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Toward a Society run by Women
By Lois W.
(Here is Christian Home editor's reply to a letter from a reader named Antonio)
"Thank you for your thoughtful letter in which you question the feasibility of a society run by women. I believe it deserves a reply. First, you say that male supremacy is too deeply ingrained in both boys and girls to be rooted out. But such attitudes are not innate.
They are learned behavior and can be countered with the proper training. This is one reason that we emphasize the importance of the home. The home is a more powerful tool for the shaping of young people's behavior than any other institution in our society.
It has the potential to counteract all the bad influences that children are subjected to. Children learn male supremacist attitudes first of all from their parents and older siblings. Once the home becomes committed to female supremacy, this process will stop. Next to the home, the second most important source of male supremacist attitudes is other children.
This takes place primarily at school, but lately it also seems to have started occurring among older children in daycare. The pattern is that the boys come to understand that the world is run by men, and so they come to believe that boys are more important than girls and that they should spend their time with other boys and exclude girls from their activities.
Once these all-boy groups are formed, the girls then form their own girls-only groups as a response to being shut out by the boys. This process was analyzed in our Time and Tide article for October 1995, "Why Girls are Yucky."
Nothing can be done at school to halt this process; it can be counteracted only at home. But the home can be quite effective. We must not forget that in most homes boys are raised differently than are girls. If we raise our sons the way we raise our daughters, much of the problem of misogyny would disappear.
One reason why a lot of people have trouble believing that a society run by women could actually come about is that they think of female supremacy in terms of mistresses and slaves. If you have ever visited an adult bookstore and looked at the magazines they had on female domination, it is obvious right off that no society could ever be organized like that.
But the mistress-slave paradigm is not the only model available. Consider the male supremacist households of the Southern Evangelicals. You have probably heard that the Southern Baptist Convention has amended its statement of faith to say that wives should "submit graciously" to their husbands. In these homes men rule without building dungeons in the basement. And they socialize their children to enter into the same type of relationship as adults.
Female supremacists can do the same thing. They can have homes in which it is obvious to the children that their mother is the boss. The father can set an example for his sons through his obedience to the lady of the house.
This is in fact the most important thing a man can do for his sons-to give them this example of obedience. Then the children can grow up expecting to have the same kind of marriage as adults. You cite the witchhunts of the later middle ages and early modern period as an example of male backlash against powerful women.
But this was back before the Industrial Revolution, which changed everything. The superior physical strength of the average male no longer has the economic importance that it once had, nor are women as tied down by childbearing as they once were.
Women are simply no longer as economically dependent on men as in the past. The nineteenth century saw a rapid rise in the status of women. Over time many members of both sexes came to recognize the moral superiority of women.
During the Victorian Era many men realized that women tended to be more moral than men and allowed their wives to become the dominant figures in their households. Then in the 1890s began the male supremacist backlash. Male dominance was reasserted through the glorification of war. This brings us to a very important component of the machinery of male dominance: the "male protection racket."
Men claim power over women on the ground that they are the protectors of women. But protectors from whom? From other men! This is why it deserves to be called the male protection racket. The example of the male protection racket most often pointed out by feminists is rape.
Most men are not rapists, but all men benefit from rape because it tends to make women dependent on them for protection. This is why male jurors are less likely to vote for a conviction in a rape case than are female jurors.
Men have a hard time taking rape seriously because they benefit from its occurrence. Rape is one part of the male protection racket, and war is the other part. Historically, it is man who is the warrior. This goes back to Paleolithic times. Man was the hunter, and from being a hunter to being a warrior was a very short jump.
Men are still better fighters than women; when the U. S. Army began recruiting large numbers of women a while back, it did so by instituting lower standards for the women than for the men, a move which generated a lot of resentment among the men. Men tend to be nonchalant about the destructiveness of war for the same reason that they tend to be nonchalant about rape: it helps to make women more dependent on them.
Beginning in the 1890s, the male supremacists were able to turn back the rising tide of powerful women by claiming that men were protecting women by fighting in wars. After several years of a buildup of a prowar movement in this country, the U. S. entered into the Spanish-American War.
Today this war is not considered a just war. It was an imperialist war and lacked any moral justification, but the social climate of militarism which arose in the 1890s made it possible for men to reassert their authority over men.
It was also at this time that the word "sissy" began to be applied to men. Before that, "sissy" was just an affectionate diminutive, a corruption of the word "sister," and was applied to girls with no negative connotations. Then with the resurgence of militarism, the word began to be applied to men who did not want the country to go to war.
A sissy was a man who was like a woman in that he did not want there to be a war. This new use of the word "sissy" clearly implied that men were superior to women. For if women were not inferior to men, what would be wrong with a man being like a woman? Labeling antiwar males as sissies clearly presupposed an ideology of male supremacist militarism.
This militarism continued in the twentieth century with World War I. Do you know what the First World War was fought for? Professional historians can't agree about this either. Do you have any idea who even started it? That is another muddle.
This war was pointless from a moral standpoint, but not from the standpoint of male supremacist militarism, and male supremacist ideology contributed mightily to the buildup which led to it. Then there was World War II.
Like all good militarists, the Nazis defended male dominance, and they set out to reverse the effects of the Industrial Revolution which had enabled women to rise during the nineteenth century. Their slogan for women was "kitchen, church and children," but their policies went far beyond slogans.
The Nazis awarded medals-bronze, silver and gold medals-to women who had four or more children. They shut down the birth control clinics, an action which made them popular with malestream church leaders.
They made low-cost loans available to newlyweds on the condition that the bride quit her job. Then during World War II they instituted slave labor in German factories, bringing captives in from Eastern Europe so that German women wouldn't have to do factory work the way the women of other countries were while the men were off fighting.
Nazism passed into history, and the Nazi attempt to subjugate women disappeared along with it. Of more lasting significance is the extent to which Hitler discredited militarism. The whole fascist ideology of young men proving their manhood by fighting in a war had been called into question. At the same time, the magnitude of the destructive potential of new weaponry made all-out war intolerable.
World War II saw the first use in combat of nuclear weapons, and even men began to worry about the dangers of launching a war. But man is still the warrior. It's part of his genetic inheritance from prehistoric times. Furthermore, the male protection racket demands that men fight wars in order to get women to submit to them.
As long as society continues to be dominated by men, there is always the danger of another war. Female domination and feminine training for males are crucial to the prevention of war in the long run.
The connection between male dominance and war is a two-way street. War legitimates male dominance, and men's desire for such dominance leads them to be indifferent to the horrors of war in much the same way that they tend to be indifferent to the trauma of rape. To the extent that we are able to eliminate war, we are also helping to weaken male rule.
This is why Lady Sophia endorses the World Federalist Association, a nonprofit organization working toward the elimination of war through the establishment of a democratically controlled world government. (If you want more information about the WFA you can write to it at 418 7th St. S.E, Washington DC 20003.)
We also believe that it is important to persuade people to vote for women for elective office and to stop voting for men. Political consultants have known for years that there is a small minority of voters which supports only women candidates and that this can make a difference in a minor race where most people don't know anything about the candidates except their gender and party affiliation.
We must see to it that this small minority of voters gets bigger; then both major parties will nominate more women for office, and more women will get elected. This brings me to your complaint about women in high office often being no better than men.
This is true enough, Angelo, but you need to understand that these women rose within a male power structure-they are women who have the approval of the male supremacists. If we can get into a situation in which nearly all elected officials are women, you will see them acting quite differently.
In a male-dominated society, successful women politicians will have been prescreened by the men who are running things. But this can be changed, and each additional woman elected to office makes it just a little bit harder for men to maintain their control.
In writing that the idea of a female-dominated society is only a fantasy, you say this is especially true for a society "run by females exerting sexual power." Actually, power relations between the sexes have always had a sexual dimension.
In Gen. 3:16, the woman is told that "your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you." That was in a patriarchal society, but today the high heel is on the other foot. Now that women are achieving more power in society, women's fashions are reflecting their sexual power as well.
This was the theme of our Time and Tide article for February 1997, "Power Dressing," which was a review essay on Valerie Steele's very important book Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power. Women are dressing in a more distracting way-to use Julia Reed's term from her April 1998 Vogue article "How Sexy is Too Sexy?"-because they have the power to do so. This trend will continue.
How can women come to rule society? I have already mentioned that the prospect of technologically advanced wars make male rule too dangerous to be tolerated. But female supremacy offers positive benefits to men as well. Because women are more moral than men, putting the women in charge means that the men will be elevated to a higher moral level.
This is attractive to most men, even many of those who fight against female power. It is this opportunity to live on a higher moral plane which is the chief attraction of female supremacy for men.
Female supremacy will succeed because man is the warrior and woman is the civilizer, and war can no longer be tolerated.
Female supremacy will succeed because in our society masculinity is a chromosomal defect inherited from prehistoric times. Female supremacy will succeed even if Lady Sophia were to go out of existence. It will succeed because it is the wave of the future."
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