Anti-FeminismThe way Things Don't Work Out as intended
1.Women normally intuit, or find out, that men won’t make good pets. They don’t want to, and can’t anyway. Their motivations are all wrong. They positively must regard themselves as necessary. This is especially true for strong and able men. Such men must believe, and be fooled into believing if necessary, that they are essential.

2.Men that are not essential are not much of anything worth mentioning. They don’t develop properly. They don’t persevere. They lose interest. They don’t invest their energy in families and communities. They wander. They will be absent in some sense. When they have nowhere geographical to go, the matter gets worse. They remain and dissipate. They cause trouble. Disenfranchised men are marauders; they tear things down.

3.Every society has had to solve the problem of having men around. Before communities could develop, the energies of men had to be harnassed. So long ago that only myth remembers, woman made herself an object of her man's territoiality, and he went to work on her behalf. Unless men regard society's welfare as their own, they invent roles debilitating to society.

4.To induce men to accept ownership in society, each known culture has reserved essential roles for them. Women did not compete with men in the roles reserved for them, and societies made a large investment in maintaining separate gender roles. Social taboos forbade blurring of the roles, and women and men united to punish transgressors. Members of the culture came to genuinely believe that each gender was unsuited to assume the roles of the other.

5.Men are inclined, perhaps biologically programmed, to shun feminine praxis. Because of this, an uncontested sphere of feminine influence is assured. By contrast, a sphere for male social influence had to be both granted and protected. As part of the bargain, the man’s role in most societies entailed socializing males to be expendable. If foreign marauders threatened the group, these expendable men were trained to hurl themselves against the invaders as a determined and lethal defense. Their role as protectors of the home became a fundamental part of how these men defined themselves. Their personalities were distinctively marked by the expectation of sacrifice that they internalized.

6.Men and women internalized different and symmetrical expectations. Specialization of labor according to gender has been universal. Organically evolving civil societies learned though experience to avoid placing women and men in face-to-face competition. Women and men lived in separate worlds and held different aspirations.

7.Organically evolved civil societies rigorously pressed individuals into sometimes ill-fitting roles. Individual liberties were sacrificed as men and women were trained into complementary roles, so that when they came together a space was created where children could be nurtured and civilization could be born. Boys and girls were in training to grow up and become husbands and wives, which was never an easy or natural discipline.

8.Billions of people in millions of insular communities over hundreds of generations have tried, and re-tried, every conceivable form of social organization and relationship. Some ideas were tried repeatedly and failed each time they were tested. People have never ceased testing limits and pushing against strictures. Societies have always experimented with equalizing and freeing the genders. None of the older experiments with gender equality was successful enough, or lasted long enough, to leave us a record. Contemporary experiments, for which we do have a record, are discouraging.

9.The Soviet Union’s legal structure militated against organically evolved civil society and especially the role of males. Families and other traditional structures were damaged. Following the collapse of the Soviet hierarchy, communities that had evolved successfully for millennia were challenged to survive. In the aftermath men have tended to be ineffectual providers. They invent self-destructive roles for themselves outside of society and die early. Women are at risk and impoverished. Progress to rebuild viable and successful institutions has been spotty, and slower than anyone predicted.

10.In the United States, the second half of the 20th century saw well-intended factions use governmental powers to eliminate the role of men in the civil society for most of Black America. Men lost interest and wandered away. The sons of these disenfranchised men are now a hugely disproportionate source of hooliganism and crime in America.

11.The 16th to 19th centuries saw Europe’s technology and conquest render male roles obsolete in many conquered cultures. Although many tried to adopt or adapt the institutions of the conquerors, essentialness was elusive. Reviewing the experience of aboriginal peoples suggests that they have fared the worst. Men have since contributed little to some of these societies, where male behavior has been marked by dissipation and malaise.

12.In parts of the American southwest, some of the aboriginal cultures were matriarchal and matrilineal. Women owned approximately all the community’s property, and women held political sway. A husband could be sent away at the whim of his wife, and dared not return home. The socialization of males was decidedly different here. These societies may have been threatened less by foreign marauders, and men may have been less trouble.

13.Some of these cultures reserved spiritual and healing roles for men. Women did not compete with men in invoking rain or praying for crops. Neither did men compete in women’s roles. These men held an essential place in community life, and contributed to their society. These were truly men, and they were not kept as pets.

14.The Anasazi was a people of this region that disappeared -went extinct- several centuries before the Europeans arrived. They once had an organized and successful civilization. The reason for their disappearance has been a declared mystery, however the mystery is readily explained:

15.Although Anasazi women witnessed the public rituals and ceremonies, much ancient lore and technique was hidden from them. Men met away from the women to fast and purify themselves, and to prepare for performance of the rites. Men kept their sacred knowledge carefully, and observed the ancient taboos against telling the secrets to women.

16.Women were more than a little curious, and envious too. Women pushed against this social stricture, of course, and women have ways of finding out secrets. She would ply her lover for secrets and decry his lack of trust – she would vow to keep his secret faithfully. From time to time a woman would find an initiate who was less resolute than amenable, and she would learn a bit of lore. And women would remember.

17.They would quietly compare their findings, and in time they accumulated a considerable part of the magical lore. They surreptitiously followed the men and learned to collect the sacred medicinal plants and artifacts. They conducted clandestine experiments and learned that they, too, could make the magic work to some degree. Children often healed in response to their ministrations.

18.A generation of children, especially girls, grew up with the realization that women, too, could make magic. As their ability increased, women were more open about their magical interventions. They would openly deride the man who considered himself the carrier of sacred power. With the violation of ancient promises and taboos, sacred arts lost their potency.

19.The prowess of the men declined and the gap between men and women narrowed. Young men formed into gangs and committed atrocities, as they sought violently for new magic that would regain a role for them in society. Some of the young men dissociated themselves from the others in disgust, and older men would have no part of these new ways. Dedication to a common purpose was shattered, and men no longer met as a body or apart from the women.

20.Disaffected men wandered away from the community, and did not return. When a husband left the community, the young wife would often fetch the baby up on her hip, and go off following her husband. The children trailed behind, the eldest helping the toddler, as they headed off to join or begin a new society. The society they left ebbed away.

21.In time there was only a circle of sad old women gathered around the fire, complaining bitterly about how unfair life was. And in time the old women died out, of course, and that was the end of the Anasazi.


Chris Choat 2003