- Recently a feminist informed me that the reason that women have not made more discoveries and inventions throughout human history is that they were too busy taking care of children and cleaning the house. It’s a line I’ve heard many times before; if only those mean old men hadn’t kept women chained to the stove, barefoot and pregnant, women would have written the Summa Theologica and split the atom.
- I have to wonder what these feminists imagine that men were doing while women were cooking dinner. Lolling about reading Greek philosophy in preparation for their own great work, perhaps, or messing about with chemicals in their private laboratories until they discovered gunpowder or something.
- The reality is that for nearly all of human history, drudgery has been the lot of almost everyone, male and female. Really, that hasn’t changed, except that the many technological advances men have made have made the drudgery less onerous. Nowadays instead of twelve hours breaking their backs in coal mines or wheat fields, most men have eight hours of being bored in cubicles staring at a computer screen.
- Furthermore, men’s work has always been more grueling than women’s, because men are the stronger sex. Mining, farming, building, smithing. Most Americans have visited those “living museums” where people wearing Colonial garb demonstrate how people used to weave, spin their own thread, or pound horseshoes into shape by hand. The first two are tedious; the third is arduous, and the idea of a woman doing it is ludicrous. It was hard enough for men. In addition to the hours of lifting a heavy hammer over and over and over again, there was the sweltering heat necessary to smelt iron. Women weren’t kept out of the smithy by selfish men who were forcing them to stay home with the spinning wheels. Rather, men sacrificed their health and spent their entire lives doing the work that was beyond the capabilities of women.
- Men’s work has also been more dangerous. Women weren’t expected to defend the country from invaders (or do the invading, for that matter) or hunt wild animals. While men were being shot, stabbed, run through, gored, and trampled, their poor oppressed wives were stuck at home, safe and sound.
- So over the centuries, very few men have had the leisure to create any more than women have. But there has usually been a leisured class, the ruling class who can afford to spend some of their time thinking and tinkering. This applies to the women of those classes as well. They had servants to cook and sew and take care of their children. Now, this class has usually produced many thinkers and scientists, because this class had the time to do so. But while men of this class often used their leisure for study or research, their women nearly always frittered it away in parties and gossip. The evidence for this is how many books the men as opposed to the women wrote over the centuries, and how few discoveries and inventions are credited to women, even among those women who had the leisure and money for such pursuits had they cared to follow them.
- I can’t remember which of the masculinist books I have reviewed gave this example, but I consider it a very telling one: for thousands of years, delivering babies was women’s work. Men did not interfere with women’s entry to the midwife profession or tell them how to go about practicing it. No midwife invented the forceps. Then, a few centuries ago, some rich decadent women decided to have male doctors deliver their babies instead of midwives. Within a century, one of these men had invented the forceps, which have saved untold lives. Women can do something for hundreds of generations without innovating. As soon as men turn their hands to a pursuit, they are devising ways to improve it.
- If you start to point any of this out to a feminist, she will usually insist that men were encouraged to achieve while women weren’t. To women, this argument makes sense, because women are deeply dependent on the approval of those around them. Standing alone is a male practice. There are women who can do it, but they are far, far rarer than men who can. But consider the hostility which every man who invented or discovered anything new has been greeted – Galileo put under house arrest, Socrates sentenced to drink poison, Martin Luther excommunicated, Darwin hounded by people who didn’t want to be descended from apes, Theodor Herzl driven into an early grave, Wilhelm Reich ordered by the FDA to stop selling orgone accumulators, Jesus Christ nailed to a tree. In the 18th century, there was a smallpox epidemic in Boston. A male doctor inoculated many people, saving their lives. Religious leaders had him arrested on the grounds that the epidemic was punishment from God, and the roused rabble set fire to his house. Where was the encouragement for these men?
- But for this argument to hold up, women given encouragement and equal opportunity should make achievements every bit as impressive as those of men. For the last four decades, millions of dollars – many of them from the taxpayers – have been poured into programs to “encourage” girls to achieve in nontraditional fields. Feminists completely dominate the teaching profession and have done so for decades; if the encouragement they gave was the deciding factor, by now they could have given us a generation of male social workers and female engineers. They haven’t.
- There are a few women who have made worthwhile scientific achievements. I recently read Against Depression by Peter Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac). He cites two women who made important advances in the scientific understanding of how depression affects the brain: Elizabeth Gould and Grazyna Rajkowska… but he also cites about a dozen male scientists. And of course, it was men who invented the microscope and the X-ray and the MRI and the various chemical processes which have made all of the discoveries in the book possible. Right now I’m looking around my apartment at the things which were invented during my lifetime, after the beginning of feminism. The laptop computer, the DVD player, the CD player, the DVR, the microwave oven, the cell phone. All invented by men. Female contributions to science remain fairly obscure ones known only to specialists in their fields.
- As Guy White put it, “The whining that we get from feminists is that 200 years ago when men were farming or 80 years ago when men worked on assembly lines in sweat shops, women weren’t given the opportunity to be social workers and Women’s Studies Professors. I am sorry, but how many men were given those opportunities?”
- Let’s stop blaming men for imaginary oppression and instead thank them for all that they have given to us.
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I have another example for you. It was common at the end of the nineteenth century for women to have ’social accomplishments’ like being able to play the piano. So during that time they had every opportunity to develop their own music. They did not. However during the same period Black American Men invented both blues and jazz. No one in their right mind could say that Black American Men at the end of the nineteenth century where a privileged group yet they invented two musical forms. Surely these men had far worse conditions than a drawing room.
Also take the Internet. Why was not Microsoft or Google started up by women? And I think it a fair bet that whatever comes next will be initiated by men. That said women will eventually take over all these things an men and maleness is pushed out and destroyed.
This is also a bell curve issue. As we know the male bell curve extends at both ends well beyond the female bell curve. So there are more male geniuses and creatives at the “right” end of the curve (something like 4 to 1 outnumbering women down the end there), but also more male untertans at the “left” end of the curve (also outnumbering untertan women around 4 to 1). The bell curve is the main reason why men will continue to “outperform” women at the high end — there are just more men with those abilities than women. Not that there are *no* women — there are certainly women there, too. But they are vastly outnumbered. And the notion that this is based on sexism or oppression is laughable — it’s based on the bell curve. I can well understand how this pisses women off, because it essentially means that their sex is “capped” much more than the male sex is, in terms of ability. But the benefit of that is that the female sex also has a higher “floor” than the male sex does, and therefore there are fewer female “dregs” than there are male dregs. Of course you never hear feminists complaining about the left end of the bell curve.
This is why the press for parity in “male dominated” fields (STEM areas which tend to be dominated by the right end of the bell curve) is insane, and amount to nothing more than rank discrimination against men who have committed no crime other than to be quite advanced towards the right end of the bell curve. The argument in favor of this discrimination is that the fields will benefit from “diversity”, even if the women there are not as far down the bell curve, because diversity is an independent value that is equally or more important than pure intelligence and ability. That is a very, very dubious claim, and potentially a disastrous one if it wins. I can guarantee you that our competitors internationally in terms of STEM and inventiveness and so on are NOT gimping their science institutions to artificially pump up the number of women. If we do that, under some kind of misguided “STEM Title IX”, as some feminists seem to want, we will be shooting ourselves in the foot as a nation.
Female, are you seriously putting Wilhelm Reich on your list next to the messiah?
According to wikipedia he would order patients to strip and touch them to induce “orgasm reflexes.”
He believed he discovered a cosmic force he called “orgone” that he harnessed through special boxes that could cure tumors.
Nature takes its risks with men, and men take risks. It has been this way throughout most of human history. To argue that men were the warriors while women had cozy lives is false (if the war was lost, they would be raped). On the other hand, it’s predominantly men who do the hardest jobs and take on the most risk. At the upper reaches of talent and public accomplishment, it’s probably 80% men. Sexism is a part of this– especially in the way most girls are raised, which is to be socially manipulative rather than to be smart– but there would still be a discrepancy in this regard in a perfectly egalitarian society.
It’s said that “behind every great man is a great women”. This isn’t true as a universal claim, but I think its often true. The contributions of women are more subtle– as wives and mothers, they can encourage others (men and women) to be better people, and be creative muses. The female roles are as important as the male ones, and without good women, a society falls to pot very quickly.
Cless Alvein’s remark about ‘behind every great man is a great woman’ I think is incomplete. What needs to be added is this – ‘and behind the rest of us is a utterly destructive woman who has ruined our lives’. The sub-clause to this platitude being the more typical case.
Since I have begun writing I would like to make a remark about the bell curve which was mentioned above. I will put aside that it should actually be called a Gaussian Distribution and say this. I don’t see how a two dimensional picture can really say anything about human ability. For example I am (or was) pretty good at mathematics but as an artist I can hardly go beyond drawing match stick men. So which end of the Gaussian am I? Also have you ever tried to plaster a wall or or plane a piece of wood flat? I have and I am hopeless. These tasks are beyond me. But I can do contour integrals so am I stupid or clever? I think the whole thing is ridiculous.
I’d like to add the example of Rousseau, who despite inspiring rage and hatred in his feminist contemporaries, saved thousands of babies by exhorting women to breastfeed their own children. You see, prior to this, most women of any means hired wet nurses who often neglected the children, who would end up malnourished and sickly, resulting higher infant mortality.
Female Masculinist is certainly correct in that there were plenty of women with plenty of time on their hands. Those in the upper classes had children, but for the most part they didn’t raise them any more than upper class fathers did. Their highest ambitions and achievements revolved around court intrigue.
”if the war was lost, they would be raped”
And the men would be killed or enslaved. Ok, the women might be enslaved as well, but they would still end up with better lives. I guarantee you being a domestic/sex slave was far preferable to being a slave on a farm or a quarry. You got basic comforts, (such as living in a house and sleeping in a bed) and would most likely be freed eventaully, as opposed to being worked like a dog every waking moment until you dropped dead.
Women’s lives weren’t always cozy, but wherever you see a bad thing happening to a woman, there is something worse happening to a nearby man.
Paul, music is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. Thank you.
Mr. N, my point was that Reich was an innovator who received no encouragement. His ideas were actually pretty fruity, but then, so are most of what we’re being asked to believe today. The order in which I put these men was random, though I put Jesus last because he was the most significant.
Welmer, thank you for the information about Rousseau. That was very interesting, and I never heard it before.
Just about all of Rousseau’s ideas should be taken with a few grains of salt. He was a believer in the blank slate (“Men are born free but everywhere are in chains”) and the noble savage. Further, he dumped all five of his own children into orphanages back when that was usually a death sentence. He was right about breastfeeding, but the old adage about stopped clocks applies here.
Superb article.
“The reality is that for nearly all of human history, drudgery has been the lot of almost everyone, male and female.”
Bingo.
I’ll add this from Kanazawa…
“However, in the only two biologically meaningful measures of welfare – longevity and reproductive success – women are and have always been slightly better off than men. In every human society, women live longer than men, and more women attain some reproductive success; many more men end their lives as total reproductive losers, having left no genetic offspring.”
“Of course you never hear feminists complaining about the left end of the bell curve.”
Truth. Feminists want to compare most women to the top 10% of men and a handful of “masters of the universe” while completely ignoring the overwhelming evidence that points to the legitimacy of the bell curve.
this book makes a similair argument:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitability_of_Patriarchy
Although I think the above is a great article and I agree with it. I can not say that men who are on top in the sense of having political power deserve to be there because of their inherent suitability. In fact I suspect that most of us as MRAs would see politicians as rather a low life form.
I would just like to expand on this point a little. As I see it the most brilliant and talented people are seldom those who have any sort of power. Mozart was in fact a servant, and not to high a one at that. So was Haydn. Beethoven did a little better and had artistic freedom but certainly no power. Ironically those who did have power and where the ‘most important people at the time’ are in fact only remembered at all today because of their association with these geniuses.
Similarly I don’t think Bush, Blair or any world leader are in any sense political Mozarts or Einsteins. So I for one discount these people as in any way being at the high end of the bell curve, except in the sense that they have an outstanding ability to dominate others.
Having read so much on MRAs sites condemning politicians I would hardly see it as consistent if any of use where to argue that the political elite which I guess is mostly male is there because of any sort of superiority and deserve to be where they are. What do any of you have to say about this?
Good point, Paul. I’m pretty sure she meant “on top of the list of achievers” rather than at the top of the social hierarchy. There are plenty of men with a lot of power who are utterly mediocre human beings. But here again, this gets back to the true goal of feminism: power. It isn’t about benefiting mankind or making a scientific breakthrough as much as it is about being able to exercise authority over others.
I apologize for the confusion. Your inclusion of Reich did fit with the subject of the paragraph, ” Standing alone is a male practice,” but I don’t feel it fits with this part of your thesis, “thank [men] for all that they have given [women.]”
The other men in your list significantly changed the world. I’m not a psychologist but it doesn’t seem like Reich did a whole lot. Since what could be called his contributions consisted of groping women while under his care to encourage their “orgasmic energy” and scamming a gullible public with magical cancer curing boxes, if I were a woman I would not want to thank him for those things.
I hope you see why I was confused by his inclusion.
@Paul,
Ability does not automatically confer nobility. There is no question that Attila the Hun was an exceptional specimen of something. The fact that whatever that something is would not be something an admirable man would want to emulate in no way affects the fact that he has it.
Politicians excel in ability and drive to seek and grab power. The top 1% of people with this drive and ability will always be the ones in power.
Ironic that every form of electronic communication women use to ‘debate’ this was invented by men, even the electrical transmission was invented by Tesla. Magneto-electric (scalar) discovered by Maxwell–and I’m glad you mentioned Reich–orgone/ ki/chi/prana/pneuma.
A man has children of the mind, a woman has children of the body. Together, they create civilisation.
Currently, the latter is seriously threatened, rather than the first.
Does anyone actually believe this was written by a woman? It’s not a coincidence that “she” has never posted a picture of herself on “her” website.
Another example used by David Stove in his article “The Intellectual Capacity of Women” is that of monks and nuns in monasteries and convents over the centuries. He points out that monks produced a lot intellectually, but nuns, despite the opportunity to do so, by and large did not. Hildegard of Bingen is the “exception that proves the rule”.
On the happiness of modern men, I remember my father’s generation of men as very stressed. These were successful middle-class men in Australia in the 1960s. They were often sole breadwinners and clearly under a lot of pressure. On the other hand, I have had as much success as these men, but have never had the pressure of being the sole earner (my wife has worked part-time a fair bit), and we are talking about her taking over sole breadwinning when I hit 60. In the “good old days”, I would have been expected to work until I was 65. I hope to enjoy retirement, since I have plenty of interests.
On inventiveness, we have a TV program here in Australia, on the public broadcaster, called The Inventors. It showcases inventors and their inventions, and is basically a competition. The TV channel (ABC) has done its best to feminise the program, with female judges, and the first inventor on the new series was a woman. But there is no hiding the fact that the new inventions presented are usually that of a man or men.
@Emily
“Does anyone actually believe this was written by a woman?”
What difference does it make?
Emily, look around at other blogs — only a few people post photos of themselves when they’re writing about controversial stuff. And, yes, I do believe she is a woman; despite the fact that she is a very good writer and uncommonly rational, I can still see it in her writing style.
@Harry
It makes a difference because “she” is using “her” sex to bolster “her” credibility.
@Welmer
You can post your picture and stay anonymous. Just black out the face. In fact, all we’d have to see is a face-down shot of “her” holding a signs saying “Yes, it’s really me, the female misogynist”
“You can post your picture and stay anonymous. Just black out the face. In fact, all we’d have to see is a face-down shot of “her” holding a signs saying “Yes, it’s really me, the female misogynist”
All to please you huh?
Here is an ultra FeminOrc ‘blog’ titled ‘Wine, Cats, and Feminism’ that is just about as misandrist as one can get.
http://winecatsandfeminism.wordpress.com/
I put ‘blog’ in quotes because I see no evidence that it actually receives any traffic.
Or perhaps, given the title, this blog is really a parody.
Does anyone actually believe this was written by a woman? It’s not a coincidence that “she” has never posted a picture of herself on “her” website.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring_(logical_fallacy)#Red_herring
There are only two ways in which a woman can be a positive contributor to society :
1) Be a good mother to the next generation of citizens. Part of being a good mother is making sure that the children grow up with BOTH parents.
2) Be in a profession that contributes to the good of society. Women who are Doctors, Nurses, GOOD schoolteachers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and even chefs, etc. qualify. Lawyers, journalists, public sector workers, etc. do not.
That is about it. Women who achieve at least one, preferably both of the above, are useful to society.
So if a woman is 35, unmarried, and in some bullshit PR or lawyer job, she is a liability to society.
Now that’s funny, Emily. How could she bolster her credibility by being a woman here? She was invited because she’s good at writing about the issues we’re exploring here — that’s all.
I’ve got nothing against working with a woman when she’s actually proven her ability to get things done effectively and without drama. Do you?
Who is ‘Emily’, by the way? What is his/her track record or reputation?
Welmer: I have nothing against women either, but I’m not very tolerant of men who hide being the internet pretending to be something they’re not.
Emily, I can believe that the Female Masculinist is a woman, as easily as I can believe that you are a woman.
Back to the topic of the article, the real question is why are men more likely to invent somthing than women? Because men try to make themselves unique or valuable to capture the attention and ultimately the hearts if women. Evidence can be seen in the fact that most inventors, composers, and artists made their masterpiece before they got married. They generally cruised along afterward. The drive for a mate drives men to create. Freud reportedly said (I’m paraphrasing) all great artists will be men because women can make the ultimate creation. As a male artist who strives to make a masterpiece, I can see why women are mildly impressed. Because if I were a woman I’d say “That painting is quite nice the way you smeared around some pigments to resemble a person. Oh by the way did you see my masterpieces? They’re running around playing, also I didn’t just create them, I gave them life, they’re self aware, conscious, and independent. But keep working on that paint smearing with brushes on canvas. Some of it might go nicely with my couch.”
Men don’t have such confidence in themselves because they aren’t guaranteed to create offspring. In other times a few elite
males (tribal leaders, kings, chiefs) would monopolize all the women. So many males never got a chance to sire any offspring. Where as each female knows she can have a child, she knows it’s hers and all she has to do is wait for the dominant male to fertilize her. Because men have to prove their worthiness and capability they are compelled to create, invent and go to war.
Great article. Excellent stuff like this should be spread widely to the feminist blogosphere so that they could attempt to write a rebuttal to it.
Also, it should be noted that the author of this article, one ‘Female Masculinist,’ is a lesbian. Which leads me to ask: why do so many of the females who are actually great writers, or scientists, or philosophers, or thinkers and so on tend to be lesbians or at least outright ‘mannish.’? It seems that even within the female sex, the most ‘mannish’ females are the ones that actually accomplish the most.
Mr N
Yeah, that Tesla was a real flake as well, with his ideas about radiant energy and Wardenclyffe. Best to stay within the ‘proven’ dogma of scientism and ignore the entire 20th century. There’s some Nobel prize winning physicists, and that annoying protege of Einstein (Bohm) who haven’t followed the tenets of scientism either–shame on them!
I really don’t want to disagree with anybody here. So I am not doing so with you DUMBARTIST I am just explaining thing out of my experience.
Such creativity as I can claim came from an intense interest in what I was doing.It was the thing itself that engaged and fascinated me. I can not say with honesty that it was tied in with any other thoughts, or if it was this was only a minor part.
The main part of ‘ceativity’ for me was just the satisfaction involved in the thinking I had to do. I could not really tie this in with my need for a mate. In fact I would rather characterize such a need as being a distraction from creativity.
This bring me onto other unrelated point I would like to make. From my experience it is amazing that men manage to do or create anything. People often point to men’s sensual and sexual nature as explaining his behaviour. But I would aver that these are rather destructive forces which rather than inspire a man drain and dispirit him.
Seldom do I see anyone say, as I believe, that for men sex drive is really just a state of discontent. So it is a distraction and damaging to creativity. It seems part of our machismo to elevate sex up into some glorious extactic state of total joy and fulfilment. I think we are self decieved but then again I am only talking from my own experience.
“Seldom do I see anyone say, as I believe, that for men sex drive is really just a state of discontent. So it is a distraction and damaging to creativity. It seems part of our machismo to elevate sex up into some glorious extactic state of total joy and fulfilment. I think we are self decieved but then again I am only talking from my own experience.”
Paul,
I was reading through all these comments and the very same thoughts were running through my mind. I have my specific interests and passions like most other men, and I do them through no conscious desire to attract a mate – I do them for that sense of adventure and achievement that most here will understand. I see the very same channeling of energy at work amongst the PUAs – even though they are ostensibly motivated by the desire to pick-up women, they go about it with the same clinical analysis, the same theorizing, creativity, risk-taking and testing, the same single-mindedness that other men go about whatever it is that occupies them.
Explaining it all away as an adaptation geared towards winning a mate may be plausible, but it’s only a theory – and it has rivals. Take what we are doing now, what I am doing now: attempting to add nuance to a phenomenon that we are all familiar with, and sharing our thoughts and ideas as to why men spend so much of their time willingly doing what we are all examples of right now. I doubt a single one of us has the pursuit of a mate consciously on our minds as we instinctively engage this subject.
While I couldn’t possibly rule out reproductive success from any speculation as to why we are what we are, it strikes me that the creative and active aspect of ourselves is too easily dismissed when we concentrate on ‘access to mates’ as motivation.
As a simple intellectual exercise, imagine you were presented with a choice between two lives: a life without women, or a life without any other interests. It’s artificial I know, but the prospect of one or the other inspires two very different sorrows, and to my taste, the latter would be the more meaningless existence.
I can honestly say piercedhead that the only time in my life that I have know true fulfilment and contentment was that period when I was alone with no women about me where I was totally absorbed in my ‘interest’. This three month period of isolation was like no other period in my life and even though it was over 30 years ago now it is still the only time I have ever know true happiness.
Dear FM, I liked the article, but I’m not sure if I agree with the title: “Men are on Top Because they Deserve to Be”. Men are not on top, and never have been. Your own article suggests as much. The whole received landscape of sexual politics is completely wrong. It is women who have always been systematically advantaged.
Dear FM, just like Heretic, i liked the article, but I doubt the argument about being on top. Is doing most of the work, including inventing something new and after that have to ‘prove’ it to be something useful, and delivering the results of all this in nicely wrapped consumable packages a sign of being on top or a sign of being hopelessly emotionally dependent on the acceptance of women ? – To make a caricature of it – And who in the caricature is the ruler, the one being on top, that gives the thumb up or thumb down ? The whole show bears a remarkable similarity with a chimpanzee male that comes home, bruised and beaten, with a peace of meat hoping it might exchange for some sex. Very much on top indeed.
I wish I could come up with a total of men who have been murdered, killed in war, or died accidentally while working and contrast it with the number of women. I would shove that in the face of every feminist who bitches about masculine patriarchal oppression. The life of a man, on average, is far more difficult, dangerous, risky, and riddled with strife. The American feminist’s warped conception of “egalitarianism” is the ultimate insult to the sacrifices men are born to make.
Stronger sex? Physically often, but otherwise weaker. Males are much more prone to disease, for example retardation.
“Because if I were a woman I’d say “That painting is quite nice the way you smeared around some pigments to resemble a person. Oh by the way did you see my masterpieces? They’re running around playing, also I didn’t just create them, I gave them life, they’re self aware, conscious, and independent. But keep working on that paint smearing with brushes on canvas. Some of it might go nicely with my couch.” Men don’t have such confidence in themselves because they aren’t guaranteed to create offspring. ”
I am not clear if these are your words, DumbArtist, or if you are ascribing them to Freud. But no matter; they are quite wrong. Because women do not “create” children, or “give them life”. If you took a million women, placed them all by themselves in a comfortable, safe environment, but with no men, and asked them to create life, they would totally fail. None of them would be able to produce so much as a single baby on her own.
A baby is created only when a man’s sperm penetrates a woman’s egg. So at the very least it must be recognised that men have a vital role to play. The sperm is just as important as the egg.
But now here is an interesting point: medical science tells us that a woman does not actually “produce” eggs. They are already inside her from the day she is born. She does not generate any additional eggs at all, at any time in her life. All the eggs a woman will ever have, are there from day one. She is born with them as surely as she is born with a head, legs and arms. She will not grow or produce so much as one extra egg as long as she lives, any more than she will grow an extra head or an extra leg.
Quite the contrary: during her life she will only lose eggs. Her body will steadily discard them until she is no longer capable of bearing children.
So much for women as “creators” of life. They do not create a damned thing. They actually steadily destroy what they are born with.
Sperm however is a completely different matter. When a boy is born he does not have a single sperm in his body. But from puberty onwards he will generate sperm, and in vast quantities. Most men can and will carry on generating sperm within their own bodies for the rest of their lives. It is a process that has no natural end except with death.
It is amazing that such a vital process, the generation of sperm (spermatogenesis), has been so little investigated and is so poorly understood. For in any meaningful sense of the words, this is nothing less than the generation of life itself.
Consider. How do we define life? There are different opinions of course, but how about this:
A life form will have a defined and recognisable shape, with a definite inside and outside; it will be composed of soft tissue that is capable of changing; it has a specific purpose that it recognises and undertakes of its own volition; it is sensitive to its surroundings and reacts to them; it is capable of independent movement using its own resources, expending energy as it does so; it takes sustenance from its surroundings; it can exist outside of any parent’s body and without any contact with it; it is capable of contributing to the reproduction of its own kind; and it can undergo a process that is recognisable as death.
How is that for a working definition of life? I think that any thing that satisfies all those criteria has a perfectly reasonable claim to be a living entity. If so, step forward what we must acknowledge is a true life form: the sperm.
If I am right and sperm has a fair claim to be a living entity in its own right, then we must acknowledge an inescapable conclusion: that the act of spermatogenesis that takes place inside the bodies of males, is nothing less than the creation of life itself.
Without a female in sight.
Note the complete contrast to the bodies of females, which do not generate anything in addition to what they are born with; in fact quite the contrary, as women’s bodies steadily waste the reproductive material they inherited at birth.
We should not be misled by the fact that men generate sperm by the billions and trillions, and that over the course of time men have produced oceans of these creatures. The fact that they are so commonplace and easily produced should not diminish the miracle one iota. Men are creating life, minute by minute, day by day, week in week out, year in year out, all through their adult lives. But each new sperm is a new life and a new miracle. Over and over and over again do men achieve this.
So we should not be misled by any claims that it is women who create life. It is SPERM that create life, by sparking the otherwise inert and dependent female egg, that cannot survive or develop on its own, into reacting in a way that eventually forms a baby. It is simply that this miraculous reaction happens to take place inside the woman. But she is just the host to the reaction, not the creator of it. The growbag, not the seed. Egg and sperm must be joined, and that has to happen somewhere secure and protected; so it might as well be in a woman’s body. But it doesn’t have to be, and could just as well be anywhere else – and sometimes is, thanks to the development of modern science and medicine.
But when do we ever acknowledge, let alone celebrate, the astonishing achievement of spermatogenesis? Is it because it is happening on such a widespread scale, that we choose to take it for granted? Or because it is just men who do it, and we are not supposed to recognise anything of value in the male sex?
@ Another Paul
Great post and interesting observations!! Indeed, it is men who create life.
Another Paul,
Interesting thoughts about spermatogenesis. I can understand why women crowing about being the “creators of life” would be vexing because it is completely untrue, both men and women, both a sperm cell and ovum are required to create the zygote, or developing child. However I don’t know that I buy your contention that men “create” because they produce sperm but women do not “create” because all of their ovum are present at birth (or actually it is not all, millions of ovum don’t survive to birth). Both sperm and ovum are produced in the gonads of the body of the man or woman respectively, thus “creation” takes place in both women and men, though this “creation” occurs in women prior to or shortly after birth producing ovum or egg cells with long lives (though not fully mature until puberty) and in men it occurrs ongoingly throughout life following puberty producing shorter lived sperm cells. Both the male and female gamete function differently and neither can “create” human life on their own.
On the topic of men improving things…..men constantly tinker with things in order to figure out ways to improve them. We are just that way. Whatever we look at we are trying to improve it. I am a good example. I have been on the leading edge of software development for 27 years now. When I worked at IBM I invented a number of pieces of software that were then rolled out all across the world. I invented new ways of designing databases. I invented new ways of getting data into databases. Just in recent times some colleauges and I invented another generation of new ways of designing and populating databases based on new hardware that has recently become available.
In all my years in IT, I never saw a woman innovate anything. Not once. They can barely even do exactly as they are told in the most detailed specifications.
This is an excellent article that pays attention to logic and facts and smashes through the brittle curtain feminism has constructed around our western civilisation to deceive the people in it (at least, on this issue).
A study of Wikipedia found that women were not contributors to the free project. While men invested many hours to the ‘human knowledge’ project, women were remarkably absent-only a few of them invested their time to it.
I am appalled at the positive reception this article has received. It is a complete misunderstanding of modern feminism. The point of feminism is not to denigrate males or male achievements, it is to promote equal opportunities, rights, and freedoms for everyone, regardless of gender.
True feminism does not strive to promote women as the superior sex, but anti-feminism seems to constantly suggest male sovereignty.
“Men’s work has also been more dangerous. Women weren’t expected to defend the country from invaders (or do the invading, for that matter) or hunt wild animals. While men were being shot, stabbed, run through, gored, and trampled, their poor oppressed wives were stuck at home, safe and sound.”
I would rather die than see one of my loved ones die. These women that stayed home while their husbands, sons, fathers, brothers went to war probably suffered every day thinking of the fate of their loved ones…to suggest that they were cozy and happy at home is cruel and untrue.
Also, war and invasion are expressions of male rage. Why does male rage take this form? Female rage takes many forms, perhaps self-harm, emotional abuse, anorexia. “It does not take the form of a woman picking up a machine gun and blowing people away. It really does not.” Such events are incredibly rare. “So it seems like one of the distinguished features of the ones performing these acts of mass slaughter is maleness.”
You want examples of women making scientific achievements? How about Marie Curie, a pioneer in the field of radioactivity and the first person to receive two nobel prizes, or Barbara McClintock who received a nobel prize for her discovery of mobile genetic elements?
This article seems to focus on scientific discovery, a field in which women were a significant minority. Now, more and more women are joining the scientific field, with the Nobel prizes in chemistry and in physiology & medicine going to women in 2009.
That is NOT to say that the discoveries made by men are not brilliant and essential to our lives… it’s just, forgive me for not understanding how certain men making extraordinary achievements, means that women should sit around and be thankful to ALL men…as if maleness equates to greatness. Most of the world’s tyrants and dictators were/are male, would it be fair for us to say that we should punish all men for the atrocities committed by a few?
Alicia,
I will not attempt to engage in any real debate here; the fact that you are attempting to argue purely with anecdotes suggests that it would be pointless to begin with.
So let me, instead, be blunt:
You are full of shit or so misinformed as to be downright ignorant; possibly both. Either the definition of feminism you subscribe to is an obscure minority view, or you are just obfuscating your real goals. Simply put, yes, most feminists are anti-male.
Look not at their words. Look at their actions.
Look at divorce laws. Look at child custody laws. Look at discrimination suits, hiring quotas, and arguments about “equal” pay for less work.
Feminism is anti-male.
Alicia:“True feminism does not strive to promote women as the superior sex…”
I couldn’t care less what you or others define what their feminism means to them. Men everywhere have a pressing problem with female supremacism, and it takes many forms. That you feel the need to blame wars on all men suggests you are part of this wider problem. Are you prepared to award me a Nobel Prize for just being a man as keenly as slander me and so many other men for being war-mongers? Should I be acknowledged a great artist, chess grandmaster, eminent mathematician, composer of genius, creator of civilization, master chef, inventor of technology etc etc simply because the common element in all these things is nearly always male? Of course not. But you equate me with a machine-gun killer, even though that’s much more rare.
It’s women like you who give this article credence.
My issue with this article is the fact that simply being male is equated with greatness and a superiority.
Saying, “Men are on top because they deserve to be” makes no fucking sense. Brilliant scientists like Einstein, Marie Curie, and Newton deserve their praise because of their achievements…not because of their genders.
I do not feel threatened by oppressed groups, such as ethnic minorities or homosexuals, gaining more social and economic freedom and power…so i’m actually curious as to why you feel so threatened by female empowerment? (I’m serious, please explain)
I can’t speak for FM, but female empowerment to many men here means getting one’s life destroyed by poorly behaved, irrational, emotionally insane women who have the legal equivalent of a loaded gun in their hands.
“Also, war and invasion are expressions of male rage. Why does male rage take this form?”
That sounds like something a kindergartner might say if you asked them a question about their understanding of the purpose of the military.
Speaking of kindergartners,it is a fact that women are responsible for the vast majority of child murders. Shall we then begin to speak of the “infanticidal female rage” and ask “why does female rage take this form”? That would certainly make things “equal”,wouldn’t it?
You claim feminism is about equality, and then with the next breath, you stereotype males as warmongers and violent. Do you think female manifestations of violence, such as the murder of the disabled,children, and elderly people,often family members, should be used to paint every woman as a potential child murderer or abuser of the elderly?
Care to comment on the unnaturally high incidences of intimate partner violence,including murder,among lesbian couples?
Women are every bit as violent as men, the only difference is that they are almost never sentenced to death and rarely spend more than a decade in prison when they commit acts of violence. Keep your stereotypes to yourself, you misandrist pig.
Alicia:: “Saying, “Men are on top because they deserve to be” makes no fucking sense.”
Of course it makes sense – if you take the time to consider the several meanings of the sentence, rather than assume that the meaning that offends you is the only one.
Amongst achievers in all walks of life, those at the very top are men – in almost everything. That this very obvious fact gets attacked by so many women demonstrates something more about their sensitivity than their sense.
“Brilliant scientists like Einstein, Marie Curie, and Newton deserve their praise because of their achievements…not because of their genders.”
It’s ridiculous to assume that because men dominate the ranks of super-achievers, then all men are super-achievers – yet this you quite openly state. This abuse of logic, as well as your use of coarse language, makes it fairly clear you are responding out of anger – why are you so threatened by male achievement, when you seem to consider yourself above such lowly sentiments?
And for what it’s worth, Marie Curie is not in the same league as Einstein and Newton – she wouldn’t make the top 100 of most influential scientists (unless you count her being a role model for women, but that’s hardly science).
Men And War
This notion that men are prone to war-mongering is extremely interesting to me, because my understanding of history and evolution (limited though it is) tells me that men HAD to go to war.
There was no other way for men to behave.
Those who refused to go to war were killed off, and their offspring disappeared from the tree of life; e.g. see
http://www.angryharry.com/esWeregoingtobecomeextinct.htm
It’s no different from different groups of organisms competing for resources.
They and their kin either got the resources they needed, or they disappeared into the abyss.
In other words, it HAD to be the case that the men alive today were the descendants of those who went to war.
Thus, our feminist friend above – Alicia – is a descendant of men who went to war.
And if her male ancestors had possessed her attitude, she would not now exist.
re The Fifth Horseman (“There are only two ways in which a woman can be a positive contributor to society : 1) Be a good mother to the next generation of citizens. (…) 2) Be in a profession that contributes to the good of society.”)
I think the same is true to men. Good fathers are just as essential as good mothers and being in a profession that contributes to the good of society is an equally important contribution from all capable human beings. Though your division of “important” and “not important” jobs seems somewhat arbitrary.
re Eman (“Which leads me to ask: why do so many of the females who are actually great writers, or scientists, or philosophers, or thinkers and so on tend to be lesbians or at least outright ‘mannish.’?”)
It’s interesting that you say being a lesbian is mannish. Feminists tend to think the opposite, some radical ones even say lesbians are the most feminine or the only real feminists (a notion I hate because I’m straight and I’m a feminist in the sense that I believe every human being should have equal opportunities in life, regardless of gender. “Humanist” would be a better word, if it wasn’t already taken.)
—-
The bell curve explanation is the best, but I think that it explains only the gender differences in science, not in arts. It is true that most scientists are men but there were many more women in the artistic world who just did not became part of the canon (mostly compiled by men) even though they were as good as the men of their era. (Anyone here heard of Anyte of Tegea who was compared to Homer by her contemporaries?)
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on a side note: Can you link the study about Wikipedia? Does it have other data, like which countries are contributors from? WP is one of my great passions on the internet
>Alicia,says:
My issue with this article is the fact that simply being male is equated with greatness and a superiority.
>>>
Men are inherently greater than and superior to female humans.
This goes double for people of Alicia’s aptitude.
———
Why aren’t people of Alicia’s aptitude working on garbage truck or in sawmills and slaughter house? She is at least as dumb as those males. Why is she literate and able to pretend she is philosophizing? This goes for all the wimmin studies types.
Where are they getting their food? Their shelter?
The Fifth Horseman said:
There are only two ways in which a woman can be a positive contributor to society :
1) Be a good mother to the next generation of citizens. Part of being a good mother is making sure that the children grow up with BOTH parents.
2) Be in a profession that contributes to the good of society. Women who are Doctors, Nurses, GOOD schoolteachers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and even chefs, etc. qualify. Lawyers, journalists, public sector workers, etc. do not.
That is about it. Women who achieve at least one, preferably both of the above, are useful to society.
So if a woman is 35, unmarried, and in some bullshit PR or lawyer job, she is a liability to society.
What about a man who doesn’t want kids who’s in some bullshit PR or lawyer job? And it’s interesting how you prefer a woman to do both, sense there are many people who get all worked up about a working mom.
And what about this part: “Part of being a good mother is making sure that the children grow up with BOTH parents.”? Why alleviate the father of the responsibility of being a part of his children’s lives. Aren’t BOTH parents supposed to make sure that their children grow up with both of them?
Paul said:
I have another example for you. It was common at the end of the nineteenth century for women to have ’social accomplishments’ like being able to play the piano. So during that time they had every opportunity to develop their own music. They did not. However during the same period Black American Men invented both blues and jazz. No one in their right mind could say that Black American Men at the end of the nineteenth century where a privileged group yet they invented two musical forms. Surely these men had far worse conditions than a drawing room.
Well it’s one thing to develop music. It’s another to get it out there to the public, and that’s where the problem lied. No one was interested in any works created by a woman. Yes black men weren’t privileged but I think that sense they were men they had the….power and opportunity if you will….to invent those musical forms. I mean, why do you think women used male pennames when getting their works published?
Ok last post lol.
About the article itself. What you fail to acknowledge is that the social norms of those times were against women becoming anything but mothers and wives. No, men didn’t literally chain men to the stove barefoot and pregnant, but they for the most part (or rather society) weren’t that supportive of the idea of women becoming doctors, scientists, etc. I mean come on, isn’t it true that at one point in this nation’s history, women weren’t allowed to apply for patents for their inventions? And also, women were indeed either not allowed to attend schools and universities, or it was looked down upon.
And even if women used their leisure for research and study, would they have been able to get those findings published, taken seriously, or even considered? I highly doubt it, because all anyone would see is that those studies were from a woman and that automatically makes them worthless.
Men did not interfere with women’s entry to the midwife profession or tell them how to go about practicing it. No midwife invented the forceps. Then, a few centuries ago, some rich decadent women decided to have male doctors deliver their babies instead of midwives. Within a century, one of these men had invented the forceps, which have saved untold lives. Women can do something for hundreds of generations without innovating. As soon as men turn their hands to a pursuit, they are devising ways to improve it.
Yet when males doctors ventured into obstetrics, they tried to make midwifery obsolete despite all those centuries of practice, as if the two couldn’t work together. They wanted to basically take over the “last frontier” if you will. And it’s also common knowledge that when doctors started delivering babies, there were incorrect, warped, and even harmful ideas and practices surrounding the treatment of mothers and babies. Mothers were confined to the beds during labor and she couldn’t try different methods of childbirth. She HAD to be on her back in stirrups. Not to mention that breastfeeding was then looked down upon. And there was a time when the mother was almost put to sleep during childbirth, and I’m not talking about C-sections. There was also cases in which bonding between mother and child were interrupted by a policy of separating mother and child for no reason. Childbirth in general was made into this big emergency instead of a natural occurance. No I’m not forgetting about high-risk pregnancies and yes I know that there are actual emergencies labor and birth.
I’m not saying that doctors didn’t contribute greatly to the area of obstetrics because they did. The cases that I described above were the early days of obstetrics. But don’t be quick to disregard midwives and their ideas and contributions. Think about it, why do you think midwifery is making a comeback?
Oh, and midwives did invent the Gaskin Maneuver.
If you start to point any of this out to a feminist, she will usually insist that men were encouraged to achieve while women weren’t. To women, this argument makes sense, because women are deeply dependent on the approval of those around them. Standing alone is a male practice. There are women who can do it, but they are far, far rarer than men who can. But consider the hostility which every man who invented or discovered anything new has been greeted
The thing is, men be inventors, scientists, discoverers, musicians PERIOD without anyone batting an eye. That was the issue that women faced. Yes men who invented or discovered something new faced hostility, but they didn’t face hostility for the ACT of inventing or discovering in the first place because they were men. Women would have been faced and have been faced with that hostility because they were women inventing and discovering.
So yeah, women weren’t encouraged to achieve in the sciences, philisophy, etc. as were the men due to social norms.
Because, Renee, under the current family law system women have the right and power to kick out the father for no reason at all at any time and retain full custody over the kids. Fathers serve at the mother’s whim — it is slavery system, currently. So, yes, mothers have the primary responsibility in this area. Remember, contrary to popular stereotypes about husbands walking out on wives and children, the actual scenario is wives leaving husbands and taking the children with them. Women have 100% of the power in the family court, and with that power comes responsibility, like it or lump it.
Thanks for your comments, Renee, I was starting to feel uncomfortable by the fact that women adding to this discussion will be judged by the Emilies and Alicias here…
Firstly, all men are not war mongers. Was it not the iron lady who took us to the Falklands? Thousands of women served in both great wars. Both at the front and at home in factories. The actual dirty job of killing was mainly the job of men but not solely.
Secondly i would like to remind all women that the lovely home they are now reading this from was built by man, so that you would not perish through the cold winters and could bring up our offspring in relative comfort. I suggest that you thank us and get on with the job silently as men have suffered in silence for milleniums. Or, are you modern women not upto the job of motherhood???????
Renee:“About the article itself. What you fail to acknowledge is that the social norms of those times were against women becoming anything but mothers and wives.”
Usual ‘gender is a construct’ waffle.
The social norms of the time also threatened men with being burned at the stake for heresy for suggesting the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe, as per the Church’s teachings – but Galileo went ahead and not only said it, he proved it. Against the advice of everyone who had his welfare at heart. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Every great man has defied social norms – he didn’t wait until it was ’socially acceptable’ to do what he did. He made what was unacceptable or unknown mainstream.
I don’t know if Galileo hesitated in showing the telescope he invented to the world until he filed a patent. I suspect the patent system wasn’t even around (some menhad yet to invent it no doubt). And I doubt Einstein felt too constrained about developing paradigm-breaking theories about the nature of the universe because he wasn’t on some ivy-league campus somewhere surrounded by sycophants (I believe he was sweating it as a clerk in a patent office).
The problem with your kinds of arguments Renee, and they are typical of the whole feminine public discourse, is that they are really affirmations of women’s weakness. Their terror of stepping out and away from the ’socially acceptable’.
How many gifted young women are capable of standing up to the intense pressure their peers place on them and tell them all to go stick it – not in some popular, glam rebel-girl way, but in a way that nearly all women would condemn? For a woman to choose a low-status, socially ostracized position because it was her conviction and passion that took her there would show her to have that essential quality that distinguishes most women from most men. (Tolstoy goes right into this with ‘Anna Karenina’ – a woman who does precisely this out of intense love, and the ensuing social isolation drives her mad and eventually to suicide).
Men invent nearly everything because they are not afraid of social isolation – many even crave it. And it’s this indifference to social norms and expectations that is vital to the birth and development of new ideas that aren’t yet part of the social fabric. It was men that invented higher education and the universities for its propagation, men who fought for and developed land registries so that ordinary people could freely buy and sell land, and have their ownership respected. It was men who developed electoral systems that allowed them to depose incompetent leaders without all the blood and gore of a battle (how’s that for our war-mongering natures – a rich history of the things men have done to avoid wars). And it was men who developed the idea of universal suffrage – extending the vote to commoners. People who didn’t own land. It was this wave of reform that gave the vote to common men and women at about the same time (not what the suffragettes did).
The great truth is that throughout history, as unpleasant as much of it may seem to us now, under the leadership of men the trend has been clearly toward better and easier lives for all, and fairer law and justice. Now that women are starting to have a strong influence in policy and law, key elements of justice are being rolled back, police are becoming more like secret police, freedom of expression is being snuffed out, slavery is re-appearing, property rights are being diminished, families are being decimated and the institutes of higher learning are turning out dunces.
Fortunately, the fearful cannot contain the bold and this will all end up being just another chapter in the book of wrong-turns that is already overfull.
Pierced Head, you are commenter # 1,000!
I’ll try to think of a suitable prize.
Pierced Head, you are commenter # 1,000!
I’ll try to think of a suitable prize.
Don’t go to any great trouble Welmer. Amy model German car will do fine.
Piercedhead,
I admit that perhaps you’re right on a few points. But once again, men could be inventors, scientists, discoverers, musicians PERIOD without anyone batting an eye….
That was the issue that women faced. Yes men who invented or discovered something new faced hostility, but they didn’t face hostility for the ACT of inventing or discovering in the first place because they were men. Women would have been faced and have been faced with that hostility because they were women inventing and discovering.
If a woman couldn’t go to school, not even a university, then how could she have the opportunity to research, study, etc. anything? If no one would publish, consider, or listen to anything a woman invented or said simply because she was a woman, then she could only go so far.
Maybe women for the most part weren’t brave enough to stand up to social norms. But you have to admit that the scenerios and realities of men and women were very different. Because of that, I’m always reluctant to compare the two in regards to societal contributions and hardships.
And no I’m not disregarding contributions by men.
I’m sleepy so I hope my last post made sense lol.
How about a ripped off hood ornament on a plastic chain?
How about a ripped off hood ornament on a plastic chain?
That pretty much describes the car I already have. But thanks for the thought.
Renee:“I admit that perhaps you’re right on a few points. But once again, men could be inventors, scientists, discoverers, musicians PERIOD without anyone batting an eye….“
There’s that essential feminine trait again. You care that someone else might bat an eye – so much that you’re prepared to argue that it’s this fear that suppressed the expression of female genius in the past.
Which do you think the higher social evaluation: “that young Isaac Newton is always sitting around reading books, saying nothing and jotting in that notepad of his, unlike his cousin Jimbo there who likes to hunt, play football, is always quick with a joke and is so very popular with the girls”?
Men and boys are subjected to social assessments all the time, and the purpose is always to bend them in a certain direction. But they repudiate it so much more than girls and women do. They didn’t become scientists because it was ’socially acceptable’ to become scientists – how could they, when science didn’t really come into being until about the time Francis Bacon described the scientific method for the first time? Perhaps you mean men were freer to do whatever they liked without censure, even if it was to invent something that no-one had yet heard of? Hardly – Galileo wasn’t the only one threatened with death or excommunication. Plenty of great men died impoverished, because they followed their hearts rather than consider the material implications of expending their energies in something that wouldn’t repay them. Most of the celebrated writers, artists and composers didn’t have university educations to help them along – they just did what they couldn’t stop themselves from doing.
Renee::“If a woman couldn’t go to school, not even a university, then how could she have the opportunity to research, study, etc. anything? If no one would publish, consider, or listen to anything a woman invented or said simply because she was a woman, then she could only go so far.”
Again, more of the poverty of thinking of modern women. Thomas Hardy never went to university – was denied a place in one because he was a common man – and lamented it bitterly in his novel ‘Jude the Obscure’. Didn’t stop him from writing those splendid novels. As for women not being published, plenty were – and I don’t mean just the Brontes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, George Sand, Elizabeth Gaskill, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Browning, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson etc – plenty of nobodies made it into print as well.
The question about how could a woman advance herself without access to a university is quite an interesting one. The whole history of mathematics is loaded with men who did little more than buy a few books, exchange letters with fellow enthusiasts and spend huge amounts of time buried in thought and conjecture – alone. Galois’s work, written while he was still a kid in his teens, wasn’t fully understood by his peers and went on to become massively influential (you might like to read a little of his life – there you’ll learn that his mother was quite the academic herself. Somehow she managed to become a scholar in Latin in early 19th century France despite the supposed barring of women from education). There are so many like him. But there were plenty of girls of wealthy families as well, who had all the leisure in the world. For some reason no record remains of brilliant girls buying a few math books, burying themselves in the subject and sending a few theoretical ideas off to the premier thinkers of their time in a letter (they could have signed themselves George if they feared not being taken seriously). The thing is, if they had done anything like Galois, Cauchy, Leibniz, Lagrange etc, there’s no way it could have been hidden. Once the great mind exposes the profound idea, the cat is out of a bag into which there is no going back.
The argument can be made that it would be near impossible now to make progress in any established discipline without access to a university education, but as we all know, at this very time that traditional research requires university resources, the universities are majority female.
What I find especially interesting about your wording is the comment “simply because she was a woman, then she could only go so far”.
Where do you suppose people of genius go? What does “going far” mean to you? For the true geniuses, they don’t go anywhere. The reward is the enterprise itself. For the great mathematicians, musicians, philosophers and writers, they went nowhere much further than their study desks and the world of thought they buried themselves in. It’s impossible to obstruct them.
But for those motivated by the desire for other people to be appreciative of them, none of this makes sense, or is important.
Piercedhead,
They didn’t become scientists because it was ’socially acceptable’ to become scientists – how could they, when science didn’t really come into being until about the time Francis Bacon described the scientific method for the first time? Perhaps you mean men were freer to do whatever they liked without censure, even if it was to invent something that no-one had yet heard of? Hardly – Galileo wasn’t the only one threatened with death or excommunication.
Of they didn’t become scientists just because it was socially acceptable. But if they wanted to be one in the first place, that was fine since they were men. They grew up with more options and opportunities. No one told them that they couldn’t do or be anything because of their sex. Of course there were males in poverty, but if they wanted to be scientists and had the means for it, then fine. And I guess my problem is male scientists were censured because people disagreed with them. Female scientists were most likely censured because they were women.
I’m reminded of a little story by Virginia Woolf called Shakespeare’s Sister
But there were plenty of girls of wealthy families as well, who had all the leisure in the world. For some reason no record remains of brilliant girls buying a few math books, burying themselves in the subject and sending a few theoretical ideas off to the premier thinkers of their time in a letter (they could have signed themselves George if they feared not being taken seriously).
And THAT is the problem I have been stating. That a female scientist, researcher, composer, etc. would have had to use a male penname; that if anyone found out that an idea, study, work of art was by a female, then it was automatically worthless. I also think that if you grow up being in a society that said that women couldn’t be this or that, if that was what you were taught as a child, then there wouldn’t be alot of female scientists. But perhaps women for the most part naturally aren’t interested in that type of stuff.
And once again, you once again made some good points.
What I meant about “going far” is their ideas, works of art, discoveries, etc. being made public and known for years to come. No, I’m not saying that notoriety is the main motivation, but scientists do publish or share their discoveries to the public, if not other scientists.
I’m heading out the door, so I might add more to this.
“But there were plenty of girls of wealthy families as well, who had all the leisure in the world. For some reason no record remains of brilliant girls buying a few math books, burying themselves in the subject and sending a few theoretical ideas off to the premier thinkers of their time in a letter (they could have signed themselves George if they feared not being taken seriously).”
Renee::”And THAT is the problem I have been stating. That a female scientist, researcher, composer, etc. would have had to use a male penname; that if anyone found out that an idea, study, work of art was by a female, then it was automatically worthless. I also think that if you grow up being in a society that said that women couldn’t be this or that, if that was what you were taught as a child, then there wouldn’t be alot of female scientists. But perhaps women for the most part naturally aren’t interested in that type of stuff.”
And this is where so many feminine arguments drift – to excuses based on unsupportable conjecture. The thing I threw in about using a male pen-name was meant to be ironic, seeing as how it’s such a staple in feminist argument.The whole ‘women had to use pen-names to be taken seriously’ spiel was constructed from only two examples – George Eliot and the Bronte sisters. The fact is, George Eliot chose a man’s name because she didn’t want to be associated with the cheesy-romance end of the market – an association that women writers had created for themselves. Charlotte Bronte goes on record for having said that they initially wrote under non-feminine names (Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell – they preserved their initials) because they wanted to retain their anonymity. They specifically chose indeterminate names – I’ve never met a man called Currer, Ellis or Acton – because they didn’t want to deceive the public into thinking they were men, and neither did they want to reveal anything about themselves (which is rather silly, because one can distinguish a woman from a man by reading them as easily as looking at them). My guess is they were really flying a kite – they didn’t know whether their writing was going to sell or not, so they didn’t risk the rest of their years carrying a failed enterprise with their name on it. As soon as they achieved any degree of success, they switched to their real names without hesitation. Another thing to consider is that the reading market was principally female – same as today. If any presumptions were being made about the value of a writer based on her sex, it would chiefly come from other women. As for the publishers, they had no problem publishing all the other women of the time.
The argument that women ‘had to use pen-names to be taken seriously’ is pure bunk, and it doesn’t become less rubbishy in the repeated telling. It’s grade-A ‘poor little me’ victimology.
Any young woman who took the trouble to buy a few maths books and arrive at the same brilliance as Cauchy or Galois could have written her thinking and conclusions and mailed it to the big men of the time, just as Cauchy and Galois did. The merit would have been recognized immediately, and acknowledged. Bear in mind that in these earlier days, ground-breaking mathematical proofs didn’t take up reams of paper as they do today – a sheet or two was common. A proof bearing a woman’s name would have been such a novelty that many men would have prioritized the reading of it.
Women take a lot more notice of what other people say than men do. If you read back through your posts, the repeating theme is ‘what women were allowed to do’. The assumption of a limit on their activities is a given, and that limit always takes the form of other people’s approval. That’s the essence of their stunted development.
Even today, with women in professional roles, government and academia, they are all there because a huge effort was made to make it ’socially acceptable’ for women to do what they wouldn’t have done on their own. They had to be praised, built-up, preened and told they were wonderful – not just as good as any man, but better. And once that massive exercise in old-fashioned flattery was played out, women moved as one from one role in society to another in the course of a generation. They move in herds, and the herd is forever sensitive to ’social acceptability’. That’s the glue that binds them together, and the barrier to them being individually original.
It’s often amusing to read of women who bemoan men’s lack of ’social skills’. The comical part is that the moaner usually demonstrates none of the empathy for another’s point of view that we commonly associate with social skills, nor any great capacity for listening. What she means is that men do and say things that make her cringe a little – things she and other women wouldn’t engage in. It’s not so much a thought out thing, but a detection of an irritant in the order of things. It’s this slavishness to the cringe that makes women handicap themselves so much.
We men know the cringe, but seem less inclined to be bothered by it. We’re more inclined to make fun of it, or glory in it – just to show how little it matters to us. It’s interesting that the men most likely to groom themselves so that they don’t cause this reaction in women – the ones who studiously avoid causing the cringe are the ones women are most drawn to. The men who are most like themselves in this regard.
Piercedhead,
I appreciate that you didn’t result and rely on insults in order to get your point across. I admit that you post gave me pause and made me think about some things.
You’re in danger of distinguishing yourself Renee. Cordiality across the gender divide is so rare that I’m a little stunned. The appreciation is mutual.
Just a reminder:
“Men in teams – subordinated self-sacrificing, disposable – got the human species from caves to palaces. When we watch men’s teams at work, we pay homage to 10,000 years of male achievements, a record of vision, ingenuity and Herculean labor that feminism has been too mean spirited to acknowledge.”
…………Camille Paglia
I had written a similar article on the eve of International mens day 2007
but it was of course extremely raw becuase my language skills are quite rotten really
But amazing Article for the approaching international Mens day 2009 on November 19th
Interesting article.
My main objection is with the closing statement:
“Let’s stop blaming men for imaginary oppression and instead thank them for all that they have given to us.”
It seems too generalized and callous. It would also be broad and callous of me to say that “men oppress women”, rather we are in a society where the “macho” male has been glorified and the objectification of women has been eroticized. It is not only that men objectify women, but that women are wanting to be objectified because that is what works best in a consumerist culture.
One of the most cited feminist texts, Marilyn Frye’s “Oppression” suggests that the difference between male and female oppression is that women are categorically oppressed, whereas men are individually oppressed. For the world at large, I believe this to be fundamentally true.
However, I also agree that under the pretense of helping women, many wrong steps are being taken which result in male oppression. The most notable example I can think of is regarding child custody laws, where women are almost always favoured.
I am disappointed that a lot of feminism has become militant and radical. I am currently doing a minor in Women’s Studies and I find it alarming that a lot of my peers are feeling angry and bitter toward men in general and every instance where they feel wronged has become a case of men “oppressing” them. So, yes, the term is used rather liberally, and it is used wrongfully toward men, but to say that female oppression in general is “imaginary” is also unfair.
I’d love to hear some other feedback and maybe this discussion can be elaborated on.
Oh, and Another Paul, it is interesting that you would call women wasteful for being born with eggs rather than producing them.
You said:
“Quite the contrary: during her life she will only lose eggs. Her body will steadily discard them until she is no longer capable of bearing children.
So much for women as “creators” of life. They do not create a damned thing. They actually steadily destroy what they are born with.”
But really it can all be flipped around based on the language one chooses to use. This is a sample from an article by Emily Martin.
“The real mystery is why the male’s vast production of sperm is
not seen as wasteful. Assuming that a man “produces” 100 million
(10′) sperm per day (a conservative estimate) during an average
reproductive life of sixty years, he would produce well over two trillion sperm in his lifetime. Assuming that a woman “ripens” one
egg per lunar month, or thirteen per year, over the course of her
forty-year reproductive life, she would total five hundred eggs in
her lifetime. But the word “waste” implies an excess, too much
produced. Assuming two or three offspring, for every baby a woman
produces, she wastes only around two hundred eggs. For every
baby a man produces, he wastes more than one trillion (1012)
sperm.”
That hardly seems fair when it’s directed back at you, right?
Fact is men and women create life together, the sperm AND the egg are both necessary, so I will appreciate spermatogenesis and I would hope that you would show the same appreciation for the functions of a woman’s body.
””””’Assuming two or three offspring, for every baby a woman
produces, she wastes only around two hundred eggs. For every
baby a man produces, he wastes more than one trillion (1012)
sperm.”””””””’
That is why the optimal life for a man is too impregnate the women while they do everything else.
Waste is a sin he he he
I’m wondering, did you know that in Victorian times, male doctors caused thousands of women to die of childbed fever because they did not wash their hands after examining corpses?
In the Netherlands, where 1/3 of births are at home, attended by midwives, the mortality rate is *signifcantly* lower for births than in North America.
The introduction of the medical field into childbirth has had mixed consequences. Some good may have come from it, but some not-so-good things have as well.
For more information on childbirth, check out the following books:
Obstetric Myths Versus Research Realities by Henci Goer
The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer
Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin
The Politics of Birth by Sheila Kitzinger
Rediscovering Birth by Sheila Kitzinger
Also, watch following dvds:
With Woman: A Documentary about women, midwives & birth
http://www.amazon.com/Woman-Documentary-about-women-midwives/dp/B000KJTBTW/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1257297987&sr=8-6
The Business of Being Born
http://www.amazon.com/Business-Being-Julia-Barnett-Tracy/dp/B0013LL2XY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1257297987&sr=8-2
I really think that you would find these books interesting to read. You probably have an opposing viewpoint from me on the subject, but you might find it worth it to read, if only to know the position you are debating against. You can probably find some of them at the library, if you don’t want to buy them. And for the videos, I know I saw Business of Being Born at the video rental place.
Take care… God bless.
Yes, and just about every other patient operated on by Victorian doctors also had increased risks because of the lack of proper medical hygiene. Their failure to have made an advancement we now think of as commonplace does not mean they were not making progress.
Most people in the Netherlands live 5km or less from a hospital. The average distance in the US is more than triple that. Living closer to the hospital means that you only have to leave to try to get there once a complication begins (assuming it is not identified beforehand), allowing for a higher rate of births outside of the hospital, and a higher survival rate. The fact that the populace of the Netherlands is healthier (in particular, less likely to be over- or under-weight) is also relevant to their lower infant mortality.
No one is claiming that doctors always do what is best; but they have consistently acted and experimented in an effort to improve results.
“I’m wondering, did you know that in Victorian times, male doctors caused thousands of women to die of childbed fever because they did not wash their hands after examining corpses?”
Yes I do recall reading that many years ago. I forget his name – it was a doctor in Vienna who made the discovery, intrigued by the fact the hospital he worked in had a much higher rate of death than another one not that far away. He considered the differences between the two, and realized that his hospital was a teaching one with corpses being handled, and the other wasn’t. So he devised an experiment, where some women bearing children would be handled only by doctors who had recently handled a corpse, and another group wouldn’t. High death rate amongst the former, barely any amongst the latter.
As I read it I couldn’t help but think how cavalier this seemed with regard to human life, that he would risk these women when he had reasonable grounds to believe he was endangering them. But of course, I speak with the benefit of an ethical attitude that has similarly been developed over history by those who had the time, talent and inclination to give serious consideration to subjects like Ethics. I might like to think I am ethical, but like anyone else, I absorbed all this from the environment I grew up in. Being the little monkeys that we are, imitating others is something we do without even thinking – and that includes blasting all those who went before us because they didn’t have the benefit of the same knowledge, and being blissfully unbothered by the fact that it was they who provided us with the skill to judge them so harshly.
We know that male attributes have a much wider variance than female attributes. There are many more men at the highest level of IQ, ability for spatial perception, aggression, competitiveness, ability to concieve of and create complex systems, desire to take risk, desire for high achievement, desire to dominante others and the environment etc., there are also more men at the bottom, BUT those who rule come from the high end not the low end. All of these impulses are biologically based even if they may be increased by social conditioning. Would women lock themselves in a room for a month and compose the “Messiah”, or spend a tortured night on the beach discovering what we call Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or sail into the dangerous and unknown Atlantic Ocean to discover a new world, or venture to the moon ,so on and so on?????
Of course not, Mother Nature wouldn’t stand for it for obvious reason(survival of the species).
Brain research over the last 30 years has begun to show how the male and female brain differ and why men have always played the role of creator and destroyer.
Although deep down in our genes men create the material culture to make themselves more desirerable to women, i.e., men compete, women choose. To expect the science department of a school like Harvard to have something even close to 50% women could only happen in an Orwellian world where standerds were lowered.
What also seems to be clear, from the record so far, is that women do not have the capacity to innovate. They bring great talents to developing what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” but they have no record of creating the “paradigm shifts” that lead in new directions. It may be, of course, that as the feminists sometimes claim, this is because they were never encouraged to engage in these activities. But to need encouragement, to depend on models to follow, is precisely not to have a capacity to innovate. It has been men who have invented things and found challenges in nature, such as climbing high mountains or sailing alone around the world. And once men have done it, women will also do it. These remain highly notable enterprises, well beyond the reach of all but a few men, but they also exemplify the fact that innovation remains largely the specialization of white males. Women can do marvellous things with a house, but they do need the house to be there in the first place.
Women & Govenrment
Its no accident that we had the blessing of Founding Fathers not Mothers. The most fundamental role of government, as reflected in the thinkers of the Enlightenment and in our constitution, is to PROTECT not to PROVIDE. That is, freedom is seen to be inherent in allowing people to choose and pursue, with as little constraints as reasonably possible, life, liberty and happiness. The more government concerns itself with providing rather than protecting the less freedom the individual has because the only way government can provide is to tax and the more it taxes the less the resources the individual citizen has to seek his own happiness. Hence everything a citizen earns is his and he and his fellow citizens decide through their elected officials how much they are willing to give to the government to PROTECT them. Socialists and their ilk take a diametrically opposite position. They think the role of government is to provide many of the necessities of life.They think,(although they woul d never admit it here in the USA) that everything a citizen makes is the government’s and the government decides how much you can keep! They are willing to live a much more limited life since the Faustian bargain they accept, consciously or unconsciously is to have very diminished financial resources but a guarantee of a mediocre existence.
This is the real rift between conservatives and liberals today. This is why women in general and single women in particular vote more Democratic than Republican. Unlike most men they prefer a guarantee of a modicum of safety and have little desire for the possibilities that can accrue when one is willing to take risk. Of course this is just what Mother Nature wants since to have it otherwise would be to the detriment of children which are the hope of future existence.
The problem is if society chooses to be provided for as opposed to being protected the consequences can and will eventually be dire. Hence Liberals ask for entitlements and every type of social welfare program and ignore or even abhor the need for national defense and lower taxes.
Alexis de’tocqueville saw this conundrum 200 years ago when he said the main problem with a democracy is that people will eventually see that they can vote themselves a welfare state, at the expense , of course , of the most productive citizens!
http://www.popecenter.org/comm…..ml?id=2135
.# 18 August 2009 at 12:31
A quick wise-crack.
I’d say that some men have added to the drudgery.
Like the BOZO’s that MADE THE LATEST WINDOWS OS!!!!
,
Have a nice day
[url=http://www.nnmfeel.net/]Garretot[/url]
Welmer October 2, 2009 at 13:36
Good point, Paul. I’m pretty sure she meant “on top of the list of achievers” rather than at the top of the social hierarchy. There are plenty of men with a lot of power who are utterly mediocre human beings. But here again, this gets back to the true goal of feminism: power. It isn’t about benefiting mankind or making a scientific breakthrough as much as it is about being able to exercise authority over others.
A very astute observation. I will add that feminism isn’t about benefitting all women ( of course we see that it was never about liberating men either). Feminism is about what benefits it’s heirarchy and some of the followers of the coven.
“It’s a line I’ve heard many times before; if only those mean old men hadn’t kept women chained to the stove, barefoot and pregnant, women would have written the Summa Theologica and split the atom. ”
Actually, a woman did have something to do with splitting the atom. Ever hear of Lise Meitner?
Piercedhead wrote:”But there were plenty of girls of wealthy families as well, who had all the leisure in the world. For some reason no record remains of brilliant girls buying a few math books, burying themselves in the subject and sending a few theoretical ideas off to the premier thinkers of their time in a letter (they could have signed themselves George if they feared not being taken seriously).”
Sophie Germain is a good example, and she was a mathematical genius.