31 October, 1995,
he created a new program that will let victims [read: alleged victims] of domestic
violence obtain restraining orders against [allegedly] abusive husbands or
[allegedly] battering boyfriends without ever entering the courthouse.
Denner has trained 130 advocates from women's shelters and poverty law centers
to file petitions by fax, handing down orders designed to stop the abuse [read:
alleged abuse]. Faxes also go out to the Los Angeles Police Department and the
county Sheriff's Department, alerting officers to restraining orders.
No need for due process, no right of the alleged abuser to present his side of the case.
Women are victims if they say they are. Men are brutes if women say they are. Another
victory in the War Against Patriarchy.
"Females," writes feminist June Stephenson, "brought up in... poverty areas with little
education and no jobs commit few crimes, almost none violent, and most related to
drugs."20 Quite so. Their contribution to crime is not criminality itself but unchastity,
which precludes one generation of males from being fathers and precludes the next
generation from having fathers.

"There are no studies," says Stephenson, "indicating that families headed by women are
more crime-prone than other families."21 God help us. It is common knowledge that the
high crime areas of every city (no exceptions--even the judges who create most of these
fatherless families know this) are those with the largest numbers of families headed by
women.

"It is not women's violence that is tearing apart the American family," says feminist Ruth
Rosen, implying that it is men's violence. True, it is not women's violence, it is women's
unchastity.
She continues:
In the wake of the Republican assault against welfare, health care, public
education and affirmative action, black families justifiably feel endangered and
hopeless. And violence is the child of despair.22
The "families" she refers to are mostly not families at all but matrilines, fatherless
households, and the programs she mentions are those which subsidize female unchastity
and matriarchy, marrying black women to the state and perpetuating the ills of the
ghettos.
According to a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation there were in 1994, 19 million,
or 24%, of children living in mother- only households. The report said
children who grow up without fathers are five times more likely to be poor, twice
as likely to drop out of high school and much more likely to end up in foster care
or juvenile justice facilities. Girls who are raised in single-parent families are
three times more likely to become unwed teenage mothers, and boys without
fathers at home are much more likely to become incarcerated, unemployed and
uninvolved with their own children.23
The debate on how to revamp the welfare system, has, according to Douglas Nelson,
executive director of the Foundation,
focused too much on creating incentives and sanctions for poor mothers and too
little on the role of fathers....The report also urges improved educational
opportunities, citing the deterioration in the economic circumstances of young
men as an important cause of fatherless families.
"Almost no one volunteers for roles and duties they cannot fulfill," the report said.
"And the simple truth is that disadvantaged young men who do not have the
examples, education or opportunity to succeed in today's economy are not
prepared to contribute as providers, protectors and mentors to their children."
The emergence of neighborhoods in which fatherless households are the norm
creates a setting where many children simply do not see fathers playing a central
role in family life, Nelson said. That, he said, becomes a powerful influence over
what children grow to believe is a father's role and responsibilities.
It's worth saying again: Male motivation has been undermined by female rejection of
sexual regulation: if women refuse to accept regulation, men cannot have families and
children will not have fathers and society will revert to matriarchy, the pattern of the
ghettos. This is what's happening.
Betty Friedan observes the pattern:
[A] growing resentment against women threatens our economic and political
empowerment....I saw the "angry white male" backlash coming, even before the
1994 election, in new data on the fall-in-income in the last five years of college-
educated white men....The basis of women's empowerment is economic--that's
what is in danger now.24
Says Betty Friedan: "I've wondered how, at this time of global economic insecurity,
women could even maintain their gains, much less continue to advance."25 What gains?
There are more women in poverty than ever, more caught in the Custody Trap with their
fatherless children. These are victims of the success of feminism. And Ms. Friedan's
proposals are the same old feminist nostrums: affirmative action, "our right to participate
in society, to earn fair pay, to control our own bodies...." She can't see that the problem is
the loss of men's motivation, consequent on increasing female sexual de-regulation,
whether by breeding illegitimate children or by divorce.
According to the California Wellness Foundation, an umbrella group of liberal groups
including the National Education Association,
Half of all children born in the past decade will spend some portion of their
childhood in a single-parent household. Child support--the financial contribution
required by law from the parent who does not live with the children--is the key to
their financial security.26
It's a poor key. "The parent who does not live with the children" is de-motivated to be a
provider for them once they are taken from him. How obvious. Less obvious is the truth
that the parent who does not live with the children ought not to be a provider for them.
His consenting to be is a primary reason for the ongoing destruction of the family and the
return to matriarchy.
The Wellness Foundation's report continues:
But the current system for collecting child support is obsolete and overloaded.
Today, U.S. children are owed more than $34 billion in unpaid child support.27
There is bi-partisan interest in child support reform and proposals to improve the
current system. One promising approach would transfer responsibility for child
support to the Internal Revenue Service. IRS enforcement of child support would
also send a strong message: the abandonment of children will no longer be
tolerated.
Few of the children are abandoned. Most are the victims of promiscuous mothers whose
sexual de-regulation makes it impossible for a man to have a family with them. Or the
men are expelled from their homes by divorce court judges. The proposal to have the IRS
collect from the fathers would further exacerbate the real problem, weak male motivation,
consequent on female sexual de-regulation. Women would feel that, with the IRS on their
side to take the man's money from him, they had less reason than ever to accept sexual
regulation, more justification in being promiscuous or divorcing their husbands. It would
drive men into the underground economy and make marriage yet more unattractive to
them, since the likelihood of marriage resulting in their having families would be
reduced. It would break up more families and accelerate society's descent into matriarchy.

Aside from which, according to researcher Kathryn Edin,28 the system for enforcing
child support payments, which has never worked well,

will surely work even less well in the future, and amply rewards welfare mothers
who cheat by hiding the identity or location of the missing father. These mothers
"pretend to comply, but in fact hide crucial identifying information from the
authorities....[T]he average state collects only about half of the money currently
owed to even the minority of AFDC mothers who have managed to get [child]
support awards." In her study, Edin found that 112 of the 134 mothers who had
complied with child-support officials "had not received anything [in child support
payments]...in the past year." When fathers of welfare mothers' children do make
payments to government officials, the welfare system keeps all but $50 monthly.
Such a system, Edin remarks, "discourages men from paying [child support]
through formal channels," since they understandably believe that "the money they
paid in to the system did nothing to enhance their children's material well-being."
For every woman who chooses single motherhood, there are four more who think about
it, according to Jane Mattes, founder of the New York based Single Mothers by Choice.29
According to Garfinkel and McLanahan,
Many people have noted that the explosion of divorce and decline in marriage that
took place in the 60s and 70s followed quite closely the rise in labor force
participation of married women with children....The biggest increases in divorce
occurred among mothers of young children who also had the largest increases in
labor force participation.30
According to Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs,
Gay liberation was another contributing factor, no matter how remote it may have
seemed from the lives of many who benefited from women's sexual revolution.
Gay men and lesbians held out a vision of sex utterly freed from the old
reproductive "work ethic" that haunts heterosexuality: sex could be sheer play; it
could be a celebration of a temporary affinity or the indulgence of long-standing
lovers.31
The "work ethic" means responsible sexuality; they prefer sex to be recreation: no sexual
law-and-order, no double standard, easy divorce with mother-custody and father's
continuing obligation to subsidize her.

The sexual double standard required of women has as its complement a double standard
of work formerly expected of men: the woman's acceptance of the sexual double standard
gives the man a family and motivates him to provide for it. This double double standard
is resented by women because it requires chastity of them --which they believe is
discriminatory against them, though its acceptance by them gives them most of their
bargaining power--and resented again by making them imagine they were entitled to
earnings comparable to men's earnings--and were discriminated against because they
earned less.
"Perhaps most of all," say Ehrenreich, Hess and Jocobs, "women's sexual revolution was
made possible by women's growing economic independence from men."32 That's it.
Women's primary contribution to marriage was formerly their offering to share their
reproductive life; man's primary contribution was offering to provide for her and the
couple's children. Women now see that they can withdraw from their part of the contract
and screw the man for alimony and child support or screw the taxpayer for AFDC. What
men have not yet seen is that it is imperative, if the two- parent family is to exist, that
they shall--must--withdraw their economic support following the woman's departure,
when the legal system still wants the man to continue to support her in matriarchal
independence. This withdrawal of male economic support is the best chance for restoring
the male kinship system, patriarchy, and with it civilized living.

"Male fears of women's sexual independence," these writers say, "are at least partly
responsible for the cruelly inadequate level of support available." This is the pitch they
make-- patriarchy is cruel to them and (especially) "their" children. They are appealing to
the Thomas Mulder in us: the Mutilated Beggar argument that it would be "cruel" not to
subsidize her, a mother with children. Since most divorce actions are initiated by wives,
these wives must be made to see that the poverty is their own choice. If they prefer to live
in poverty as the price of achieving the great goal of feminism, sexual "independence,"
aka sexual promiscuity, the right to control their own bodies, so be it. But they must not
be permitted to drag our children into poverty and matriarchy with them and men must
not be made to pay subsidies or be made to carry a load of guilt for fear of being called
cruel. "In the 1960s and 1970s," say these writers, "a majority of women entered the work
force and gained, if not exactly 'liberation,' at least the financial leverage to imagine
being sexual actors in their own right."33 In other words, gained the financial leverage
which enabled them to be sexually promiscuous. But they have a sense of danger:
Yet, having come this far in our sexual revolution--much further that our mothers
and certainly our grandmothers could have imagined--we seem to find cause less
for celebration than for ambivalence and anxiety. For what we have achieved, the
remaking and reinterpretation of sex, is something that women both deeply want
and deeply fear.
This fear is less of loss of the male role in reproduction-- something they rather hope for
than fear--than loss of the male paycheck and loss of status within the patriarchal system,
perhaps loss of the Motherhood Card. "So powerful is the backlash today, and the official
new mood of sexual conservatism [this was written in 1986], that we have to remind
ourselves of how ancient and deep that desire is." They are speaking of women's desire
for the right to be sexually promiscuous, to return to matriarchy, the lifestyle of the Indian
squaw and the black matriarch of the ghetto. Sexual de-regulation is the big thing, as is
illustrated by what follows:
It is expressed not only in the risks taken by a few exceptional women who defied
sexual norms in the name of their own freedom--Emma Goldman, Victoria
Woodhull, and Frances Wright are among the better-known examples--but by the
repressed history of women's most incoherent, apolitical upsurges. Mass female
adulation of the male androgynous rock star who represents sex freed from
ulterior motive and daily necessity predates Beatlemania by many centuries. In
the Dionysian cult of ancient Greece, women abandoned their household
 responsibilities for nights of frenzied dancing and worship of the beautiful young
god.
India has an equivalent god, Shiva. According to Alain Danielou,
Whenever it has reappeared, the cult of Shiva or of Dionysus has been banished
from the city, where only those cults in which man is given paramount importance
are acknowledged, allowing and excusing his depredations and condemning all
forms of ecstasy which permit direct contact with the mysterious world of the
spirits...Puritanism is totally unknown in the primitive or natural world.34
That's why it is primitive: it hasn't figured out how to put sex to work to create wealth
and civilization. The persistence of Dionysian and Shivaite rites and bacchanals and such
modern equivalents as rock concerts and gay bathhouses shows the power of unregulated
sexuality and its War Against Patriarchy.
This is the appeal of such degenerate freaks as Elvis Pressly and John Lennon, their
elevation to the status of great culture heroes.
But for most women in traditional societies [continue Ehrenreich, Hess and
Jocobs], the possibility of noninstrumental sex, sex without the price of lifelong
subordination to one man, was something glimpsed only at rare events--village
holidays, religious festivals, carnivals. The carnival foreshadowed some of the
best features of modern urban life: a public space apart from the hierarchy of the
family, and crowds large enough to offer temporary anonymity and the license
that went with it.
How they hate sexual law-and-order--marriage and family and long-term commitments,
and a meaningful contract of marriage. Thus speaks the eternal feminine. "We are
drawn," say these writers, "as women have been for ages [emphasis added], to the
possibility of celebrating our sexuality without the exclusive intensity of romantic love,
without the inevitable disappointment of male-centered sex, and without the punitive
consequences."
Of course. The Saturday night bash, the Oktoberfest, the New Year's Eve party, the Mardi
Gras--escape, escape from responsible sexuality, and the regulation of female sexuality.
That's the thing. No male-centered sex. Also no child-centered sex. Sex without reference
to reproduction.
At the same time, though, women have grounds to fear sexual liberation, even
their own. The fear is not irrational or neurotic, for if sex is disconnected from
marriage, childbearing and family commitments, women stand to lose their
traditional claims on male support.
Men should pay attention. They are talking about men's Money Card. No romantic
nonsense. Marriage for them is an economic arrangement.
If sex is "free," then so, potentially, are men; and women are left to fend for
themselves in an economy that still drastically undervalues women's labor. This
was a dilemma that the radical feminists of the late sixties and early seventies,
who boldly proclaimed the link between sexual liberation and women's liberation,
did not always seem to grasp--or if they did, to sympathize with.
Fortunately for such women, most men have not yet grasped it either. Too many, like
Thomas Mulder, imagine that women's need for men's money obligates men to supply it
and therefore permits women to divorce them and to withdraw the man's children and the
reciprocal services which during marriage were a quid pro quo for the money.
 A homosexual named Hamp Simmons wants to change the narrow close-minded,
right-wing definition of the word "family." A family is a group of people who love
and support one another. Sometimes there are two parents of two different sexes,
sometimes there are two parents of the same sex. Sometimes there is one parent,
maybe heterosexual, maybe homosexual. The key words are love and support."35
Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Iphegenia, then, were not a family; Tristan and Isolde
were a family.

"The homosexual delight in sex as a defiant expression of liberation," say Ehrenreich,

Hess and Jacobs, "was catching on with heterosexual women."36 Very natural that it
should, for homosexuals and women are both enemies of patriarchy. "The promiscuous
homosexual," says one of them by name John Rechy, "is a sexual revolutionary. Each
moment of his outlaw existence he confronts repressive laws, repressive 'morality.' Parks,
alleys, subway tunnels, garages, streets--these are the battlefields."37

Sjoo and Mor list as a patriarchal assumption "that autonomous female sexuality poses a
wild and lethal threat to these [patriarchal] world orders and therefore must be controlled
and repressed."38

Quite so; and the corollary is that female sexuality must be regulated. These authors say
on page 200:
What would it have been like if patriarchy had never happened? To get an idea,
we have to comprehend the first law of matriarchy: Women control our own
bodies. This would seem to be a basic premise of any fully evolved human
culture; which is why primate patriarchy is based on its denial.
Only when women give up our sexual autonomy [say these writers] and our right
to be independent and creative, only when we give up ourselves and accept
patriarchal male definitions of "femininity" as passive, negative, and receptive--
only then will we be treated humanely. Only then will we be treated, with
patronizing smiles and door- openings, as something just a little less than the
male. It is male fear, hatred, and envy, that has for so long tried to turn our female
abilities into incapacities; and despite all suave veneer of "advanced Western
culture," it is gut- level male fear, hatred, and envy that women must fight to
reverse this field.39
Betty Friedan points to the envy of women by men in backward societies:
Because the human body is the same in primitive South Sea tribes and modern
cities, an anthropologist, who stars with a psychological theory that reduces
human personality and civilization to bodily analogies, can end up advising
modern women to live through their bodies in the same way as the women of the
South Seas. The trouble is that Margaret Mead could not recreate a South Sea
world for us to live in: a world where having a baby is the pinnacle of human
achievement.40
Ms. Friedan's purpose in writing her Feminine Mystique was to get women to do the
opposite of what Sjoo and Mor want them to do: participate in the wonderful--and
artificial--world of male achievement. This world is created by males for the purpose of
enabling them to participate as equals in reproduction. In Ms. Friedan's thinking women
should envy men. She quotes Margaret Mead:
In Bali, little girls between two and three walk much of the time with purposely
thrust-out little bellies, and the older women tap them playfully as they pass.
"Pregnant," they tease. So the little girl learns that although the signs of her
membership in her own sex are slight, her breasts mere tiny buttons no bigger
than her brother's, her genitals a simple inconspicuous fold, some day she will be
pregnant, some day she will have a baby, and having a baby, is on the whole, one
of the most exciting and conspicuous achievements that can be presented to the
eyes of small children in these simple worlds, in some of which the largest
buildings are only fifteen feet high, the largest boat some twenty feet long.
Furthermore, the little girl learns that she will have a baby not because she is
strong or energetic or initiating, not because she works and struggles and tries,
and in the end succeeds, but simply because she is s girl and not a boy, and girls
turn into women, and in the end--if they protect their femininity--have babies.41
Ms. Friedan's comment on this:
To an American woman in the twentieth century competing in a field which
demands initiative and energy and work and in which men resent her success, to a
woman with less will and ability to compete than Margaret Mead, how tempting
is her vision of that South Sea world where a woman succeeds and is envied by
man just by being a woman.42
It's not just in the "eyes of small children." Men also envy women's ability to create life;
else why are most transvestites and transsexuals men who want to pretend they are
women? Why does a man say of a book or a project "That's my baby"? (One would feel
very sorry for a woman who said that of a book or a project.) Ms. Friedan cites Mead's
comment on male initiation ceremonies where men take boys into the woods and teach
them to play wooden flutes and beat on wooden drums:
By a great effort man has hit upon a method of compensating himself for his basic
inferiority. Equipped with various mysterious noise-making instruments, whose
potency rests upon their actual forms being unknown to those who hear the
sounds--that is, the women and children must never know that they are really
bamboo flutes, or hollow logs...they can get the male children away from the
women, brand them as incomplete and themselves turn boys into men. Women, it
is true, make human beings, but only men can make men.
True [comments Ms. Friedan], this primitive society was a "shaky structure,
protected by endless taboos and precautions"--by woman's shame, fluttery fear,
indulgence of male vanity--and it survived only as long as everyone kept the
rules. "The missionary who shows the flutes to the women has broken the culture
successfully." But Margaret Mead, who might have shown American men and
women "the flutes" of their own arbitrary and shaky taboos, precautions, shames,
fears, and indulgence of male vanity, did not use her knowledge in this way. Out
of life the way it was--in Samoa, Bali, where all men envied women--she held up
an ideal for American women that gave new reality to the shaky structure of
sexual prejudice, the feminine mystique.43
She feels that if social arrangements are shaky they ought to be shaken, which might
make sense in the South Seas. But why in America, which has been so good to its
women? And why should men consent to having them shaken? Why consent to subsidize
the shaking by allowing ex-wives take custody of their children and paying them alimony
and child support so that they can afford to? "The yearning," says Ms. Friedan, "is for a
return to the Garden of Eden: a garden where women need only forget the "divine
discontent" born of education to return to a world in which male achievement becomes
merely a poor substitute for child-bearing."44 The ghetto and AFDC have now replaced
the Garden of Eden and women who cannot be motivated to be the overachievers Ms.
Friedan wished them to be now are going through the same feminine mystique but with a
much lower standard of living, having achieved sexual independence by displacing
males, many of whom are seeking through drugs or violence to escape from the mess the
feminist/sexual revolution has given us. As Mead says,
The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily
enough--whether it be to build gardens or raise cattle, kill game or kill enemies,
build bridges or handle bank shares--so that the male may, in the course of his
life, reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement of which his childhood
knowledge of the satisfactions of child- bearing has given him a glimpse. In the
case of women, it is only necessary that they be permitted by the given social
arrangements to fulfill their biological role, to attain this sense of irreversible
achievement. If women are to be restless and questing, even in the face of
childbearing, they must be made so through education.45
Most women don't want to be restless and questing. They want quotas and affirmative
action and comparable worth programs and goals and timetables and every unfair
advantage they can get--in order to gain the economic independence which will enable
them to escape from sexual regulation. If they can't get these they will settle for welfare
and a reduced standard of living. Or they will marry temporarily and divorce the man
hoping that the bureaucracy will make good on President Clinton's promise to find the
displaced father and make him pay Mom.
"What is the machine?" ask Sjoo and Mor.
The machine has been called man's baby, sometimes man's true lover. It is also
patriarchal man's version of the World Mother. The machine is man's
transformation ritual, his magic uterus of mass production.46
This haughty scorn comes from women whose program it is to ensure that men have no
real children, for allowing men to function as fathers would impair women's reproductive
freedom.
The machine is a manmade system, device, or theology- philosophy for
converting world energy (animal, vegetable, mineral) into human wealth. Under
four thousand years of patriarchal religious-economic systems, human wealth has
meant the conversion of the energy; of the many into the profit and power of the
few. The primary mechanism of this energy conversion has been the control and
exploitation of the female reproductive process simultaneous with the repression
and punishment of female sexual autonomy. Through the energy-suppression and
conversion mechanism of piety and drudgery, female sexual-biological energy has
been maintained and controlled in a chronic process of productive repression; and
this machine-model for controlling and using female sexual-reproductive energy
has also been applied to the control and exploitation of workers' productive labor.
Profit of a few? The whole world is richer because of male achievement. Compare
the wealth of America in 1492, when it was matriarchal, and its wealth today.
Whites bought Manhattan Island from the matriarchal Indians for $24. (It was a
fair price. If the Indians had invested their money at 7 percent interest they could
buy Manhattan Island back again today.) But Sjoo and Mor are right: This
astonishing wealth-creation has been made possible by women's acceptance of
sexual regulation. The arrangement works because it motivates males, which Sjoo
and Mor imagine to be a matter of no importance. In matriarchal societies, where
women enjoy the sexual autonomy these writers covet for them, men try to win
women's cooperation by painting their bodies with woad and ocher, wearing
earrings and by performing dances, mimes and ceremonies. But they made the
discovery (leading to patriarchy) that women are more cooperative, more willing
to let men share in reproduction if men created wealth. The stability of society
depends on women's understanding of the secure connection between men's
wealth- creation and men's participation in reproduction. "The past four thousand
years has been accomplished via the total physical and ideological repression of
the female body," say these writers. True, more or less.
Patriarchal man has undoubtedly lusted after woman in his heart, as a sexual
body. Even more, he has lusted after motherhood. The control of female sex and
reproduction through his jealous father Gods and misogynist priesthoods has been
his mode of experiencing ersatz motherhood. He has owned the female
reproductive machinery, like the factory- owner owns productive machinery.
(Like the pastoralist owns cows.)
Perhaps a better comparison would be "like Mom owns 'her' children." But
patriarchal man has paid through the nose for his ownership and women have
been glad for the payment. Much feminist labor is expended in finding ways to
get this payment without allowing males to share in reproduction. This is why we
have ghettos, where women enjoy the "total sexual and reproductive autonomy"
Sjoo and Mor speak of:
The process of redefinition begins with women reclaiming total sexual and
reproductive autonomy....47
If this is taken literally, it includes the right of not being subsidized by men (and
thus being placed under obligation to them). Men, accordingly, not only have the
right to refuse to subsidize ex-wives and welfare recipients, but the obligation to
refuse, so that the autonomy of these promiscuous women may be total. The
corollary would then be that the children, who are, after all what reproduction is
all about, ought to be placed in the custody of their fathers.
Why do Sjoo and Mor suppose it is advantageous to themselves or to women in
general, to increase this male fear and envy? And why do they spurn men's wish
to make women "dependent," which is to say pay their bills?
Only dependent motherhood [say Sjoo and Mor] is celebrated and recognized as
"legitimate" in patriarchy.48
They demand the right to be "independent and creative"; but no feminist demand,
except for women's right to be promiscuous, is more insistent than their claim to
greater dependence: free child care, alimony, child support, free medical care, free
or subsidized housing. If women were denied these freebies, they would
understand that dependence on a husband pays better than dependence on an ex-
husband or on AFDC. Only dependent motherhood gives women and children the
advantages of having husbands and fathers and raises their standard of living 73
percent.49
"Men in patriarchal societies," say Sjoo and Mor, "learn, or reveal, a great
jealousy and fear of natural women--of the sexual, mental, and spiritual abilities
of fully evolved women living in harmony with the consciousness of our own
bodies." This is to say men fear women--not just "natural women" but civilized
women who refuse to submit to patriarchal socialization, "natural women" like the
Indian squaw and the ghetto matriarch so admired by "civilized women" such as
feminists who admire the "natural women." Men fear such women because they
sense the shakiness of their own role in civilized society and the shakiness of
civilization itself, both of which are dependent on women's acceptance of sexual
regulation. Like Betty Friedan, Sjoo and Mor see women's sexual de-regulation
(which is what feminism is all about) as an "evolutionary breakthrough," though
unlike Ms. Friedan, who places the breakthrough in the present or the immediate
future, Sjoo and Mor place the Golden Age in the remote past, prior to the Garden
of Eden. The punch line of the Garden of Eden story, written some three thousand
years ago, is God's utterance to Eve: "He shall rule over thee." That's patriarchy,
father headship of families, stable two-parent households, father custody if the
man and woman split. Otherwise Mom is boss, as feminism wishes her to be, thus
returning society to the Stone Age matriarchal system.
"The asherah," say Sjoo and Mor,
was the Neolithic Goddess (Inanna-Ishtar, Astarte-Ashtoreth- Asherah) or the
symbol of the Goddess. It was a conventionalized or stylized tree, perceived as
she, and planted therefore at all altars and holy places. The asherah represented
the Goddess as Urikittu, the green one, the Neolithic mother-daughter of all
vegetation, of agricultural knowledge and abundance. Yahweh's absolute hostility
to the asherah was the political hostility of the nomadic-pastoral Hebrew people,
or their priesthood at least, to the settled matriarchal cultures and their Goddess
beliefs. It became a psychological hostility to the entire living earth, doctrinalized
in the biblical texts:
You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have
served their gods: on high mountains, on hills, under a spreading tree. You must
tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles [asherahs],
set fire to the carved images of their gods, and wipe their name from that place.
(Deuteronomy 16:20)
This is to be understood as the warfare between the two kinship systems, male
and female--projected into religion and social systems. It is still with us. This is
what the feminist/sexual revolution is all about: are women to be sexually
regulated so that men can have families and children can have fathers? Or are they
to be sexually de-regulated so that they can achieve "equality" and control their
own sexuality--and restore the female kinship system (as has already happened in
the ghettos)?
This sexual independence, as described by Esther Harding, is in marked contrast
to the ideal of marriage as exemplified by such deities as Hera. There fidelity to
the given word is the principle which is worshipped. In the case of Ishtar it is
loyalty, not to a contract, but to the actual feeling, the reality as it lives in the
moment. This is the principle which was worshipped as the woman par
excellence--the Magna Dea.50
This is what Fergie, Duchess of York, means by being "true to myself" in
discarding her marriage contract.
Sexual disloyalty is woman's weapon par excellence. "Adultery is, in fact," writes
Dalma Heyn,
a revolutionary way for women to rise above the conventional--if they live to do
so. The injunction against it--always absolute--is still strong and the stakes are
still high, as legions of once-adulterous and now-divorced women whose standard
of living has been drastically lowered can attest.
Ms. Heyn prefaces her book The Erotic Silence of the American Wife with the
following quotation from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter:
[Hester] assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at some brighter period, when
the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would
be revealed, in order to establish the whole relationship between man and woman
on a surer ground of mutual happiness.
Meaning, we must suppose, that this surer ground would be supplied by
something like the contemporary feminist/sexual revolution and the recognition of
the naturalness of sexual promiscuity. Some other basis than the regulation of
female sexuality. Matriarchy, in other words, is the bright wave of the future, a
brighter period when the world shall have grown ripe for feminism. The era when
Hawthorne was writing The Scarlet Letter was the era when Tocqueville was
visiting America, In his classic Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote that "In
America, a single woman can undertake a long journey is safety," as indeed
Hester and Pearl are represented as doing in Hawthorne's narrative. Today, now
that feminism and the de-regulation of female sexuality have created the ghetto
and the brighter future Hester and Hawthorne yearned for, a single woman cannot
jog in Central Park in safety. If she tries, she may find herself beaten and gang-
raped by a posse of fatherless punks who grew up in matriarchal homes
(subsidized by patriarchal taxpayers) resulting from the sexual de-regulation of
their mothers. The mothers' sexual de-regulation in the previous generation had
led to the punks' de-regulation from all civilized behavior in the next. This is why
three-quarters of the men behind prison bars grew up in fatherless homes. It is
why the poverty in such homes ought not to be relieved by taxpayers and ex-
husbands. It explains why homes should be headed by fathers.
"What we have here," says Ms. Heyn, is women saying again and again that their
sexuality, which had been so disempowering inside the confines of conventional
goodness [read: inside the patriarchal system] had, outside it, become
empowering. They are saying that their love, inside marriage, had made them feel
disconnected and devitalized, while outside it, in relationships they created for
pleasure alone, they felt neither idealized nor debased. Their sexuality had "come
alive" as surely and inexorably as they themselves had.51
What we have here, once again, is the fact that women hate the sexual regulation
patriarchy requires. The women were empowered when they escaped from the
rules prescribed by the patriarchal Sexual Constitution. Ms. Heyn cites Carolyn
Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life as ending women's story after the wedding:
But examine the romance plot closely and you will see that after you cut to the
chase--marriage--it is Mr. Right's story that continues, not our heroine's. After her
implicit goal of becoming a wife is reached, her story is over. Once inside the
little cottage, the moment after becoming a wife, as Carolyn Heilbrun point
out..."the young women died as a subject, ceased as an entity," was left there
languishing on the page, without a voice, hardly a heroine at all, relegated to a
plot that cannot thicken. This story that goes nowhere for her is, nevertheless, the
only plot written for a woman's life, just as happily ever after (that is,
monogamous marriage) is the only ending that certifies her success as a woman in
this society.52
Ms. Heyn thinks it's too bad that all adulterous wives in literature come to a tragic
end--Anna Karenina, Tess, Hester, Madame Bovary. "Unlike the classic tragic
hero, whose pride or folly dictate a suffering which then redeems him, the tragic
heroine need not have a fatal flaw to warrant her tragic ending: Tess is neither
proud nor foolish; neither is Anna. Their suffering comes from without rather than
from within; it arises out of the insistence of a social order rather than from any
character defect."53 That's right. The social order is called patriarchy and it makes
civilization possible. And these women are violating its rules, which safeguard the
family. "How is it," she wants to know, "that a girl's own sexual feelings have not
entered into our culture's imagination?"
Where in "respectable" mainstream American fiction do we read of a woman's
sexual coming of age, described from her point of view? Where does this vital
young girl speak about her own sexual desire, not her desirability; what feels
erotic, not what she hopes appears erotic to others? Where does Sleeping Beauty
tell of her awakening? Where is the female Portnoy? Where does Lolita tell of her
own response to Humbert Humbert? Where does Marilyn Monroe tell her own
sexual history? How is it we never cared about her silence, connected her "sexy"
voice with its little-girlness, tied its very breathy quietness to the fact that it both
held back secrets and was so faint it was barely audible?...[F]ew female voices
speak out to describe their pleasure, to define precisely what feels good and what
does not, to delineate girls' sexual maturation in terms other girls can relate to.54
It is highly advantageous to a woman to be a sex object and for society to have
her be, for it is thus that men are motivated to be achievers and to create wealth.
But the advantages can only be derived from a husband whose stable motivation
(and therefore work performance) is assured. Focusing on what sexual adventures
the wife wants and believes herself entitled to weakens the man's motivation. For
a woman to seek sexual pleasure marks her as an easy lay. It is too threatening,
too disruptive to patriarchy, which operates by channeling male sexuality into
marriage, thereby getting society's work done and giving children two parents and
the best environment in which to rear them. Society gets no work out of men (or
women) by making men into sex objects. A woman cannot be motivated to
support a family adequately because she loves a man or by a sexual adventure
with one. But society can use the woman as a sex object to motivate a man to
support a family, to pay taxes, to buy real estate, create a stock portfolio and so
forth. It is for this reason that female sexuality must be regulated. But this
regulation breaks down if the man loses control over his paycheck and custody of
his children, as happens in the divorce court or when the woman marries the state
and lives off welfare. Women often prefer this, and, as previously indicated on
page 5 (but it bears repetition), will accept a drastic lowering of their standard of
living to gain this sexual freedom. As Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs say:
Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms, still offers more sexual
freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man.55
As feminists, they view the attaining of this sexual freedom for women as a
proper object of social policy. But it would be the death of patriarchy and a
disaster for women--as well as men and children. Women need reminders of how
they benefit from patriarchy. They need to know that breaking the rules will result
in economic suffering and cause them to be de-classed--in spite of which many
women will choose to break the rules. Ms. Heyn tells of Amanda:
Amanda, living alone and talking about the "mess" she made of her life as a result
of her affair, tries to figure out why she is not depressed about it:
I'm alone. I'm not seeing either man. I have no money. And what I feel--I feel
released. I know I should feel regret, but what I really feel is reborn.
Paula says,
I did the worst thing in the world, the worst thing for a woman in this entire
culture. And you know what? It was the best thing I ever did. It opened my eyes
to so much...it opened my heart.
The women began seeing everything now "in color" and feeling more "alive."56
This is the way they are. "Explanations for the silence," says Heyn, "suggest that
women don't really know what they want, or don't say what they need, or don't
say what they mean, or don't mean what they say":
Those who have noticed the difficulty women have in speaking about what is
most precious to them--love and sex--may also suggest that the silence is not
cultural but inherent; that women, even when they know what they want, will not
speak of it because they are "secretive" or "manipulative" or "tricky." They not
only lack a voice, these explanations imply, they lack much more: a morality; a
self; a soul.57
They lack patriarchal morality, civilized morality, morality which can be the basis
of family life. Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey tells us "To all intents and purposes the
human female is sexually insatiable in the presence of the highest degrees of
sexual satiation."58 Sherfey believes, says Barbara Seaman, "that every girl born
has the capacity to become a veritable nymphomaniac."59
Even if Sherfey is right, however, continues Seaman,
I think that most of the women who opt for marriage and family life will continue,
sedately and perhaps a little sadly at times, to "will themselves" satisfied. A
mother's attachment to her young is very strong and not easily jeopardized.
On the other hand, there is no question that a new life- style is emerging for
educated women in civilized countries. The world is pretty well filled up, and the
men who rule it are coming to view babies as a threat to their own survival. The
pressures on women to marry and reproduce are rapidly diminishing, at the same
time as their solo economic position is improving.60
This means that women are coming into position to impose a matriarchal society
upon us. If men knew that every woman is, in Dr. Sherfey's words, a potential
nymphomaniac and if she could become economically independent with the help
of affirmative action policies, he would know that it was improbable that he
would be able to be a breadwinner for a family. He would be in danger of
becoming a demoralized underachiever and society would be in danger of
matriarchy. Large numbers of women would be willing to forfeit the advantages
patriarchy has hitherto bestowed on women in exchange for their acceptance of
patriarchal regulation.
Ms. Heyn speaks of women being thrown into the central dilemma of relationship
they had encountered both at adolescence and in marriage: how to speak honestly
about their deepest feelings but not be "bad"; how to say what they desired
without sounding "wrong" to desire it; how to speak about sex without displeasing
me and being punished somehow.61
They would do well to keep quiet about their "deepest feelings" since speaking
honestly about them would reveal that they are enemies of the patriarchal system
upon which they depend. They are bad by patriarchal definition; and their real,
albeit unexpressed, aim is to discredit and reject patriarchy. Their deepest feeling
is a yearning to be promiscuous and to employ this promiscuity as a means to
undermine patriarchal law- and-order and restore the female kinship system and
mother-right. All of which is summed up in the feminist slogan "a woman's right
to control her own sexuality."

It was formerly understood that an important part of this "control" was the
woman's right to contract to share her reproductive life with a man who must
depend on the contract and on society's enforcing of it. Today, however, women
insist that they also have the right to renege on the contract, to deprive the man of
the children procreated under it and to use them as Mutilated Beggars whose
sufferings and deprivations will then supply the justification for reducing the man
to slavery. They see the corollary of the woman's right to control her own
sexuality as her further right to demand the law shall nullify the woman's
obligations under the contract while still enforcing the man's economic
obligations under it.

Ms. Heyn speaks of her adulteresses faltering when trying to describe the men
they were sleeping with:
These relationships, these men, these feelings were explicitly taboo. And so it
became clear once again that adultery is unmentionable--a word itself defined as
"immodest," "indecent," "obscene," and "shameful." To mention the
unmentionable was very dangerous indeed.
It was only when I was able to mock my position as omnipotent arbiter--to joke
about having the power to validate or repudiate their feelings--that, together, we
began to understand whose role we were really mocking, whose booming voice
carried sufficient moral authority to silence their own. They had to know that that
role, that voice, do exist--one is the impersonation of society, the other, the voice
of the patriarchy--and both have rendered all women both mute and dumb at some
point or other.62
Mute and dumb but still conspiratorial, still mole-ing and mining away at the
patriarchal basis of civilized society, still yearning to return to matriarchy.
Then [continues Ms. Heyn] they spoke about something so radical, something that
men have always had, the right not to exclude themselves from the sexual
equation--
She lapses into jargon, illustrating the taboo she previously talked about. She isn't
talking about an "equation." She is talking about being sexually promiscuous.
--even more radically, the right to put themselves first in that equation. They
spoke about constructing an emotional and sexual dynamic they had never
experienced before and inventing their role in it. "Undazzling" and "gentle" men,
"not-so-perfect," "playful: and "confident" sex, and "egalitarian" friendship in
which they felt freed from the requirement to be "good enough" to be loved were
the hallmarks of this forbidden, unconventional attachment.63
She cites Freud's notion that some women can love "only in an illicit relationship
which must be kept secret, and in which she feels certain of being actuated by her
own will alone." And comments thus:
It is possible that what so appeals to women in these forbidden, secret relations
are the extraordinarily different terms of relationship they seek and find in them.
When my women found is that within these gentle relationships they felt powerful
and equal and freed from having to be pleasing--three aspects of relationship
historically missing for women in conventional marriage.64
They enjoy the status of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the fine ladies of the courts of
love, where the lover is merely a humble troubadour. They go the Wyf of Bath
one better by having power over two men, the lover held by erotic attraction, the
husband held by the power of her treachery and the law's complicity in her
treachery by assuring her child custody if the husband tries to do anything about
her adultery. It's a power game; and, as Secretary Kissenger tells us, power is the
great aphrodisiac. More than that, they are exercising power against the hated
enemy, the patriarchal system, which made them "Young, White and Miserable"
when they were girls, confronted them as a "wall" needing to be surmounted by a
"Mother Daughter Revolution."65 Being revenged on "the system" is the great
goal.

They don't feel merely "equal," as Ms. Heyn says. They are in the driver's seat and
they know it and love it. "These same two women couldn't think of any previous
relationship focused so entirely on them."66

"Its only goal is mutual pleasure," she says of the activities of one of her
adulteresses. Evidently not, since sex within marriage gives her less pleasure. It is
the forbiddenness which makes it more pleasurable, the excitement of releasing
the "enormous potential counterforce" of which Ms. Rich writes. It is
revolutionary. And that confers power on the woman.
According to Debold, Wilson and Malave, "Sixty percent of elementary school-
aged girls and 67 percent of boys felt happy with themselves. In high school, only
29 percent of the girls still felt that way, while nearly half of the boys held
themselves in high esteem."67 Boys were down 17 percent, showing that both
girls and boys found adolescence and the requirements of accepting socialization
difficult. The greater female distress is perhaps owing partly to the earlier
maturation of girls. Besides which boys see the acceptance of responsibility to
mature as an opening up of the possibility of something desirable, a meaningful
role as family head and provider, which will motivate them towards success in the
male world of work. Girls see the motherhood role opening up to them as a
restriction of their autonomy and resent the sexual regulation it necessitates.
Debold, Wilson and Malave quote the AAUW report as saying, "The survey finds
that adolescent girls are more likely than are boys to have their declining sense of
themselves inhibit their actions and abilities," and they comment: "Adolescent
boys have a greater sense of confidence in their ability to do things in their lives
than girls do."

This is probably true in patriarchal society, but the opposite of the truth in the
matriarchal ghetto, where girls are preferred and are higher achievers. The
patriarchal system aims to create male achievers and does; but the female chastity
is the linchpin of the system, for without it men cannot have families. Earning "all
the stuff" enables men to have families and participate equally in reproduction.
Girls don't need to earn all the stuff, as boys must. Girls are assured of having
families and an essential reproductive role by reason of their biology, which gives
them an ascribed status which boys must earn. White men have all the stuff
because they earn it, unlike their wives who complain at their consciousness-
raising groups that merchants aim three-quarters of their advertising at women.
White men earn all the stuff because white women are willing to give up their
sexual autonomy which many black women "enjoy."
"In the shadow of the wall," say Debold, Wilson and Malave, girls see the
injustices in their worlds but have no recourse and few allies. The dawning
realization of women's subordinate position within the culture becomes more and
more clear to them. In traditional families, they see their mothers pay more
attention to and collude with their fathers' authority. Boys and men often get more
attention. As girls, as their mothers' daughters, they are asked to be silent, to be
helpful, and to be nice so that there isn't trouble. Mothers and women teachers
know that they can depend on girls' desire for connection to ask them to bear
more than they would ever ask from boys. While asking for girls' cooperation and
compliance, mothers and teachers also tell girls that silence, niceness, and
kindness are what is expected from them. Middle-class girls are often asked to
give up their strong feelings and loud voices in order to get along or to create an
artificial harmony in the classroom or family. The unspoken threat is
abandonment and exclusion. From this they learn that these aspects of themselves,
as well as what they know, are bad, rude and unwelcome. By shutting off what
they know and feel, these girls buy continued closeness with their mothers and the
other women in their lives. But as they do so, they know and feel that it is not
fully real.68
They gain the benefits patriarchal society bestows on women-- on good women.
Of course it's "not fully real" The female role, is, as John Stuart Mill said, an
eminently artificial thing. So is the male role. Following the advice mentioned
privileges them to belong to the middle class, the upper tier of our two-tiered
society. Strong feelings and loud voices can be left to feminists and common
scolds. They are not really women's best weapons for getting what they want. A
woman who relies on her loud voice is like a crocodile who fights by kicking or a
boy gangster who hopes to succeed in life by drive-by shootings. The "real"
female is a bitch, just as the "real" male is a boy gangster. Patriarchal socialization
is the system which converts female bitchiness into feminine charm and male
violence into the constructive labor which generates the wealth of society. Both
are artificial; their complementariness makes civilized life possible.
"Girls," say Debold, Wilson and Malave, firsthand gain an extraordinarily
political knowledge about men and women by observing how women are denied
power in patriarchal culture. At eleven, Victoria begins an interview by stating
that the way women take men's names when they get married is unfair.69
They gain the power to claim a man's surname, along with his income and status.
When a heroine in Victorian melodrama says, "I want my child to have a name,"
she means a man's name, one showing that she belongs to the male kinship
system, which has higher status, rather than the matriarchal system, which has
lower status, so conspicuous in the ghettos and Indian reservations. She doesn't
want her child to be a bastard, to have no father. Fathers can and do give their
children enormous benefits. Would a wife who divorced her husband consider it a
victory if the divorce court deprived her of her husband's surname and compelled
her to resume the use of her father's surname? The father's income and status are
the reason "white men have all the stuff" and share it with their wives and
children whom they love and who in return motivate the father to be a good
provider and acquire "all the stuff." Many black men lack the stuff because they
lack the sexual loyalty of their wives, which deprives them of families or the hope
of having families. This is why women and girls "compete for men's attention" so
they can enter the upper and middle classes and enjoy the benefits which
patriarchy bestows. Debold, Wilson and Malave's naive assumption that women
are denied power in patriarchy because men (or rather white men) "have all the
stuff." Would they prefer to live in the ghetto where the men don't have much
stuff and the women, while enjoying relatively higher status than their men and
than white women enjoy vis-a-vis their men, are absolutely less well off and less
powerful.
Singapore's Prime Minister Goh has noticed America's troubles. He tells us that
"America's and Britain's troubles--a growing underclass which is violence-prone,
uneducated, drug- taking, sexually promiscuous--are the direct result of their
family unit becoming nonfunctional."70 They are a result of the liberation of
women and making men subsidize this liberation. Men are blamed for the second
generation crime by feminists who wish to remain in the dark about the fact that
this crime has its roots in the previous generation's family breakdown. June
Stephenson writes a book titled Men Are Not Cost Effective in which she says
this:
Females brought up in the same poverty areas with little education and no jobs
commit few crimes, almost none violent, and most related to drugs.71
Their main contribution to the crimes she hangs on the males is their sexual
behavior, which deprives males of their own generation of families and the
resulting children of fathers. And deprives taxpayers of the money needed to pay
for the resulting crime, illegitimacy and fatherlessness. This is matriarchy.
Stephenson covers this family disintegration with the usual pitch that
the family is not disintegrating: it is simply changing. True, there are many more
single-mother homes now than ever before in our culture, and that often makes
life difficult for both mother and children. Without a man to help support children,
there is financial hardship. But financial hardship does not necessarily lead to
crime. There are many poor cultures where the crime rete is low.
True. Two generations ago Chinese-Americans were the poorest group in our
society. There was a common saying "He doesn't have a Chinaman's chance."
That meant no chance. Discrimination against Chinese was as bad as
discrimination against blacks. But then, as now, Chinese had the lowest crime rate
of any group in our society--because they had patriarchal families.
What is needed in any good family situation is a good relationship between
whichever parent is available and the child. Single mothers are often overworked,
fatigued, and worried. So are mothers in two-parent families.
(These are the mothers of whom Betty Friedan wrote "Society asks so little of
women."72)
This is not to minimize the problems of single motherhood but to stress that there
are no studies indicating that families headed by women are any more crime-
prone than other families.
What chutzpah. This is feminist scholarship for you. It is common knowledge that
three-quarters of the men behind bars grew up in families headed by women. The
high crime areas of every city in America are those with the greatest numbers of
families headed by women. In my Garbage Generation I cite twenty pages, 315-
335, of studies proving what Ms. Stephenson says no study proves.
She continues:
The absence of a father is not necessarily a crime-inducing factor.
Of course not. But to say that many, or most fatherless children don't go to prison
says nothing about the proportion of criminals who are fatherless. Most children
who grow up in orphanages don't go to prison, but this says nothing about the
relative desirability of a family and an orphanage.
To say that being a single mother increases her children's chance for crime is to
blame a women for having a child out of wedlock or to blame women for getting
a divorce, or to blame women in every case in which the man leaves the home for
whatever reason.73
We damn well better blame women for having a child out of wedlock. She should
be de-classed and shamed and made to wear a scarlet letter on her dress. Most
divorces are initiated by wives--about three-quarters--which is blameworthy,
though the greater blame rests on the legal system which gives her custody of the
children. And the ex-husband is blameworthy for financing this matriarchal
family by support payments, the anticipation of which was a primary motive for
the wife's filing of the divorce action.
Barbara Katz Rothman writes a book called Recreating Motherhood74 which
begins with this:
I recently had the interesting experience of trying to put together a very short
family photo album for a celebration of the Bar Mitzvah of my son, Dan. A
colleague had just done one for his daughter, and it seemed to be a lovely idea to
copy.
My colleague began his with a family tree. I started but it got complicated, messy:
we had divorces, deaths, remarriages, too many convoluted branches somehow.
And besides, those flat generational lines in no way represented family to me: I
have first cousins I haven't seen in twenty- five years, but great-aunts, second
cousins twice removed, and close friends that feel very much like part of my
family. So I scratched the tree idea, and went straight to the photos.75
She describes the photos in her album and says this:
They were nurturing pictures, one after another. It wasn't by lineage that I saw
Dan's first thirteen years, but by nurturance: people holding, greeting, caring,
tending, teaching.
For me, the idea of nurturance as mattering more than genetics, loving more than
lineage, care more than kinship, is not just an intellectual fancy. It's really there, in
my heart. The writing of this book, the attempt to carve out a new definition of
motherhood, of relationships, of parents and of children, is not just an intellectual
exercise. This is halfway through my life and halfway through the active years of
mothering, I choose to live my life.
I am not alone in this. More and more of us are choosing to live our lives this way,
putting together families by choice and not by obligation.
Parlor intellectuals are always re-discovering the female kinship system and
imagining it to be a wonderful and new discovery. Ms. Rothman's problem in
putting together the photo album reflects the regression to what anthropologists
call the "classificatory system," thus defined in Webster's New International,
second edition:
classificatory system. Anthropol. A primitive system of reckoning kinship, found
among American Indians, Australasians, etc., according to which all the members
of any single generation in a given line of descent (as in a clan) are reckoned as of
the same degree of kinship to all the members of any other generation. The system
is contrasted with the descriptive system, in vogue among civilized peoples,
which discriminates degrees of individual kinship in each generation.
What Ms.Rothman describes is the female kinship system which results from
female unchastity: and which accordingly excludes males from meaningful
sharing of reproduction. This the system of the ghettos, of Indian reservations and
the Australian bush. It is rapidly becoming the system of American society as
women become liberated from sexual law-and-order and divorce court judges like
Robert Noland automatically give child custody to mothers. It's all so natural.
Paying the bills, maintaining sexual law-and-order, and ensuring children their
place within a stable patriarchal social order, however, are no part of the female
kinship system, though they are "nurturance" also, though forms of nurturance
seldom found in matriarchy, though the female kinship system provides the
biological base on which patriarchal system is built as a second-story structure.

Feminists imagine this "new definition of motherhood" and the sexual revolution
which brought it about are something new, a breakthrough achieved only in recent
decades, something which finally liberates women to the attainment of equality
and justice. "I choose to live my life this way," says Ms. Rothman. Men are not to
be given a choice. Not if women are going to reject sexual law-and-order. The
genealogies Ms. Rothman rejects have no significance in ghettos, where most
children carry their mother's surnames, and in clans and on Indian reservations.
The social system based on "nurturance" is one in which fathers play no essential
role. They are allowed to hang around if they behave themselves. If Mom gets
tired of them, they must leave and find themselves another girlfriend.

"Putting together families by choice and not by obligation," she says. She chose to
marry, as her husband did. But only she can make the choice to get rid of him and
take his kids. She and her feminist sisters want the right to repudiate the marriage
contract and its obligations on women while riveting the marital obligations on
the man who is denied the kind of choice they demand for themselves. The choice
she really refers to is "putting together" a family by dissolving it. The chief
problem with this matriarchal pattern is paying the bills.

"In a mother-based system," says Ms. Rothman, a person is what mothers grow--
people are made of the care and nurturance that bring a baby forth into the world,
and turn the baby into a member of society."76 In a mother-based system, what
mothers grow is a crop in which criminals and delinquents are greatly
overrepresented.
I believe it is time to move beyond the patriarchal concern with genetic
relationships...[W]e need to value nurturance and caring relationships more than
genetic ties....Stripped of all the social supports, is that genetic tie sufficient to
define a person?"77
Nobody would ever claim this. What is claimed is the social desirability (proved
by the resulting social stability and productivity) of maximizing the importance of
the tie to the father. The more tenuous and artificial the tie, the more important it
is to emphasize its significance by titles, patrilineal surnames, ancestor worship,
the patrimony, the landed estate, etc.--and the more important the father's money
card is. The father's role is the weak link and therefore the one which society must
guard most carefully. This is the way patriarchy works. This is why the wife takes
the husband's name, why it is transmitted to the children.
Ms. Rothman discusses the Baby M Case, once notorious, now largely forgotten.
Bill Stern wanted a child of his own and, his wife Betsy being in poor health and
unwilling to conceive for him, contracted with Mary Beth Whitehead to be
inseminated with Bill Stern's sperm and, for $10,000 to bear Bill's child. But,
being a moral minor who didn't think contracts amounted to much, she changed
her mind and refused to give up the kid. She not only reneged on her contract with
Bill Stern, she evidently reneged on her contract with her own husband in
agreeing to bear another man's child. Was Mr. Whitehead a consenting party to
Mary Beth's contract with Bill Stern? Was he a consenting party to his wife's
revocation of this contract? (The newspapers never bothered to say.) Then, after
becoming a celebrity, publishing a best selling book and doing the talk-show
circuit, she tossed Mr. Whitehead out and took his other children from him.
"Ultimately," says Ms. Rothman,
Bill Stern won. Even though the contract was declared illegal, the socially
weighted fact of his paternity made the child his in the eyes of the law. Based on
his genetic connection, based on that vial of semen, he alone had a legal right to
challenge and ultimately to win custody of the child. And now, in the eyes of the
law, Betsy Stern is the surrogate mother, raising his child for him.
Is that genetic tie, that chromosomal connection, strong enough to bear the weight
we place on it?78
Bill's claim was based not just on a vial of semen, but on a contract. His genetic
tie to his daughter is strong enough only if society makes it strong. Fatherhood,
says Margaret Mead is a social invention. If we want two-parent families, society
must provide the props which will create and sustain them, as mere biology won't.
But once society commits itself to maintaining the tie of the child to the father,
then the undermining of that tie is the undermining of society. This is what is
happening because the legal system refuses to guarantee the father's role and
imagines there is some other way of legitimizing, socializing, subsidizing and
educating children and giving them a place in civilized patriarchal society. The
law's refusal to make this guarantee to fathers creates a social and economic crisis
which irresponsible lawmakers and judges wish to blame the displaced fathers for
and which they seek to remedy by reducing these fathers to slavery, forced labor
for the benefit of another person.
"Babies," says Ms. Rothman, at least healthy white babies, are very precious
products these days. Mothers, rather like South African diamond miners, are
cheap, expendable, not-too-trustworthy labor necessary to produce the precious
product.
And she adds in a footnote:
I want to express my appreciation to the Texas midwife who found it so hard to
understand how babies could be valued and mothers not.
To value mothers would be to return to the feminine mystique, which Betty
Friedan and other feminists worked so hard and successfully to undermine in
order to glorify career-elitism for women.
"In a better world," says Ms. Rothman, in the world I would want us to have,
there would be virtually no women giving up babies: contraception, abortion, and
the resources to raise her own children would be available to every woman.79
She is saying the same thing liberals were saying a century ago. Hear George
Bernard Shaw, saying "Even if every woman bearing and rearing a valuable child
received a handsome series of payments, thereby making motherhood a real
profession as it ought to be."80- Shaw proposes an AFDC program, but with more
generous payments to the women who breed fatherless children. Shaw knew of
women's hatred of the patriarchal system:
My own experience of discussing this question leads me to believe that the one
point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is
the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a
man.81
As a black woman said on the Donahue show a few years ago, "We want the right
to have children without having husbands." They wish the right to reduce men to
the status of studs--though they also condemn them for being poor providers. Men
have no similar right, though the male taxpayer has the obligation to subsidize this
female sexual independence. Another black woman, an unwed mother, is quoted
by Rickie Solinger82 as saying, "If your old man has been like my old man, you
wouldn't think not having him around was any great loss." Women really do feel
this way. They really do hate patriarchy. They really want to get back to the
matriarchal female kinship system. And they are succeeding.
_______________________________
1John Campion and Pamela Leeson, Facing Reality: The Case for the
Reconstruction of Legal Marriage (London: The Family Law Action Group,
1994), p. 5.
2Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), pp. 8, 22.
3Los Angeles Times, 29 September, 1995.
4Los Angeles Times, 28 February, 1995.
5Re-Making Love, p. 197; emphasis added.
6Wall Street Journal, 30 October, 1995.
7Brenda Scott, Children No More: How We Lost a Generation (Lafayette, LA,
1995), p. 158.
8Ibid.
9George Gilder, Visible Man (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 107.
10Ms. May, 1982.
11George Gilder, Sexual Suicide, p. 86.
12P. 78.
13Mother Daughter Revolution, p. 14. The subtitle of their book is From Betrayal
to Power. That's code language for "from accepting patriarchal socialization,
marriage and the family to rejecting these good things and reverting to
matriarchy."
14WSJ, 30 Oct 95.
15The Liberator, October, 1995, citing as source WOMEN/POLITICS Newsletter
of the Organized Section for Women and Politics Research of the American
Political Science Association, Vol. 7, No. 2, August, 1995, p. 3.
16Los Angeles Times, 15 August, 1995.
17I document this in my Garbage Generation, p. 92.
18Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia, pp. 97f.
19Chicago Tribune, 5 October, 1995.
20Men are Not Cost-Effective, p. 324.
21Ibid.
22Los Angeles Times, 12 October, 1995.
23Los Angeles Times, 24 April, 1995.
24Newsweek, 4 September, 1995.
25Ibid.
26Los Angeles Times, 3 May, 1995.
27This tiresomely repeated statistic is untrue. According to Jerry Lester, "An
Open Letter to 'Deadbeat Dad' Journalists, The Liberator, October, 1995,
The data related to child support payments reported by the Bureau of the Census
(Current Population Reports, Series P- 23, No 173, 1989), show that 75 percent of
all child support is paid.
Total amount of child support owed--$14,800,000,000. (NOT $34 billion!)
Amount received--$11,100,000,000.
Composed of paid in full--$7,600,000,000. Paid in
part--$3,500,000,000.
28Her research is epitomized in The Family in America: New Research,
November, 1995.
29Los Angeles Times, 12 June, 1992.
30Single Mothers and Their Children, p. 64.
31Re-making Love, p. 196.
32Re-Making Love, p. 196.
33Pp. 197f.
34Alain Danielou, Gods of Love and Ecstasy: the Traditions of Shiva and
Dionysus (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992), p. 17.
35Los Angeles Times, 9 April, 1995.
36Re-making Love, p. 97.
37John Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (New York: Dell Publishing
Company, 1977), p. 28.
38The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 6.
39Great Cosmic Mother, p. 196.
40The Feminine Mystique, pp. 140f.
41Mead's Male and Female, pp. 72ff.; quoted in Friedan, p. 141.
42Ibid.
43P. 142.
44P. 142.
45Quoted in Friedan, p. 142.
46Sjoo and Mor, p. 382.
47P. 384.
48Ibid.
49This is Dr. Lenore Weitzman's celebrated statistic, frequently cited in feminist
literature. I discuss it in my Garbage Generation, Chapter 8.
50Esther Harding, Women's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern (Los Angeles:
Pantheon, 1955), p. 162.
51P. 191.
52P. 11.
53P. 14.
54P. 17.
55Re-Making Love, p. 196.
56P. 269.
57P. 18.
58Quoted in Barbara Seaman, Free and Female: The Sex Life of the
Contemporary Woman (New York: Coward, MaCann and Geoghegan, 1972), p.
44.
59Seaman, p. 45.
60Seaman, p. 45.
61Heyn, pp. 173f.
62P. 174.
63P. 174.
64P. 175.
65Book titles by Wini Breines and Debold, Wilson and Malave respectively.
66P. 164.
67Mother Daughter Revolution, p. 9.
68P. 44.
69P. 45.
70Cited in The Free American, October, 1994.
71(New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), p. 324.
72Feminine Mystique, p. 338.
73Ibid.
74New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.
75P. 17.
76P. 35.
77P. 40.
78P. 47.
79P. 133.
80Preface to Getting Married; Prefaces by Bernard Shaw (London: Constable and
Company, 1934), p. 15.
81Ibid.
82Rickie Solinger, Wake Up, Little Susie, p. 79.