Perhaps the most potent weapon in the feminist arsenal has long been the widely-held belief that women are helpless victims in the face of male aggression, and that they would never wreck their families without being victims of some vile form of abuse on the part of their husbands. Although the younger generations have realized that this is a fantasy, older Americans – men in particular – often cling to the image of the wife as eternal victim, and husband as aggressor. Unfortunately, a lot of these older folks are still in very influential positions as judges, politicians, CEOs, etc. On the bright side, they won’t be for too much longer.
If I had to give a rough estimate of the age that marks the cutoff, I’d have to say it’s somewhere in the 50s. People who were born before 1960 are far more likely to hold to chivalrous, pedestalizing ideals concerning women; perhaps even more so than the GI generation that raised them. I think Zed’s post on toxic fathers explains a lot of what was going on. I’ve observed the phenomenon he referred to in my own family, where I had a far more benevolent relationship with my grandfathers than their own sons did. For a lot of men who grew up in postwar America, there was a rivalry between father and son that manifested itself in a hatred and fear of men in general.
And then, of course, there was the unnatural phenomenon of the 50s and 60s housewife, who stayed at home in the ‘burbs with a whole lot of time on her hands. Her mother was more likely to have been a worker than she was, and before the benefits of mass production brought every woman a fridge, washing machine, vacuum cleaner and electric range, women were performing the equivalent of light industrial labor in the home every day. Without the distraction of having to work for her own and her family’s survival, the 50s suburban housewife was therefore left without a sense of purpose, except in being a proper housewife. She was, in a real sense, disempowered, and therefore a more sympathetic figure.
To the young men growing up resentful of their tough, authoritarian fathers, who were themselves children of the Great Depression and WWII, it was easier to bond with the nurturing and tragic mother. Zed suggests that there was an element of emotional incest underlying family dynamics:
…boys and young men who sense that their fathers are destructive and not using their male power in a constructive and responsible manner will seek to psychically and emotionally castrate them and take away their power.
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Such men are sitting ducks for women, because in the absence of approval and blessing of their fathers, they sought it from the only place they could get it – their mothers. And thus does an unholy alliance of emotional incest often form between boys and mothers, with the boys displacing the fathers as the emotional mate of the mother. For many of them, being a “good man” involves both making “mama” happy, and being as unlike their fathers as they can manage to be.
The emotional bond between mother and son and the resentment men felt toward their fathers translated into action against men in general. Men who grew up in the midst of the postwar paradigm saw feminism as justice, and a means to destroy the hated father figure, but from my perspective and those of my generation, it appears that – in a cruel twist of irony – they only succeeded in destroying their sons.
I don’t think these men will change much with age. Their cherished image of the mother-victim will follow them to the grave, just as the old Soviet veterans paid their respects to Lenin and Stalin up until the fall of Communism. Guys like Zed and Paul were pioneers, and there were few of their kind. For a couple of decades, there were a few men trying to warn the rest of us about what was going on, but until recently, they were speaking into the wind.
Change is certainly coming, but the sacred icon of the feminist revolution – the victim wife – will only fade away with the generation that cherishes it.
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