Chapter 7: Employment Issues & the Women Can Do Anything Lie
 

1999 Version

0. News Item

Barry Ceminchuk ... has sued the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense for employment discrimination against him and all men.[1]

The Feminist slogans "Women Can Do Anything" and "Girls Can Do Anything" are lies, if you interpret them as statements of fact. They are never applied fairly to areas such as professional sports, for example. But they are not really statements of supposed fact: they are slogans -- exhortations of the kind that have been commonly used in totalitarian countries (e.g. Communist countries) to overcome and conquer the truth, and to make something true that was obviously not true when the campaign started.

The main aim of Feminists in recent years has been to get more women into the paid workforce, and to make life for them there as pleasant and as profitable as possible -- at the expense of men's interests, if need be. Feminists have paid lip-service to the notions of "equality" and "equity" where this seemed to be a useful tactic. However, there have been effectively no men's pressure-groups to make sure that these notions were actually taken seriously across the board -- as opposed to just as and when some Feminist group decided to make an issue of them.

Consequently, there are areas in paid employment where women have achieved an unfair advantage over men. And there are other areas where women already had an advantage -- thanks to old-fashioned chivalry -- and where Feminists have actually built on and worsened an already inequitable state of affairs. Three employment areas where men are disadvantaged are professional sports, professional modelling, and the police.

Equal Employment Opportunities and Affirmative Action policies kill. Mainly, they kill men (see below). And that's quite apart from the jobs that they steal away from able men to squander on less qualified women. There are obvious, apparent differences between the policies of Equal Employment Opportunities and Affirmative Action, but the practical meaning of these policies depends on how they are interpreted in practice, of course.

The slogan "Women Can Do Anything" is a lie, and it has formed the basis of a very successful Feminist campaign to get women doing things that tradtionally they hadn't been doing in any numbers. It is a lie, because:

• men can't do just anything, so how is it that women can do just anything?
• it really means that women can do everything that men can do -- but that is a lie, because women and men are segregated in most sports activities (see below). And that occurs precisely because women can't do everything as well as men can!
• People (mainly men) are put at risk when this lie puts women into positions where they are not physically competent:

Every time that male and female police officers patrol together, that happens because one other man failed to get a job (see below). That job was given to one woman who performed less well that he did in a physical test. So when those two police officers patrol together, the man will sometimes be forced to protect the woman, because she can't cope physically with the demands of the job. That happened recently near Wellington, New Zealand. Two unarmed police officers were injured -- the man much more severely than the woman -- in an assault.

Policies on so-called "Equal Employment Opportunities" for men and women are a result of the relatively recent upsurge in numbers of women in the paid workforce. This upsurge, in turn, was the result of:

• the increased mechanisation of the workplace, which reduced the importance of physical strength;
• an increase in available labour-saving devices for the home, which gave women more free time;
• the availability of safe and convenient methods of birth-control, which had the same result;
• pressure from Feminists, who convinced generations of Western women that it was much nobler  work in paid employment than it was to be a traditional housewife.

The New Zealand Human Rights Commission's Equal Employment Opportunities Manual defines "Equal Employment Opportunities" as:

"A SYSTEMATIC, RESULTS-ORIENTED, SET OF ACTIONS THAT ARE DIRECTED TOWARDS THE IDENTIFICATION AND ELIMINATION OF DISCRIMINATORY BARRIERS THAT CAUSE OR PERPETUATE INEQUALITY IN THE EMPLOYMENT OF ANY PERSON OR GROUP OF PERSONS."

"MEN WHO ARE NOT WITHIN THE TARGET GROUPS (that means: men who do not belong to an ethnic or other disadvantaged minority), MEN WHO ARE NOT WITHIN THE TARGET GROUPS ARE NOT INCLUDED FOR SPECIAL CONSIDERATION IN THE MANUAL. THEY HAVE NOT BEEN SUBJECTED IN THE SAME DEGREE TO THE FACTORS WHICH HAVE LIMITED THE PARTICIPATION IN EMPLOYMENT OF TARGET GROUP MEMBERS."

What seems to be happening is that all this propaganda about Equal Employment Opportunities is putting pressure on organisations to hire and promote women FOR THE SAKE OF HIRING AND PROMOTING WOMEN. These organisations worry about their images. They have to look good in the marketplace and in Society. Also, women spend much more money than men do, so this gives them power over retail firms and advertisers.

Men may be fired to make space for women. These women will then not be selected on merit. These women may be being selected just because they are women. This is serious sex discrimination, if it is indeed happening.

In June 1994, a Men's Network was formed by male staff at New Zealand's Open Polytechnic. Its aim was to combat the apparent "gender-cleansing" effects of the Equal Employment Opportunities policy practised by that institution's female Principal.

Tom Dowling was the coordinator of this Men's Network. According to him, he had never before thought seriously about discrimination against men, or about men's rights.

I interviewed him for Wellington Access Radio's Men's Rights programme. He told me that an informal meeting at morning tea had crystallised the issue for him and his male colleagues. The Open Polytechnic was in the middle of the latest redundancy round -- the fifth in four years. Redundancy was the topic of conversation at that morning tea.

What focused their minds on the issue of men's rights was the fact that 79 of the 80 staff who had been made redundant so far were men! Furthermore, they noticed that 48 of the 52 who were to be made redundant in the current redundancy round were men!! "Not surprisingly, as men. we found this rather concerning," said Tom.

Four years previously, when the female Principal took over from her male predecessor, the Open Polytechnic employed few women. Only 20% of the staff were women, as the subjects taught were mainly male-dominated trade subjects.

Now, according to Tom, the latest redundancy round would turn male staff into a minority on campus. Most of the powerful management positions were held, or were about to be held by women.

Since men were about to become a minority in the staffroom, the Men's Network decided to ask for the privileges that the Women's Network had long enjoyed. These privileges had been instituted under the Open Polytechnic's Equal Employment Opportunities policy.

The Women's Network had a noticeboard for its own exclusive use. Now the Men's Network demanded the right to take it over. Tom pointed out that the idea for a Men's Network was largely tongue-in-cheek when it started. But it got more serious once the members started delving more deeply into the insitution's Equal Employment Opportunites operation.

They learned that groups with official status under the Equal Employment Opportunites policy had monthly meetings. These meetings were half in paid time. Since the campus was split between several sites, the institution paid the monthly taxi fares of network members who had to travel to the main campus for these meetings. Obviously, these subsidies came from the same source which used to pay the salaries of the men who had been made redundant.

These subsidies were not only substantial -- they were also sometimes used for dubious purposes. For example, the May 1994 Women's Network meeting was held for the purpose of watching slides on Africa provided by a travel consultant! And in 1993 the Open Polytechnic's EEO programme funded an ethnic food festival.

The issue of toilets also cropped up. This is an interesting one, as one of New Zealand's most radically Feminist Members of Parliament, Marilyn Waring, made a big issue of the lack of female toilets in Parliament Buildings.

On the floor of the secondary campus where Tom Dowling worked, the only toilet was a women's toilet, despite women being a minority on that floor. Male staff had to go down to the next floor, which was leased by another organisation, to use a male toilet.

Furthermore, the male toilet was smelly, and fitted out like a public toilet. The women's toilet, on the other hand, was very plush, and fitted with an extractor-fan and air-freshener. The toilet situation was similar on the other secondary polytechnic campus.

So men's issues do exist in the employment area of social life -- but they seldom get any publicity or any pro-men action carried out on them.

EEO and Affirmative Action policies are often lies, to the extent that they are based on distorted statistics. The vigour with which these policies are implemented is often linked to the severity of the problem that is perceived to exist. And it is Feminst researchers, by and large, who produce the statistics which are supposed to show how big the probelm really is.

An official government report[2], for example, states:

"There has been little movement towards gender equity in the teaching service in the past three years.... Fewer women than men held senior positions, particularly in primary schools. Furthermore, they received, on average, lower salaries than did their male colleagues in equivalent positions or with the same qualifications" (page 1, second paragraph).

The leaflet itself mentions, at the end, the fact that more women than men left the teaching service (temporarily or permanently), and it is obvious that chilbirth and childcare must have been among the reasons for this. Yet the leaflet does not investigate, or even mention the likelihood that the reason women have lower salaries than men with the same qualifications is that they have shorter total careers than men. Because they have shorter careers, they progress less far up the payscale ladder, and they are less likely to apply for, or achieve promotion.

This is totally obvious, though it may not, of course, account statistically for all the difference between men's and women's salaries in the teaching service. This leaflet conveys a misleading impression, and the authors must have been incompetent or intentionally fraudulent in their actions. I wrote to the Minister of Education about this and the reply I got did not challenge my main point at all. While there exists a Feminist research industry and no Masculist research industry to balance it, this sort of distortion is likely to go unchallenged and result in administrative and political change of an anti-male nature.

Men work for and earn more money than women do, but it is well-known in Men's Rights circles that women control more than 65% of US personal wealth, and spend four consumer dollars for every consumer dollar that men spend. The personal wealth is controlled mainly by women because women live longer than men and inherit their wealth at the point in their life when they are likely to be at their richest -- young men, of course, are usually relatively poor at the start of their careers. Women also get wealth from men through alimony, palimony, and child-support payments. I haven't yet found the source for thoese statistics, though.

Sexual harassment regulations are a case in point. In some cases, these seem to have been devised by Lesbian Feminists who really would prefer to have nothing to do with men at all! It is generally the case that men take the initiative in sexual relationships, with all the attendant risks of rejection. This means that men, on the whole, must be more open about their sexual feelings -- or end up with no sexual partner. Heterosexual women tend, on the whole, to be more passive, and are less overt about their sexual feelings, since they can afford to wait until a man makes the first move.

So sexual harassment regulations, by punishing natural male sexual behaviours, while rewarding natural female passivity, amount to a serious form of oppression of men. Men, by acting naturally, can have their careers blighted -- whereas women, by acting naturally, are defined as model employees, as far as sexual harassment regulations are concerned.

Sexual harassment regulations can even have an anti-male bias written into them. For example, one workplace leaflet on sexual harassment that I have seen lists "looking down shirts or up skirts" as a form of sexual harassment -- but does not place any restriction on women dressing in a way that produces gaps in their blouses, or skirts that allow vast amounts of leg or even underwear to be seen, depending on the position of the wearer. This puts the woman in the position of being officially blameless, while the man is put into the position of being forced to avert his eyes or run the risk of beiung accused of sexual harassment.

This is not just a hypothetical possibility. One man working at the above workplace had experiences of women exposing parts of their breasts, legs and underwear -- both before and after these regulations were introduced. Some of the women doing this were his superiors, and some worked in constant proximity to him. Some appeared to do it for sexual reasons, and others because they were aggressive Feminists who wanted to exploit the above loophole in the sexual harassment regulations.

The National Association of Scholars, in America, placed an advertisement in the March 1994 edition of the "American Spectator". This ad was a policy statement on sexual harassment and academic freedom. I won't go into it in detail today, but two of the most important points it makes are:
 

These two points aim to make it difficult for women (in particular) to turn just any trivial incident into a sexual harassment complaint -- and also to make it hard to use sexual harassment complaints as a way of victimising people who have unpopular opinions.

Where is the slogan "Women Can Do Anything" in sport?

Professional and semi-professional sportswomen receive far more prize-money and publicity than they equitably deserve -- given that their performances are (in most sports) of a much lower standard than those of men. For example, in Iron Man and triathlon events, and the like, publicity is given to the male winners (and perhaps the second and third men home), and then to the first one-to-three women to cross the finish-line, even though the women may have come in much later than the leading men.

Not only does this discriminate against all the other men who may have come in ahead of the leading women, but all mention of the comparative times of the leading men and the leading women are sometimes censored out -- in order to hide the fact that women CAN'T do just anything.

In October 1993, there was a combination running-and-mountain-bike race in Dunedin, New Zealand. Both men and women competed, but the women were given a 20-minute head-start. As one of the leading male contenders pointed out, this was highly sexist. If a woman, benefitting from her head-start, had come in first, she would have got exactly the same amount of prize-money as a male winner, despite his 20-minute handicap, would have got.

As it happens, the best men took about 30 minutes less time than the leading women to cover the course, so it was a man who took the winner's purse. But in future years the pressure will no doubt be on the organisers to raise the handicap to 30 minutes, or so. So next year we could have the sexist farce of a woman picking up the winner's purse for achieving a result about 30 minutes worse that the leading man.

If sportswomen who perform less well than the best sportsmen in certain sports are to get the same level of publicity and sponsorship as the best sportsmen, then so should the best junior sportsmen and sportswomen, the best disabled sportsmen and sportswomen, the best veteran sportsmen and sportwomen, and so on.

Wherever there used to be sexual segregation in society that Feminists did not like, it was called "sexist" and abolished. But female athletes would be shown up for what they really are, if there was open competition with men, so none of the Feminists have been jumping up and down demanding an end to double standards on this issue!

A similar situation is present in other sports, such as tennis and golf, as Bertels (1981) points out. Professional women tennis-players play three-set tennis, while their male colleagues often have to play five-set tennis championships. The calibre of women's tennis is also lower -- yet the women players seldom miss an opportunity to demand equal purses with men! In golf, the women's tee is closer to the green than the men's tee is -- despite the obvious inequality involved. Again, no Feminists have ever complained about this sort of inequity, to my knowledge!

Thomas (1993) also points out that at Wimbledon, for example, female prize-money is within 10% of male prize-money, and women players such as Monica Seles are demanding 100% parity in prize-money. Yet, as the male player Pat Cash pointed out some years ago, women are not only not as good at tennis as men (and no woman has denied this or attempted to disprove it), but they also work less hard for their money.

According to Thomas (1993), the BBC's radio commentator, Barbara Potter (a former professional tennis player), has estimated that only 50% of professional women tennis players are fully fit. The men are much fitter, as they play on a much more competitive circuit.

When Steffi Graf won (the women's) Wimbledon singles title in 1991, she had to play only 128 games to win her prize money of Stg. 216,000. Michael Stich, the men's 1991 Wimbledon champion, had to play all of 257 games for his prize money of Stg. 240,000. This works out at Stg. 933.85 per game paid to Stich, and almost twice as much per game, Stg. 1,687.50, being paid to Graf.

Thomas (1993) points out that women players can't argue for equal prize-money on the grounds of the amount of revenue they generate, either. On British television, for example, the BBC had 8.1 million viewers for the 1991 Wimbledon men's final -- but only 7.0 million viewers for the women's final. And the black market prices for Wimbledon centre court tickets for the men's final were Stg. 650-900 for the men's final and only Stg. 300-450 for the women's final.

The money paid to female tennis-players must be coming from somewhere. It must be coming from the same sources that produce the money paid to male tennis-players. Female players are being paid more, relative to the income they actually generate, than male players are. If female players were paid purely in proportion to their economic value, then more money would be available to spend on prizes for male players. So male professionals are in effect subsidising their female counterparts!

Since Feminists favour Equal Employment Opportunity and oppose separate men's clubs, the sexual apartheid system in all non-contact sports should be abolished, e.g. female tennis players should play in the same competition as men players -- for the same prizes. The alternative is to enshrine sexual segregation in some areas of social and sporting life in legislation, with payments for sportsmen being set substantially higher than those paid to sportswomen -- to reflect the different objective standards involved.

It is highly unfair for men and women to be treated equally in areas of employment where it suits women for them to be treated equally -- and then to be treated unequally whenever it suits women for the treatment to be unequal!

There are no longer any minimum height requirements for police recruits in countries such as New Zealand, but there used to be. At that time, I wrote to Police Headquarters about them, and it is illuminating to see the kind of reasoning the Police used. They suggested that men and women should be looked at separately, for recruitment purposes, because it is "a well-established fact" that men are, on average, taller than women. Proportionately, they argued, it would discriminate against women to set the same maximum height standards for them as for men.

Presumably, the same argument would be used to justify the separate physical entry standards for male and female police recruits under the current regime. But this "proportional" argument does not hold up to scrutiny, especially as it is never brought up when men are the ones who would benefit (because men have few pressure-groups, and thus noone to put their case).

How about areas such as the real estate industry, where women are sometimes considered to have better relevant people skills than men, on the whole. How about saying that the industry should aim to employ more men who had less developed people skills -- because it would discriminate against men to set the same people skills standards for them as for women! That argument is never use when it benefits men -- here people would say that the best person for the job should get the job. Then why don't they say that for the Police? I would think that a competent police force is much more vital to Society's welfare than a competent real estate industry!

When Feminism-related jobs are advertised (in the Ministry of Women's Affairs, or Equal Employment Opportunities positions, etc.), one of the criteria is usually "an interest in sexual equality issues", or some such phrase. Proportionately, many more women than men meet this criterion, but noone ever says that the Ministry of Women's Affairs should lower their standards on this in order to be fair, proportionately, to men!

Here's another example: it is also a "well-established fact" that it is very much more difficult for a woman, or even a group of women, to rape a man than for a man, or group of men to rape a woman. Does anyone ever argue that penalties for men who rape women should be lowered in order to be proportionately fair to men?

The fact is that Society applies a double standard to men and women, under the pressure applied by Feminist lobby-groups.

Moreover, the purpose of the Police Force is to carry out a job, not to bend to the dictates of Feminists. Will a burly criminal stop carrying out a violent crime when he sees a short (and probably weak) female police officer? Will that criminal be intimidated by the Feminist logic of "proportional fairness"? I am a taxpayer and a citizen, and I don't see why I should put up with the streets becoming even more dangerous because the Police Force, like everyone else, is being bullied by Feminists.

In addition, if we have double standards for men and women, then, logically, we're going to have to have different standards for ethnic or other groups whose average physical characteristics differ from the average for the population as a whole. I have no statistics on this issue, but it seems to me that some ethnic groups, such as Samoans, may well perform better on such tests than the average, and other ethnic groups, such as East Asians, may perform worse.

Then there are disabled people. Logically, if we are going to have different physical standards for men and women, then we should have different standards for the physically and intellectually disabled, who should also be entitled to become Police Officers.

I wrote to the Minister of Police and got a copy of their old and new entry standards for recruits, because of the sexist double-standard. I really couldn't believe my eyes! As I already knew, the 1990 version had explicitly different standards for men and women, in that men of all ages had less time to complete the physical tasks than women of comparable ages.

But in 1993 a Review of the Entry Standards for Police Recruits was completed. It said that the previous test "had different requirements for men and women and under the Human Rights legislation this is no longer acceptable." So they changed the screening process. Fair enough, you might think!

Imagine my suprise when I saw that the new regulations ALSO had different standards for men and women! All that had really changed was that there was an additional level of Grades/Marks (from 0 to 3) which the performance scores were translated into. The translation formula was what was different for men and women.

So a man and a woman might both get a 3 ("good") for the vertical jump, for example, but a man would have to reach 48 or more cms., whereas a woman would only have to reach 40 cms., and so on for the various activities!

Obviously, they have had their lawyers onto the case, and have figured out a way to retain the double standard without breaching the letter of the new Human Right legislation! Talk about Equal Employment Opportunities! Think of all the male police recruits who will be failed because they can only do as well as a woman who passed!

The proposal that housework should attract a wage is an interesting and important issue in Sexual Politics. It is one of the few major Feminist policy planks which have so far avoided being implemented in any country (to my knowledge). The main reason for this is probably that even some Feminists do not think it is a good idea.

I once heard a radio interview of an official of the New Zealand Ministry of Women's Affairs on this issue. It was enlightening, because it emerged that the Ministry was not in favour of a wage for housework/child upbringing. For the same reason, the Ministry wanted to retain features of the tax system that favoured working couples over single-income families.

At time of writing, one person earning, say, NZ$ 40,000 pays more tax in New Zealand than does a working couple, where the partners earn NZ$ 20,000 each. Low income earners attract rebates, irrespective of their partner's income, or lack of income. Income earners are taxed in their own right -- the family is no longer a taxation unit, and the number of dependents is no longer relevant to the amount of tax a person pays.

The reason given for this stance by the Ministry of Women's Affairs was that, in two-income families at present, part of the combined parental income often has to be spent on child-care and/or home help (i.e. on the work that one parent would otherwise be staying at home to do). Or the housework/child-care is wholly or partly carried out by the parents in addition to their work-commitments.

So the Ministry of Women's Affairs took the line that it was unfair to pay someone to stay at home and do something full-time, which working couples had to do for nothing, or which they had to get done at an actual financial cost to themselves.

There is an obvious Feminist value-judgement here: encouraging both partners to get jobs is rated as more important than housework and bringing up a family. Small wonder that the nuclear family has dissolved into one-parent families, with all the attendant social evils and crime.

Barbara Andolsen's article, "A Woman's Work is Never Done", in Andolsen et al. (eds.) (1985), deals with the related issue of households where both the man and the woman work, but the woman still does the lion's (lioness's ?) share of the housework. She argues that justice requires that men and women in such households should share the housework equally.

In Western countries, it is obvious that a far greater percentage of women are working full-time or part-time outside the home than was the case before the Second World War. Andolsen (op.cit.) recites the following statistics:

"By 1983 fifty-two percent of all wives were working for wages. Almost two-thirds of all  women with children ages six to seventeen were working for wages. Fifty percent of mothers with children under six were working outside the home (an increase of seventeen percent in one decade.) More than three-quarters of all divorced mothers are in the labor force. American households in which a wage-earning husband supports a nonwage- earning wife -- a wife presumable devoting her energies to household maintenance -- are now a dwindling minority among families." (page 4)

One could speculate that increasing numbers of Feminist books (together with improved birth-control methods) persuaded increasing numbers of married women to enter the workforce and leave their husbands (not necessarily in that order). The increasing number of two-income and one-parent families led to increased truancy, drug-dependency, and crime among their neglected children.

It is quite clear that Feminism (of whatever kind) has tended to destabilise the traditional family -- in that it has caused many women to become dissatisfied (or to be brought up already dissatisfied) with the traditional nuclear family, where the husband in the sole bread-winner and also titular "head of the household".

Husbands, or potential husbands, had to either conform to a changing role in the family, or opt for celibacy or separation (if already in a relationship). Feminism (particularly Radical Feminism) has also tended to romanticise financial and emotional independence from men as an ideal for women to aspire towards.

Be that as it may, the fact seems to be that working couples do not share the housework equally: working husbands with working wives only do, on average, up to about twenty-five percent of what Andolsen calls the "more pleasant" of the household tasks, such as social or educational care of children, food-preparation, and food-clean-up.

This is probably true, but it does not tell the whole story: what about the more traditionally male chores, such as sports-coaching, gardening, car maintenance, and home-handyman-type work? This type of chore traditionally takes up a lot of the working man's spare time, and it is not included in Feminist surveys. Farrell (1993) reports two US studies that showed that men did more work than women, if you include housework, commuting, repairs, work in the garden, and so on.

Some account must also be taken of the fact that the husband is more likely to work in excess of the minimum hours at his job -- either physically at the workplace, or at home. As more men than women occupy senior positions, this latter scenario is more likely to apply to them than to women. It should also be noted that one reason more men than women occupy senior positions is that women often spend a large part of their adult life caring for their children. This means that they have a career which is, on average, shorter than that of the average man.

Andolsen is aware of this, but her response is to propose that employers stop requiring their ambitious employees to work these long hours! That is surely unrealistic. Not only is this stance unrealistic, but it is evidence that Andolsen has raised the notion of shared housework to the status of an ideal for its own sake -- it is not really so much a matter of ethics or equity after all.

And, of course, in any emergency involving danger (whether local and personal, civil, or military), it is the men, rather than women, who are expected to run the risks. I feel that any laziness men might exhibit around the house is a fair trade-off against the danger they might at any time be called upon to subject themselves to.

How can we quantify this? The problem is an actuarial one. Insurance companies (I assume) calculate their premiums on the basis of statistics as to the likelihood of the event they are insuring against. They also have to build in their overheads and a profit margin, of course.

If we picture the family as a socio-economic unit, then the typical adult male(s) is/are providing protection on a non-profit basis. We can also ignore the question of overheads, in this case. They provide protection from potential burglars, rapists, etc., and they do this just by their physical presence. Sometimes they actually have to confront such criminals, but often a criminal will avoid entering a house just because an adult male is obviously resident.

Men are also liable to be conscripted in wartime to pursue the military aims of the nation as a whole. These may be purely defensive, or they may be based on the theory that "the best defense is attack."

It should be perfectly possible to quantify these risks, and to quantify the value of housework, based on rates of pay for Home Help. On this basis, it should be possible to quantify how much, or how little housework the average adult male should equitably do.

Feminism has also brought up the issue of housework as a constant background irritation in marriages. If the wife didn't work, then it wouldn't be an issue. But Feminism has taught women that it is better to get a job outside the home than to do a good job of looking after your children.

Once they are working, women don't always see why they should also do the lion's share of the housework -- and I can see their point. On the other hand, maybe the husband would prefer her to stay home and do the housework and childcare. Why should he then shoulder extra burdens created by his wife's selfish or materialistic decision?

A relationship works best if it is based on complementarity. It does not work well if it is based on competition. A marriage of two people of similar personalities does not work as well as one where the personalities of the spouses complement each other.

Likewise with roles. The best thing about the old-fashioned philosophy that "A woman's place is in the home" was that husband and wife had distinct, well-defined, and complementary roles in the socio-economic system of the family. If both are working, then they are to some extent competitors. Of course, complementarity also results if the wife works and the husband is a househusband. But this is relatively less common.

Having a job of her own makes it more likely that the wife will feel like leaving her husband. Every relationship goes through stresses and strains. The social and legal climate helps to determine how much a couple will put up with before they separate or divorce.

Farrell (1993) states the military service issue in graphic terms:

"ITEM. Imagine: Music is playing on your car radio. An announcer's voice interrupts:'We have a special bulletin from the president.'... The president announces, 'Since 1.2 million American men have been killed in war, as part of my new program for equality, we will draft only women until 1.2 million American women have been killed in war.'" (op. cit. page 28)

As a bare minimum, Liberal Masculists might say, the drafting of women as front-line troops should occur on exactly the same basis as that of men (whether in war or peace). Increased use of military technology has indeed reduced the importance of men's greater upper-body strength and hormonal characteristics in war, as much of the action is now long-distance. Even infantry warfare involves little upper-body strength.

However, this is more a moral issue, as far as some Masculists is concerned, rather than just being a practical one. The argument would still be a strong one in the absence of sophisticated military hardware.

Conservative Masculists, however, still prefer the traditional division of labour. This means that only men should get conscripted into the front line, but they should receive some special treatment in return. This treatment might involve men being treated as head of the household in law, for example. It might even be used as an argument for women not having the vote. After all, why should women elect governments that can declare war, when women don't share equally in the dangers that war involves?

Some Feminists appear to be in favour of front-line positions being open to those women who volunteer to take this up as an occupation. I agree with this. However, Feminists don't seem to like the idea of women being compelled to undertake such dangerous and unpleasant duties. At least, I have never seen or heard any Feminist propose this course of action.

Of course, many men are against this idea, as well -- as I mentioned above. But Feminists have never taken any notice of what men thought, if it stood in the way of something that conferred an advantage on women. So Feminists are being hypocritical if they use this reluctance on the part of men as something they can hide behind. The fact that some men disagree (whether from chivalry, or for some other reason) is not a legitimate argument in this case.

The Men's Manifesto (Doyle 1992) mentions that Feminists had made a serious demand for a statue of a "combat woman" to be errected at the Vietnam War Memorial in the United States. This was intended to memorialize specially and separately the eight (8) American women who died in that war. The existing memmorial would then be shared only by the 58,000 American men who died there.

This total lack of compassion, gratitude and sense of proportion by the Feminists is absolutely typical. Feminists feel guilty about all the sacrifices men have made in wartime on behalf of women and children, and they know it is one of the weakest points of the Feminist case. This leads them to attempt to raise such activities as nursing (even if there were no casualties at all) to the same level as front-line infantry fighting (with horrific casualties and psychological suffering).

One of the main targets of Feminist anger has been the fact that, traditionally, more men than women have held full-time jobs. In addition, even when women started to enter the work-force in large numbers, occupations tended to be sexually segregated, being either predominantly male or predominantly female. Moreover, many (though not all) of the predominantly male occupations have tended to be the best-paid ones.

In his introduction to Tiger (1984), Desmond Morris gives the following as the historical cause of this phenomenon:

"When our ancient ancestors switched to hunting as a way of life, the relationship between males and females was dramatically altered. Females, with their heavy reproductive burden, were unable to play a major role in this new feeding pattern, which had become so vital for survival. A much greater division of labour between the sexes arose. The males became specialized for the chase. They became more athletic and they spent long periods of time away from the tribal home base, in pursuit of prey."

As Tiger (1970) emphasizes, the claim that there was originally a very good reason for the sexual division of labour is not the same as saying that it must be perpetuated, or that it cannot be reversed in the present or future. Nevertheless, Morris and Tiger do talk in terms of genetic changes resulting from natural selection. They are Biologists, as well as Social Scientists, and they base their work on that of Ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz, George Schaller, and Jane Goodall.

Such scientists discovered a lot about the complexity of animal (especially primate) social behaviour. Moreover, they are also in a position to start puzzling out how these patterns of behaviour can be genetically transmitted and selected for, or selected out, just like any physical characteristic.

Thus what they claim about "human nature" has a semi-permanent ring about it. Natural selection operates over a large time-scale. And species have so far never been able or willing consciously to determine the overall course of genetic development within their own species.

So it is easy to see how this book upset many Feminists. Feminists, after all, are keen to bring about social change, i.e. change resulting from conscious administrative and legal reforms which take place on the time-scale of a generation, or thereabouts.

They would not be happy to hear someone claim, in effect, that the male closed shop in the best-paid, full-time employment sectors reflects reality on the genetic level. This would mean that it could not be changed for thousands of years, and that no amount of pressure from Feminist groups would change it. Any change would have to result from impersonal, intangible selective pressures.

Academic works by people like Lionel Tiger (and also those written by Feminists) may claim to be merely descriptive of what the authors observe. But there is a feedback-loop between description and behaviour in the social sciences. As soon as an academic popularises the fact that certain previously obscure facts do occur, there is a tendency for prejudices against them to be diminished, and for the events in question to occur more frequently. Thus what started off as a ³descriptive± account ends up as something more prescriptive -- an indication of what should or (at least) could take place without being ethically wrong.

The attitudes of the author or researcher in such situations need to be considered as well. It is not realistic to assume that academics pursue their work in a purely objective frame of mind. If a Sociolinguist, for example, undertakes a lengthy study of a stigmatized word (such as "aint" is, or used to be), then two things are certain:
 

This is why Feminists reacted so strongly against Lionel Tiger's book. Once it becomes known that bonding within male groups is "natural" and has specific functions, it becomes less likely that men will feel guilty about belonging to male-only organisations. The less guilty they feel, the less likely they are to bow to Feminist pressure to admit women members. Men will also feel less guilty about working in male-only occupations.

Most Feminist meetings, "consciousness-raising" sessions, etc. exclude men. This is because the hard-liners can push their line more effectively if there are no men there to defend themselves (or for some women to empathize with). "Those who are absent are always in the wrong," as the French proverb goes. Men can thus be convicted of all sorts of "crimes" without being able to defend themselves.

Conversely, this is also why women want to desegregate all male-only institutions: a male point of view, such as Masculism, can develop most freely in a male-only environment.

When research is undertaken in the area of "Women's Studies", too, it can be confidently assumed that anyone devoting their research energies to this area has some emotional stake in the issues involved. And once the results of the research have been published, public attitudes towards the phenomena described in the research will probably undergo some change -- presumably in the direction desired by the author. This is why the very existence of "Women's Studies" Departments in universities, and of Ministries of "Women's Affairs" in governments is itself full of political implications.

Desmond Morris obviously considers that natural selection has favoured societies with male bonding as part of their social organisation, and that the consequences are binding on us genetically to this day.

"His comments are particularly valuable at a time when attempts are being made to minimize the difference between the sexes. A misguided but vociferous minority is campaigning to conceal human gender differences and to obscure the evolutionary truth about our species. This unisexual philosophy seeks to distort the facts as part of an otherwise laudable assault on the unjustifiable exploitation and subjugation of modern woman." (op.cit.)

Once a Feminist has admitted that men and women differ psychologically (if only because of hormones), it becomes very hard for her (try as she might) to deny that there are other psychological differences between men and women. These psychological differences are what make "equality" (in the sense of identical treatment) hard to argue for in theory, or to achieve in practice.

From a natural selection point of view, in highly competitive situations, some types of social organisation would tend to be more successful than others. Other things being equal, the most successful societies would be those whose cultures "went with the flow" of the physical, metabolic, psychological, and behavioural differences between men and women.

The least successful societies (perhaps including those small, isolated communities belatedly discovered and popularised in the media by anthropologists) would, other things being equal, be those which went against the grain of gender differences. In the kind of world we live in now, the selective pressures may well be very different from those faced, say, by hunter-gatherers in the jungle. Therefore, evolution may not favour male-only groups in the future -- even if it did in the past.

It seems to me that societies which undergo the kinds of social changes that rampant Feminism facilitates may eventually collapse under the strain of the results of these changes:

"It seems inescapable that one concrete outcome of this is a widespread pattern of relatively late marriage, delayed childbearing, if any, and then smaller families than before in the major industrial economies.... Since we know that children of small families have small or smaller families themselves, this seems like a continuously persisting trend. In addition, the proportion of men and women who are unmarried has been rising ..., and presumable related to this is a deep decline in birth rates in industrial economies such that on balance it is below replacement." (Tiger 1984, Preface)

One of the striking features of the black ghettoes of America's cities is the high proportion of solo mothers there. It is a truism that solo mothers have trouble controlling their teenage sons. And it is precisely these ghettoes that have the lowest educational levels, the most poverty, the most crime, the most drug abuse, the most alienation from the police and the Establishment as a whole -- as well as the greatest propensity to produce riots.

Feminism alone cannot be blamed for the decline of the two-parent family, but it is certainly partly responsible for it. It is a question of societal goals: if the main aim is materialistic, then bringing up children takes second place. In that context, it makes sense for women to consider not marrying and/or to delay or avoid having children, and for both parents to work.

However, if the main societal aim is to bring up each succeeding generation in a stable and secure environment, then the parents have to make sacrifices. Unless there are communal or extended-family child-care options, one parent (usually the mother) has to stay home, being a housewife has to be restored to its previous high status as an occupation, divorce has to be socially stigmatized, and the employed parent (usually the father) has to be legally liable for the upkeep of the non-employed partner and children.

As Thomas (1993) points out, it is very illuminating to compare the situation of professional tennis-players with that of professional models. Fees for male models are much less than those paid to female models, as men generally provide a much smaller market for cosmetics and fashionable clothes than women do.

In this area, unlike professional tennis, the economics of the situation dictate the respective incomes of male and female professionals. In tennis, as we saw above, politicl pressure has been applied by Feminists, with the result that top female tennis professionals now receive 90% of the income that top male professionals earn. We have seen how the females expend less effort than the males to earn this income, and how female professional tennis generates much less income than does male professional tennis.

While the top female models have annual earnings in the millions of dollars, the top male models have annual earnings in the mere tens of thousands -- one hundredth of the female figure! There is a great and obvious inequity in this situation. Men should demand that either male models earn 90% of what female models earn, or female professional tennis-players go back to earning what they are actually worth in economic terms.

According to an article in the London "Independent" newspaper, about some research by Dr. Tessa Pollard of Oxford University, men and women, in supposedly equally demanding jobs, reported (subjectively) equal amounts of work stress. However, objectively, men had higher adrenalin levels (showing higher stress) than the women.

The researcher apparently concluded that women's hormones protected women from adrenalin surges, and this may be why men have higher levels of heart disease than women.

Now this may be partly correct (I don't know). But another factor that should be taken into account is interpersonal relations in the context of Feminist propaganda. I don't know if stress resulting from interpersonal relations was taken into account in the study (I doubt it), but it seems to me that men in the modern workplace are subject to much more stress from this source than women are.

The Feminist cops-and-robbers scenario has women as the "good guys" and men as the "bad guys", which means that any adjustments necessary as a result of more and more women invading the workplace have had to be made by the men. Women are the modern Madonna (in more senses than one). And chivalry is alive and well, and allied with Feminism in an anti-male conspiracy.

In connection with this, I'd also like to cite a snippet from the "Liberator" newsletter (March 1995), which reports that men in an all-male work environment show the strongest commitment to their jobs, and their commitment declines as the percentage of women in their work group rises. This report summarises research by Anne S. Tsui of the University of California at Irvine.

There may well be a connection between the two research result, along the lines I have suggested. I'd like to encourage those researchers with time and money to follow up this line of inquiry.

2002 Version

CHAPTER 5
EMPLOYMENT ISSUES AND THE "WOMEN CAN DO ANYTHING" LIE

News Item

Barry Ceminchuk ... has sued the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense for employment discrimination against him and all men.[1]

There are jobs in which women have gained an unfair advantage over men -- others where women already had an advantage -- and more where Feminists have leveraged and exacerbated an already inequitable state of affairs. Three employment sectors where men are disadvantaged are the police, modelling, and professional sports. Why? Because men have to compete with women on a level playing field when it suits women, but when it doesn't, women get special, preferential treatment.

The slogan "Women Can Do Anything", which has been popular in New Zealand, was meant as a claim that women could do any job men could. In practice, it became dogma that had to be proved, usually by applying a double standard.[2] Thus, in the police force, men have to perform a physical test each year in less time than the women. (In the U.S. this is called "gender norming."). But no one imposes gender norming on criminals, so a gender-normed policewoman is likely to be physically incompetent, when faced with the task of chasing or fighting a male criminal. If the police could do a deal with the criminals, whereby the crims wouldn't run too fast or fight too hard when confronted by a mere policewoman, this sexist double-standard would perhaps start to make sense.

Is the return on our investment making the double standard worthwhile? Hardly. According to an article in the Wellington Dominion newspaper of October 11th 1997, women don't stay in the New Zealand police force as long as men do – only seven years, on average, as against 17 years for men – so the investment in training a woman police officer is a relative waste of taxpayers' money.

This same double standard is applied in other fields. In professional sports, golf has separate men's and women's tees. In professional tennis, the women play "best of three sets" while men play "best of five sets" – for virtually the same prize money.

Aren't double standards supposed to be sexist? Not in this case, according to University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon: "Why should you have to be the same as a man to get what a man gets simply because he is one?" (The Seattle Times, March 6, 1992) She argues that workplace performance is judged by male standards based on male paradigms and this amounts to discrimination when those standards are applied to women. Hence, employers should not judge women by those standards.

In the real world, this argument is incoherent. A job is not a right – it is a means to provide economic resources for oneself, one's dependents, and the community. Western men allowed women into the workforce on the assumption they were just as good as men. At least, according to the Feminist propaganda they were as good as men.

If Feminists now say women are not, after all, as productive as men, and for this reason need to be assessed by different standards, then they are in effect arguing for women to get back to the kitchen! At least there they would provide a service with high social utility paid for by the labour of their menfolk, as used to be the case in western societies. No economy is so rich and secure that it can afford to give priority to inefficient workers when more efficient ones are available.

The Feminist slogans "Women Can Do Anything" and "Girls Can Do Anything" are lies. They are never applied fairly. But they are not truly intended as statements of fact; in reality: they are devices, propaganda of the kind common in totalitarian countries to overcome and conquer the truth, to make something true that is obviously not true, to peddle a Big Lie. Remember George Orwell (the author of "Animal Farm" and "1984")? He would recognize the modern Feminist state as a totalitarian one.

The main aim of Feminists in recent years has been to get more women into the paid workforce and make life for them there as pleasant and as profitable as possible no matter the price men have to pay for it. Feminists have paid lip-service to the notions of "equality" and "equity" where this seemed to be a useful tactic. But there have been no effective men's pressure-groups to assure these standards were adhered to. Hence, unless some Feminist group decides to make an issue of something nobody listens to calls for equity. And this gives women an extremely unfair advantage.

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and Affirmative Action (AA) are examples of Feminist-supported workplace policies, and these policies kill. Mainly, they kill men (see below). And that's quite apart from the jobs they steal from able men to squander on less qualified women.

This may be hard to prove, since any two candidates for a given job may have such different educational backgrounds and life experiences that it is easy for a selection panel with a particular agenda (e.g., Affirmative Action) to find some factors in the background of the applicants they can use to rationalise their decision afterwards, if necessary. For example, they could say their organisation lacked enough customer service staff who had experience dealing with whining children; their preferred candidate "just happened" to have such experience and they felt this would be more useful for dealing with customers than extensive knowledge of the products, services and industry. But we still need examples where such bias is obvious.

Feminists have adamantly asserted that "women can do anything" and that men, as a sex, cannot be considered more suitable than women for particular jobs. So why is it okay to say women, as a sex, are more suited for particular jobs? This is a glaring example of Feminists employing sexist standards to advance their agenda, and it goes against everything they say they stand for. If a job requires men to meet certain physical fitness criteria, it should require all candidates to meet those same standards. If a female candidate can meet those standards, under the principles of equal employment opportunity she should get the same consideration any other equally qualified male candidate would receive. But affirmative action has different priorities.

There are obvious, apparent differences between the policies of EEO and AA The term "Equal Employment Opportunity" implies there should be no barriers based purely on race or sex to any person who aspires to a particular position. "Affirmative Action," however, goes well beyond that. If removing barriers to women and ethnic minorities, etc., does not result in their being employed in every workplace and at every hierarchical level in proportion to their presence in the population as a whole, then quotas need to be set to achieve that result artificially and irrespective of the merits of the candidates for the positions.

Each government and workplace tends to interpret these two programmes differently, depending on the political forces at work there. John Marcus of the National Coalition of Free Men defines Affirmative Action as follows:

Current policy of establishing hiring quotas, quotas for business contracts, quotas for university admissions, providing some people, and not others, with more favorable loan arrangements, preferential treatment in awarding broadcast licenses and other favoritism based on race and gender. Favoritism is enforced through government agencies. Affirmative action first became wide spread during the Nixon administration (Republican). (www.ncfm.org/afiract.htm)

We have to look at both sides of the ledger. Women may have been prevented from doing certain things, but some of those things (which men were forced to do) were unpleasant -- even dangerous. In pre-Feminist western societies, there was an equal-but-different model of gender roles which emphasised the fact that there are some things women can do better than men, and vice versa.

When women get pregnant or during menstruation and menopause, which don't have precise male equivalents, women tend to function below par, intellectually (see the medical research papers: Buckwalter JG; Stanczyk FZ; McCleary CA; Bluestein BW; Buckwalter DK; Rankin KP; Chang L; Goodwin TM (1998) and Keenan PA; Yaldoo DT; Stress ME; Fuerst DR; Ginsburg KA (1998)).

Certainly they cannot sustain the kind of physical activity required by many jobs. And pregnant women leave. They may come back, and in many jurisdictions employers are required to hold position for them, but while they are gone their coworkers must shoulder extra responsibilities, then bring them back up to speed upon return. Hence, women can cost more and produce less than men.
Moreover, the Feminist lie puts people (mainly men) at risk when it allows women into positions where they are not physically competent. Every time male and female police officers patrol together, it is because a man was denied the job (see below). The lie gave the job to a woman who performed less well than he did in a physical test. So when those two police officers patrol together, the man will sometimes be forced to protect the woman because she can’t handle it. That happened in one particular case near Wellington, New Zealand. Two unarmed police officers were injured – the man much more severely than the woman – in an assault.

Employing women as fire fighters also puts people in burning buildings at risk. They may die solely because women lack the upper-body strength to move unconscious, heavy people out of burning buildings by themselves. In the past, if two firemen entered a burning building and saw two unconscious people, those two people would be carried or dragged to safety. Now, if a male and a female firefighter enter a burning building and find two unconscious people, unless the male firefighter can return in time, the second of these victims may die!

Nowadays, some fire services have a policy whereby two firefighters are required to move any incapacitated person at a fire scene. I believe that this policy was brought in as a sop to physically incompetent women – so that their physical incompetence would not stand out. The result is that some people may be dying at fires, who would otherwise have been saved.

But not all jobs require that kind of strength. What about those? EEO Policies for men and women are a result of the relatively recent upsurge in numbers of women in the paid workforce. This upsurge, in turn, was the result of:
 

Research has shown that daycare is detrimental to the psychological development and socialisation of children. So Feminism extracts a price not just from men and unborn children, but also from children, and the adults that they will turn into. See http://ici2.umn.edu/ceed/publications/factfind/daycare.htm.

Feminists have largely dictated the lines along which EEO policies were implemented. They required male-only or mainly-male workplaces to conform to policies designed to make it easier for women who wanted to work alongside men to gain entry. Moreover, they do not care what policies men might need to help them work alongside all these women! The only policies they look for are those which force men to make the workplace and work easier for women.

The New Zealand Human Rights Commission's Equal Employment Opportunities Manual defines "Equal Employment Opportunities" as:

“A systematic, results-oriented, set of actions that are directed towards the identification and elimination of discriminatory barriers that cause or perpetuate inequality in the employment of any person or group of persons.”

Men are not within the target groups (i.e., do not belong to an ethnic or other official minority) and are not included for special consideration in the manual. They have not been subjected in the same degree to the factors which have limited the participation in employment of target group members.

Moreover, this discrimination is exacerbated by Human Rights legislation which is seldom written with men in mind, and the pervasive male chivalry which applies sexist double standards that generally favour women. For example, I was working in a female-dominated workplace when management brought in an anti-sexual harassment policy. This policy was drafted by a committee headed by an old-style Feminist woman in middle management. The new policy gave examples of "sexual harassment," including "looking up skirts and down dresses." Obviously this targets male and lesbian "offenders."

Immediately, two middle-aged Feminist women whom I found unattractive took it upon themselves to bend over and expose their bras and breasts to me (since I was well-known as the one-and-only anti-Feminist activist). I regarded this as sexual harassment, but the anti-sexual harassment policy made me out to be harassing them unless I instantly averted my eyes! So I went to the only pro-male member of the committee and complained about this, after which he managed to get the policy amended so no sex-specific offences or examples were mentioned. I am certain no other person there would have thought of or dared to lift a finger to change that anti-male policy.

All the propaganda about EEO is putting pressure on organisations to hire and promote women solely for the sake of hiring and promoting women. These organisations worry about their image. Women spend much more money on consumption than men, so this gives them power over retail firms and advertisers. In the article, "Work-Day Dream" www.geocities.com/peterzohrab/199enslt.html#Dream
the author writes:

“With an hour to kill on my lunch break, I casually stroll through the brightly lit corridors of the shopping mall. As I look around, it occurs to me that I could easily spend the rest of my life without ever needing a good 95% of the items sold in this place. Yet everywhere I look it's mostly women snapping things up left right and center.”

In June 1994, the male staff at New Zealand's Open Polytechnic formed a Men's Network. Its aim was to combat the "gender-cleansing" effects of the Equal Employment Opportunities policy practised by that institution's female Principal. Tom Dowling, coordinator of this network, said he had never thought seriously about discrimination against men or about men's rights until it became obvious men were being removed to make way for women. I interviewed him for Wellington Access Radio's Men's Rights programme. He told me it was an informal meeting at morning tea which crystallised the issue for him and his male colleagues. The Open Polytechnic was in the middle of the latest round of redundancies layoffs – the fifth such round in four years. Redundancy was the topic of conversation at that morning tea.

What focused their minds on the issue of men's rights was that 79 of the 80 staff laid off so far had been men! Furthermore, they noticed that 48 of the 52 who were about to be laid off were men. "Not surprisingly, as men. we found this rather concerning," Dowling said.

Four years previously, when the female Principal took over from her male predecessor, the Open Polytechnic employed few women. Only 20 percent of the staff, as the subjects taught were mainly male-dominated trade subjects. Now, according to Tom, the latest redundancy round would turn male staff into a minority on campus. Most of the powerful management positions were held, or were about to be held by women. Since men were about to become a minority in the staff-room, the Men's Network decided to ask for the privileges the Women's Network had long enjoyed under the Open Polytechnic's Equal Employment Opportunities policy.

The Women's Network had a notice-board for its own exclusive use. Now the Men's Network demanded the right to take it over. Tom pointed out that the idea for a Men's Network was largely tongue-in-cheek when it started. But it got more serious as the members began delving more deeply into the institution's Equal Employment Opportunities operation.

They learned groups with official status under the Equal Employment Opportunities policy had monthly meetings. These meetings were half in paid time. Since the campus was split between several sites, the institution paid the monthly taxi fares of network members who had to travel to the main campus for these meetings. Obviously, these subsidies came from the same source which formely paid the salaries of the men who were laid off. These subsidies were not only substantial, they were also sometimes used for dubious purposes. For example, the May 1994 Women's Network meeting was held for the purpose of watching slides on Africa provided by a travel consultant. And in 1993 the Open Polytechnic's EEO programme funded an ethnic food festival.

The issue of toilets also cropped up. This is particularly interesting as one of New Zealand's most radically Feminist members of Parliament, Marilyn Waring, made a big issue of the lack of female toilets in Parliament Buildings. On the floor of the secondary campus where Dowling worked, the only toilet was a women's toilet, despite women being a minority on that floor. Male staff had to go down to the next floor, which was leased by another organisation, to use a male toilet. To add insult to injury, the male toilet was smelly and fitted out like a public toilet while the women's toilet was very plush and fitted with an extractor-fan and air-freshener. The toilet situation was similar on the other secondary polytechnic campus. When employers discriminate against men in various ways, it seldom gets any publicity or resolution.

The vigour with which social engineering policies such as EEO and AA are implemented is often linked to the perceived severity of the issue. And it is Feminist researchers, by and large, who produce the statistics intended to show how big such problems are. Hence, EEO and AA policies are often based on distorted statistics. An official government report, for example, states:

There has been little movement towards gender equity in the teaching service in the past three years.... Fewer women than men held senior positions, particularly in primary schools. Furthermore, they received, on average, lower salaries than did their male colleagues in equivalent positions or with the same qualifications. (page 1, second paragraph).3

This passage was obviously intended by the two female authors to create the impression there was some problem to be solved here. The leaflet is studded with words such as "imbalance," "under-representation" and so on. However, the leaflet does not take account of – or even mention – length of service! Pay-scales in the teaching service are based on a system of seniority from a point initially determined by qualifications to a maximum you can't progress beyond without applying for promotion.

Near the end, the leaflet does mention how more women than men left the service (temporarily or permanently), and it is obvious childbirth and childcare must have been among the reasons for this. Yet the leaflet neither investigates nor even mentions any reason why women have lower salaries than men with the same qualifications that do not support their contention of gender bias. Because women have shorter careers, they don't progress as far up the payscale ladder, and they are less likely to apply for or achieve promotion.

The link is obvious, though it may not account statistically for all the difference between men's and women's salaries in the teaching service. Regardless, the leaflet conveys a misleading impression, and the authors must have been either incompetent or intentionally fraudulent. Do our officials care? I wrote to the Minister of Education about this and the reply from Education Ministry Group Manager Rob McIntosh neither disputes this nor apologizes for the oversight:

“Unfortunately, data on length of service was not available when the report was being prepared. While acknowledging the relevance of this factor to some of the issues discussed, its absence does not invalidate the material which is included. For example, if position is partly determined by years of service, then the analysis of salary by designation also reflects the length of time a person has been teaching.”

Men work for and earn more money than women do, but women control more than 65% of US personal wealth and spend four consumer dollars for every consumer dollar men spend. This means that personal wealth is controlled mainly by women, because women live longer than men and inherit their wealth at the point in their life when they are likely to be at their richest. Young men, on the other hand, are usually relatively poor at the start of their careers. Women also get wealth from men through alimony, palimony and child-support payments which they do not have to report for tax purposes because men do.

Sexual harassment regulations are another example of one-sided rules instigated by Feminists, who have scant regard for the needs or rights of men. In some cases, these seem to have been devised by Lesbian Separatists who really would prefer to have nothing to do with men at all! It is generally men who take the initiative in sexual relationships, with all the attendant risks of rejection. This means that men, on the whole, must be more open about their sexual feelings or end up single, celibate and alone. Heterosexual women, on the whole, tend to be more passive and are less overt about their sexual feelings since they can afford to wait until a man makes the first move.

So sexual harassment regulations, by punishing natural male sexual behaviours while rewarding natural female passivity, oppress men. Men, by acting naturally, can now have their careers blighted – while women, by acting naturally, are defined in this context as model employees. Females can and do sexually harass males (I have been on the receiving end of this), but it is basically an offense waiting for a man to commit it.

Sexual harassment regulations can even have an anti-male bias written into them, as I mentioned earlier. Policies, for example, which restrict "looking down shirts or up skirts" as a form of sexual harassment but place no restrictions on women dressing in ways that produce gaps in their blouses or allow vast amounts of leg or even underwear to be seen, depending on the position of the wearer. This makes women officially blameless while forcing men to avert their eyes or run the risk of being automatically guilty of sexual harassment.

In America, the National Association of Scholars took out an ad in the March 1994 edition of the American Spectator publicizing their policy statement on sexual harassment and academic freedom. Two of the most important points it makes are:
 

These aim to make it difficult for women (in particular) to turn just any trivial incident into a sexual harassment complaint – and also to make it hard to use sexual harassment complaints as a way of victimising people who have unpopular opinions. But most institutions are far too intimidated by the Feminist lobby and their lawyers to implement reasonable policy. Better by far to immolate individual innocent men than to risk a big money lawsuit with all the attendant bad publicity. Proving once more how sexual harassment oppresses men.

Where is the slogan "Women Can Do Anything" in professional sports such as tennis? Professional and semi-professional sportswomen receive far more prize-money and publicity than the level of their performances relative to men in most sports deserves. For example, in Iron Man and triathlon events the media and judges lavish attention on the male winner (and perhaps the second and third men to cross the finish line), and then on the first one-to-three women to cross the finish-line, even though the women may come in much later than dozens of men. Not only does this discriminate against all the men who come in ahead of the leading women, but all mention of the comparative times of the leading men and the leading women are sometimes censored out. To hide the fact that women can’t do just anything men can, of course.

In October, 1993, there was a combination running-and-mountain-bike race in Dunedin, New Zealand. Both men and women competed, but the women were given a 20-minute head-start. As one of the leading male contenders pointed out, this was highly sexist. If a woman, benefiting from her head-start, had come in first, she would have received exactly the same prize-money a male winner would, despite his 20-minute handicap.

As it happened, the best men took about 30 minutes less time than the leading women to cover the course, so it was a man who took the winner's purse. Will Feminists pressure the organisers to raise the handicap to 30 minutes, so a less able woman can win? Soon we could witness the sexist farce of a woman picking up the winner's purse for achieving a result inferior to several men and 30 minutes worse than the best man.

If sportswomen who underperform the best sportsmen in certain sports are to get the same level of publicity and sponsorship as the best sportsmen, then so should the best junior sportsmen and sportswomen, the best disabled sportsmen and sportswomen, the best veteran/masters sportsmen and sportswomen, and so on. Wherever there was sexual segregation Feminists did not like, they called it "sexist" and got it abolished. But in open competition with men, female athletes would be shown for what they really are. This is why Feminists have not been jumping up and down demanding an end to double standards on this issue, of course.

Similar conditions occur in other sports, such as tennis and golf, as Bertels (1981) points out. Professional female tennis-players play three-set tennis while their male colleagues often have to play five-set tennis championships. The calibre of women's tennis is lower, yet the women players seldom miss an opportunity to demand purses equal to men’s! In golf, the women's tee is closer to the green than the men's despite the obvious inequality involved. Again, no Feminists have complained about this. But they are complaining about the prize money.

Should they be paid the same as men? Thomas (1993) also points out that at Wimbledon female prize-money is within 10 percent of male prize-money. Female players such as Monica Seles want 100 percent parity in prize-money. Several years ago the male player Pat Cash said women are not only not as good at tennis as men (and no woman has denied this or attempted to disprove it), but they also don’t work as hard for their money.

Barbara Potter, a radio commentator for the BBC and a former professional tennis player, estimates that only 50 percent of professional women tennis players are fully fit. The men are much fitter, as they play on a much more competitive circuit. When Steffi Graf won (the women's) Wimbledon singles title in 1991, she had to play only 128 games to win her prize money of Stg. 216,000. Michael Stich, the men's 1991 Wimbledon champion, had to play all of 257 games for his prize money of Stg. 240,000. This works out to Stg. 933.85 per game for Stich, and almost twice as much per game – Stg. 1,687.50 – for Graf. Based on pay per game, the Feminists have no case.

Nor, according to Thomas (1993) can they argue for equal prize-money on the grounds of the amount of revenue they generate. On British television, for example, the BBC had 8.1 million viewers for the 1991 Wimbledon men's final but only 7.0 million viewers for the women's final. And the black market prices for Wimbledon centre court tickets for the men's final were Stg. 650-900 for the men's final and only Stg. 300-450 for the women's final.

Where is all the money paid to female tennis-players coming from? The same sources that pay male tennis-players. But female players are paid more than men, relative to the income they actually generate. If they were paid purely in proportion to their economic value, then male players would be paid more because male players earn more. So male professionals are in effect subsidising their female counterparts. Isn’t that like a sexist double standard? Two separate and unequal systems, like athletic segregation, or apartheid, one for privileged women, the other for workhorse men? But where are the Feminists demanding equal pay for equal work?

Since Feminists favour EEO and oppose separate men's clubs, the sexual apartheid system in all sports should be abolished; e.g., female players should play in the same competition as men and for the same prizes. The alternatives are to continue with the Feminist hypocrisy, or enshrine sexual segregation in some areas of social and sporting life through legislation, with pay for men set substantially higher than women to accurately reflect the different objective standards involved.

It is highly unfair for men and women to be treated equally in employment only when it suits women! We must actively oppose this, because Feminists are demanding more of this “equal” treatment (money and media coverage) across the board for their substandard half of the apartheid sports industry. All their jabber about wanting nothing more than a level playing field notwithstanding, this is one arena in which women are almost always incapable of competing on that much vaunted but little coveted level playing-field.

As I mentioned earlier, police recruitment policies in some countries discriminate against men. My example is the New Zealand police force, but I am sure such discrimination is a feature of most western police forces. There are no longer any minimum height requirements for police recruits in New Zealand, but there used to be. I asked Police Headquarters why the requirements were eliminated, and their reply was illuminating. It is "a well-established fact," they said, that men are, on average, taller than women. Proportionately, they argued, it would discriminate against women to set the same minimum height standards for them as for men.

How about areas such as the real estate industry, where women are sometimes considered to have better relevant people-skills than men? How about demanding that that industry should aim to employ more men who have less developed people skills because it would discriminate against men to set the same people skills standards for them as for women? Here people would say the best person for the job should get the job. Then why don't they say that for the police? A competent police force is much more vital to society's welfare than a competent real estate industry.

When Feminism-related jobs are advertised (in the Ministry of Women's Affairs, or Equal Employment Opportunities positions, etc.), one of the criteria is usually "an interest in sexual equality issues," or some such phrase. Proportionately, many more women than men meet this criterion, but no one ever says that the Ministry of Women's Affairs should lower their standards on this to be fair, proportionately, to men. Here's another (albeit extreme) example: it is also a "well-established fact" that it is very much more difficult for a woman, or even a group of women, to rape a man than for a man, or group of men to rape a woman. Does anyone ever argue that penalties for men who rape women should be lowered to be proportionately fair to men?

Feminist arguments taken to their logically absurd extreme aside, the fact remains that under the pressure from Feminist lobby-groups society does impose a double standard on men.

And what about ethnic double standards? If we have them for men and women, then logically, we should have different standards for ethnic or other groups whose average physical characteristics differ from the average for the population as a whole. Otherwise, some ethnic groups, such as the generally powerful Samoans, might have an “unfair advantage” over other ethnic groups, such as the generally slight east Asians. But let’s take the twisted Feminist logic ever further and apply it to disabled people. If we are going to have different physical standards for men and women, then we should have different standards for the physically and intellectually challenged, who should also be entitled to become police officers.

I wrote to the Minister of Police and got a copy of their old and new entry standards for recruits. I couldn't believe my eyes! The 1990 version had explicitly different standards for men and women, in that men of all ages had less time to complete the physical tasks than women of comparable ages. But in 1993 a Review of the Entry Standards for Police Recruits was completed. It said that the previous test "had different requirements for men and women and under the Human Rights legislation this is no longer acceptable." So they changed the screening process. Fair enough, you might think. But the new regulations had different standards for men and women, too! All that had really changed was the performance scores were translated into grades (0 to 3). The translation formula was what was different for men and women.

So a man and a woman might both get a 3 ("good") for the vertical jump, for example, but a man would have to reach 48cm or more where a woman would only have to reach 40cm, and so on for the various activities.

Obviously, they had their lawyers figure out a way to retain the double standard without breaching the letter of the new Human Rights legislation! Think of all the male applicants who fail even though they perform better than woman who pass. Forget the men, think of you and your loved ones getting inferior protection because the best candidates were not recruited. Straight-out job-related discrimination against men does take place – especially in female-dominated organisations such as cosmetics companies, and this is occasionally reported in the media.

The proposal that women should be paid wages for housework is another means by which Feminists are trying to extort money from men. If women can't get into the paid workforce, then taxpayers should pay them to stay home! In a radio interview an official from the New Zealand Ministry of Women's Affairs noted the Ministry opposes wages for housework/child upbringing and wants to retain features of the tax system that favour working couples over single-income families. Why? Ostensibly because it is unfair to women to pay them to stay home. Two-income families, the Ministry spokeswoman said, can usually cover the cost of childcare and/or home help themselves (i.e., from the pay one parent would otherwise relinquish to stay at home), or the working parents are able to handle the housework/child-care in addition to their work-commitments. Hence, why limit women's options?

There is an obvious Feminist value-judgement here: encouraging both partners to get jobs is more important to them than housework and bringing up a family. What the Ministry of Women's Affairs spokeswoman did not say was that having more housewives at home bringing up children would diminish the size of the working women's lobby, which (including the male partners of working women, who like the extra income) is the backbone of the Feminist movement. This is the real reason some Feminists oppose a wage for housewives, and why conservative Christian parties sometimes favour it. Employers, however, may have mixed motives for giving in to Feminist demands – women may be willing to work for less than men are, and having more women alongside men in the workforce increases the labour pool and drives down wages.

Moreover, income taxation in several western countries is structured along Feminist lines. One person in New Zealand earning, say, NZ$40,000 pays more tax than a working couple with a combined income of NZ$40,000. The government grants low income earners rebates irrespective of their partner's income, or lack thereof. In other words, the family is no longer a taxation unit, the number of dependents is no longer relevant to the amount of tax a person pays, and this contributes to the rising number of single parent (i.e. single mother) households. And New Zealand is by no means alone in this. The income taxes of several countries actively discourage marriage thereby hastening the demise of two-parent households.

Why would they want to do that? Because like the Chinese Communists under Mao, Feminists see the family as a rival power-structure they must weaken if not destroy.

Feminists have captured the Establishment in western countries, and they are continually restructuring society to make working women (with of without a partner, and with or without children) the central focus. Barbara Andolsen's article, for example, "A Woman's Work is Never Done" (1985), deals with the related issue of households where both the man and the woman work, but the woman still does most of the housework. She argues that justice requires men and women in such households should share the housework equally:

By 1983 fifty-two percent of all wives were working for wages. Almost two-thirds of all women with children ages six to seventeen were working for wages. Fifty percent of mothers with children under six were working outside the home (an increase of seventeen percent in one decade.) More than three-quarters of all divorced mothers are in the labor force. American households in which a wage-earning husband supports a nonwage-earning wife – a wife presumable devoting her energies to household maintenance – are now a dwindling minority among families. (page 4)

The same period might well furnish a Masculist researcher with other, arguably related statistics: a rise in sales of books by Feminists, a rising divorce-rate, a rising truancy-rate, a rising drug-dependency rate, a rising male suicide rate, and a rising crime rate. One could speculate that the increasing number of Feminist books (together with improved birth-control methods) persuaded more and more married women to enter the workforce and leave their husbands (not necessarily in that order). The increasing number of two-income and one-parent families led to increased truancy, drug-dependency, and crime among their neglected children. The New Scientist of 20 February 1999 reports that Bernard Lerer and his colleagues found that children whose parents split up are more likely to have a psychiatric illness later in life.

Feminism has destabilised the traditional family, encouraged many women to be dissatisfied (or to be brought up already dissatisfied) with the nuclear family, where the husband was the sole breadwinner and also titular "head of the household." Husbands, or potential husbands, had to either conform to a changing role in the family or opt for celibacy or separation (if already in a relationship). Feminism (particularly Radical Feminism) also romanticised financial and emotional independence from men as an ideal to which women should aspire.

Be that as it may, the fact seems to be that working couples do not share the housework equally: working husbands with working wives only do, on average, up to about twenty-five percent of what Andolsen calls the "more pleasant" of the household tasks, such as social or educational care of children, food-preparation, and food-clean-up. This ignores the more traditionally male chores, such as sports-coaching, gardening, car maintenance, and home-handyman-type work, which take up a lot of the working man's spare time. Warren Farrell (1993) reports two US studies showing men do more work than women, if you include housework, commuting, repairs, work in the garden, and so on.

Feminists also ignore how husbands are more likely to work overtime, either by bringing their work home with them or physically remaining at the workplace. And as more men than women occupy senior positions, the latter is more likely to apply to them as well. We should also note that one reason more men than women occupy senior positions is precisely because men work significantly more overtime than women.

Andolsen is aware of this, but her response is to propose employers stop requiring their ambitious employees to work these long hours! As Feminist writer Ellie McGarth put it, "The answer is not to move women out of star jobs but to redefine our expectations for everyone." (Savvy magazine, June 1989, p 40) Not only is this unrealistic, but also evidence Feminists have raised the notion of shared housework to the status of an ideal for its own sake, not as an issue of ethics or equity.

In any emergency involving danger (whether local and personal, civil or military), it is men, not women, that Feminists expect to run the risks. Any laziness that men may or may not exhibit around the house is a fair trade off against the danger society may call upon us to face.

Just how real is this risk? How can we quantify it? The problem is actuarial in nature, something insurance companies deal with all the time. They calculate their premiums on the basis of statistics as to the likelihood of the event they are insuring against. They also build in their overheads and a profit margin. In this context, if we picture the family as a socio-economic unit, then, all other factors being equal, the reason insurance premiums for men are higher than women is because of the greater risks men face throughout life, because the state spends less money researching, publicising, preventing, and treating men's health issues, and because men are not encouraged to look after their own health the way women are.

Hence, men are providing protection on a non-profit basis. They provide protection from potential burglars, rapists, etc., and they do this just by their physical presence. Sometimes they actually have to confront such criminals, but often a criminal will avoid entering a house just because an adult male is obviously resident. Men are also liable to be conscripted in wartime to pursue the military aims of the nation as a whole.

The standard Feminist response to this is, it's a man-problem to begin with, because, but for the male aggressors, women wouldn't need protection; hence, there should even be a special "testosterone tax" on men to help pay for the added expense males impose upon society. However, there is no evidence that women, in any specific country at a time of war, are any more pacifist than men, and there is no evidence that women leaders are more pacifist than male leaders. Just because the leaders who have to decide whether to go to war are usually male, armchair Feminists can sit back and pretend such decisions have nothing to do with women. Similarly, they assert men have a higher propensity to commit crime than women, but as more women become the primary breadwinners the crime rate for women is going up.

Instead of a "testosterone tax," we arguably need an "oestrogen tax" because women live longer and therefore use more taxpayer-funded health resources,utilities, and retirement benefits. They also receive more state-funded legal aid and single parent benefits. And they carry out taxpayer-funded abortions. Women also tie up more of the GNP of western countries because a significant proportion of the media, bureaucracy, education system, and legislature is dedicated to promoting and implementing Feminist agendas and suppressing men's and fathers' rights. Women are never conscripted into the front-line in wartime, so they should be taxed to pay for this sexist exemption.

It should be perfectly possible to quantify these issues, and to quantify the value of housework, based on rates of pay for home help. On this basis, it should be possible to quantify how much, or how little housework the average adult male should equitably do, and how much the oestrogen tax should amount to.

If a wife does not have an outside job, then who does most of the housework would not be an issue. But Feminism has taught women it is better to get a job outside the home than to do a good job of looking after your children. Once they are working, women don't always see why they should also do most of the housework. On the other hand, maybe the husband would prefer her to stay home and do the housework and childcare. Why should he then shoulder extra burdens created by his wife's selfish or materialistic decision?

Close relationships work best when based on complementarity rather than competition. A marriage of two people of similar personalities does not work as well as one where the personalities of the spouses complement one another. Likewise with roles. The best thing about the old-fashioned philosophy that "a woman's place is in the home" was that spouses had distinct, well-defined and complementary roles in the socio-economic system of the family. If both are working, then they are to some extent competitors. Of course, complementarity also results if the wife works and the man is a househusband, but few women are interested in such an arrangement.

Having a job of her own also makes it more likely a woman will feel like leaving her husband. Every relationship goes through stresses and strains. The social and legal climate helps to determine how much a couple will put up with before they separate or divorce. And the Feminists have seen to it women are more inclined than ever to leave – especially as matrimonial and divorce legislation and enforcement are biased against men.

Military service and conscription are an area where women have always had an advantage over men, and Feminists are not about to complain about it! But they are working hard trying to get women the choice of a military career without the obligation of conscription. Nowhere are Feminist double standards more blatant. Farrell (1993) states this issue of military service in graphic terms:

Imagine: Music is playing on your car radio. An announcer's voice interrupts: 'We have a special bulletin from the president.'... The president announces, "Since 1.2 million American men have been killed in war, as part of my new program for equality, we will draft only women until 1.2 million American women have been killed in war." (op. cit. page 28)

Wars have always involved civilian casualties, but most of the casualties are soldiers and most of the soldiers have been men. So I think it is worthwhile making Farrel's imaginary scenario a political proposal. At least it would expose Feminists as the hypocrites they are.

As a bare minimum, Liberal Masculists might say that the drafting of women as front-line troops should occur on exactly the same basis as for men (whether in war or peace). Increased use of military technology has indeed reduced the importance of men's greater upper-body strength and hormonal characteristics in war, as much of the action is now long-distance. Even infantry warfare involves little upper-body strength. However, this is more a moral issue than a practical one and the argument for mandatory draft registration of women would be strong even in the absence of sophisticated military hardware.

Moral and political arguments aside, conservative Masculists still prefer the traditional division of labour: only men should be subject to conscription and front line duty, but they should receive some special treatment in return. Legal status as head of the household, for example. It might even be used as an argument for repealing women's right to vote: why should women elect governments that can declare war when they don't share equally in the dangers that war involves?

Some Feminists favour opening front-line positions to women who volunteer. However, Feminists don't like the idea of compelling women to undertake such dangerous and unpleasant duties. Of course, many men oppose the idea, as well, but Feminists who hide behind this are hypocrites. Many Feminists pretend that wars are "men's games", which is an outright lie. Most wars have just as much support from the females in the populations involved as from the males. How many Feminists stood up and said that Britain should not defend itself against Hitler, for example? And I once read of a German mother who so adored Hitler that she said that, if Hitler was really homosexual, she would send her son to sleep with him! In 1999 the Sri Lankan Prime Minister was a woman, and in that year a Tamil female suicide bomber blew herself up in an attempt to kill her! In what way was that a "man's game"?

Feminists also say we should concentrate on preventing war because a world without war has no need for conscription. True enough, but that does not stop them from demanding that women have the option to serve on the front lines. Moreover, there is a contradiction between that and the line Feminists take on abortion. You never hear Feminists say they oppose abortion because they are concentrating their efforts on preventing unwanted pregnancies!

Everyone agrees that war and unwanted pregnancies are both evils we should avoid. But in the case of war, Feminists pretend they can abolish the evil and thereby ignore the conscription issue. While in the case of unwanted pregnancy, they focus instead on removing the inconvenience for women – at the cost of a human life!

But this is not the only context in which they suffer from a distorted sense of proportionality: The Men's Manifesto (Richard Doyle, Men's Defense Association, 1992) notes Feminists made a serious demand for a statue of a "combat woman" to be erected at the Vietnam War Memorial in the United States. This was intended to memorialize specially and separately the eight (8) American women who died in that war. The existing memorial would then be shared only by the 58,000 American men who died there.

This complete lack of compassion, gratitude and sense of proportion by the Feminists is absolutely typical. They must feel guilty about all the sacrifices men have made in wartime on behalf of women and children, and that it is one of the weakest points of their case if it leads them to attempt to raise ancillary activities to the same level as front-line infantry fighting.

In their drive to get more women into the paid workforce, one of the Feminists' main complaints has been how more men than women hold full-time jobs. What's more, even when women started to enter the work-force in large numbers, occupations still tended to be sexually segregated, with many (though not all) of the predominantly male occupations commanding higher pay.

In his introduction to Lionel Tiger (1984), Desmond Morris gives the following as the historical cause of this phenomenon:

When our ancient ancestors switched to hunting as a way of life, the relationship between males and females was dramatically altered. Females, with their heavy reproductive burden, were unable to play a major role in this new feeding pattern, which had become so vital for survival. A much greater division of labour between the sexes arose. The males became specialized for the chase. They became more athletic and they spent long periods of time away from the tribal home base, in pursuit of prey.

Nor, as Tiger (1970) emphasizes, is saying there was a good reason for creating a sexual division of labour long ago the same as contending it must be perpetuated, or that it cannot be reversed in the present or future. Nevertheless, Morris and Tiger do talk in terms of genetic changes resulting from natural selection. They are both biologists and social scientists who base their work on that of ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz, George Schaller and Jane Goodall.

Such scientists discovered a lot about the complexity of animal (especially primate) social behaviour. Moreover, they are also in a position to start puzzling out how these patterns of behaviour can be genetically transmitted and selected for, or selected out, just like physical characteristic. Thus what they claim about "human nature" has a semi-permanent ring to it. Natural selection operates over a large time-scale. And species have so far never been able or willing to consciously determine the overall course of genetic development within their own species.

So it is easy to see how this book upset many Feminists. They are, after all, keen to bring about social change; i.e., change resulting from conscious administrative and legal reforms which take place on the time-scale of a generation, or thereabouts. They would not be happy to hear someone claim male dominance in the best-paid, full-time employment sectors reflects reality on the genetic level. This would mean it could not be changed for thousands of years, and no amount of pressure from Feminist groups could hasten the day. Instead, any change would have to result from impersonal, intangible selective pressures.

But such findings have other, more immediate results of far greater concern to Feminists, as well. Academic works by people like Lionel Tiger (and also those written by Feminists) may claim to be merely descriptive of what the authors observe. But there is a feedback-loop between description and behaviour in the social sciences. As soon as an academic popularises the fact that certain previously obscure facts do occur, people accept them, allowing the events in question to occur more frequently. Thus what started off as a descriptive account ends up being more prescriptive – an indication of what should or at least could take place without being ethically wrong.

Hence, it's important for us to consider the attitudes of the author or researcher. We cannot simply assume academics pursue their work in a purely objective frame of mind. If a sociolinguist, for example, undertakes a lengthy study of a stigmatized word (such as "ain't"), then two things are certain:
 

This is why Feminists reacted so strongly against Lionel Tiger's book. Once it was known that bonding within male groups is "natural" and has specific functions, men felt less guilty about belonging to male-only organisations. The less guilty they feel, the less likely they are to bow to Feminist pressure to admit women members. And they may also feel less guilty about working in male-only occupations.

Most Feminist meetings, "consciousness-raising" sessions, etc., exclude men. With no men present to defend themselves (or for some women to empathize with), the extremists can push their line more effectively. "Those who are absent are always in the wrong," as the French proverb goes. Thus they can convict men of all sorts of "crimes" when the guys aren't around to defend themselves.
Conversely, this is also why Feminists want to desegregate all male-only institutions: a male point of view, such as Masculism, could (and probably would) develop in a male-only environment.

Similarly, when an academic devotes herself to research in "Women's Studies," we can confidently assume they have an emotional stake in those issues. Once they publish their research, public attitudes toward those issues will almost certainly change, probably in the direction the author desires. This is why the very existence of "Women's Studies" departments in universities, and of Ministries of "Women's Affairs" in government is fraught with political implications.

Desmond Morris obviously believes natural selection has favoured societies with male bonding as part of their social organisation, and that the consequences are binding on us genetically to this day:

His comments are particularly valuable at a time when attempts are being made to minimize the difference between the sexes. A misguided but vociferous minority is campaigning to conceal human gender differences and to obscure the evolutionary truth about our species. This unisexual philosophy seeks to distort the facts as part of an otherwise laudable assault on the unjustifiable exploitation and subjugation of modern woman. (op.cit.)

Once a Feminist admits men and women differ psychologically (if only because of hormones), it becomes very hard to deny other psychological differences between men and women. These psychological differences are what make "equality" (in the sense of identical treatment) hard to support in theory or achieve in practice. Indeed, any society which attempts to implement the kind of social changes Feminism facilitates may eventually collapse under the strain as the unstable elements of society out-reproduce and, thereby, replace the more stable elements:

It seems inescapable that one concrete outcome of this is a widespread pattern of relatively late marriage, delayed childbearing, if any, and then smaller families than before in the major industrial economies.... Since we know that children of small families have small or smaller families themselves, this seems like a continuously persisting trend. In addition, the proportion of men and women who are unmarried has been rising ..., and presumable related to this is a deep decline in birth rates in industrial economies such that on balance it is below replacement. (Tiger 1984, Preface)

Do we want children in our society? That is the question. If our main aim is materialistic, then bringing up children takes second place. In that context, it makes sense for women to consider not marrying and to delay or avoid having children, and for both parents to work. However, if our primary social goal is to bring up each new generation in a stable and secure environment, then parents have to make sacrifices. Unless there are communal or extended-family child-care options, one parent (usually the mother) has to stay home, we must restore the role of a housewife to its previous high status as an occupation, we need to socially stigmatize divorce, and the employed parent (usually the father) has to be legally liable for the upkeep of the non-employed partner and children.

Children are our future, and if we put them last, what becomes of that future? In that context, the question is not "is there a sexual division of labour," but "how do we best fulfill the sexual division of labour?"

At the start of this chapter, we mentioned models and professional tennis players. As Thomas (1993) points out, it is very illuminating to compare the situation of professional tennis-players with that of professional models. Fees for male models are much less than those paid to female models, as men generally provide a much smaller market for cosmetics and fashionable clothes than women do.

In this area, unlike professional tennis, the economics of the situation dictate the respective incomes of male and female professionals. In tennis, as we saw, Feminists applied political pressure with the result that top female tennis professionals now receive 90 percent of the pay top male professionals earn. We also saw how the females expend less effort dollar-for-dollar, pound-for-pound, than the males, and how female professional tennis generates much less revenue than male professional tennis. In modelling, however, women bring in more money than men do and are paid accordingly; so where are the Feminists demanding equality?

While the top female models have annual earnings in the millions of dollars, the top male models have annual earnings in the mere tens of thousands – one hundredth of the female figure! There is a great and obvious inequity in this situation. Men should demand that either male models earn 90 percent of what female models earn, or female professional tennis-players go back to earning what they are actually worth in economic terms.

According to an article in the London "Independent" newspaper about research by Dr. Tessa Pollard of Oxford University, men and women, in supposedly equally demanding jobs, reported (subjectively) equal amounts of work stress. However, objectively, men had higher adrenalin levels (showing higher stress) than the women. The researcher concluded women's hormones protected them from adrenalin surges, and this may be why men have higher levels of heart disease than women.

But this may be only part of the story; another factor they should consider is interpersonal relations. In the context of Feminist propaganda, men in the modern workplace are subject to much more stress from this source than women are. As the Feminist agenda invades the workplace, it forces men to adapt a predominantly male environment to Feminist sensibilities. How can a man relax when any normally masculine behavior he may exhibit could get him fired? The Feminist anti-male conspiracy has men on edge. No wonder they suffer from higher levels of stress.

In this context, Richard Doyle commented in The Liberator (www.mensdefense.org) newsletter (March 1995) on research by Anne S. Tsui of the University of California at Irvine. She reported that men in an all-male work environment show the strongest commitment to their jobs, and their commitment declines as the percentage of women in their work group rises. There may well be a connection between these research results. It is also noticeable how the Japanese economy has suffered, since the male-only workplace culture became diluted by increasing numbers of women workers. We should encourage research to follow this line of inquiry.

Last Update: 28 December 2004

©Peter Zohrab