Installment 4. If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules?
Share this compelling intro to the Men's Movement with your skeptical friends.
Adjusting Our Eyes to See Female Power
There are two possible reasons why we keep hearing that we live in a patriarchy. The first is that we do indeed live in a society dominated by men. The other possibility is that we live under a different kind of rule that is so strong and so pervasive that it keeps us from seeing it for what it is.
“Cherokee women didn’t have titled positions. The men had those. But women had the Women’s Council. They had a lot of control. People forget that… With the Iroquois the chief was a man, but the women chose the chief, they nurtured him, they installed him. Women could take him out.”
— Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, 1987-1995, speaking at the University of Arizona in January 2002, as broadcast on C-SPAN, June 1, 2002
Women’s power is the opposite of monumental. It’s like wall-to-wall carpeting, or a snowfall, everywhere and unavoidable, not concentrated into a few narrow, vertical monuments, like men’s.
Phyllis Schlafly gets a big kick out of the story of a hoodwinked husband boasting foolishly to his friends: “When my wife and I were married, we agreed that I would make all the major decisions, and she would make the minor ones. I decide what legislation Congress should pass, what treaties the president should sign, and whether the United States should stay in the United Nations. My wife makes the minor decisions—such as how we spend our money, whether I should change my job, where we should live, and where we go on our vacations.”
—from Schlafly’s 1977 book The Power of the Positive Woman
Women get away with more bad behavior than we do because our mischief tends to rise abruptly for all the world to see. Women’s mischief often hugs the terrain like a low-level bomber invisible to radar.
As a new seventh-grade teacher in Winslow, Arizona in 1974, I drew two graphs on the chalkboard. Pointing to the graph on the left I said, “This is how a boy is typically bad. He throws an eraser, laughs out loud, or yells. He isn’t bad for very long, but when he’s bad there’s no denying it.” I turned to the other graph. “This is how a girl is typically bad. At any moment she’s only doing little things like whispering or giggling, but she does it for a much longer time.”
“The shaded area,” I said, “shows that the total ‘badness’ is about the same. Boys who misbehave in my class will be punished as I’m sure they always have been. But if I should punish a girl for something much less obvious than throwing an eraser, don’t complain that you weren’t doing much. Consider instead how long you were doing it.” Naturally enough the boys were happy with this enlightened standard of justice and discipline. But to my delight, the girls, too, liked the fact that somebody had called them on their game.
“In studying female aggression, Dr. [Wendy] Craig [a professor of developmental psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario] found that girls are just as aggressive as boys. Unlike male aggression, which is physical, female social aggression is covert and, therefore, hard to detect. ‘Girl aggression tends to be social in nature—that is, emotionally rejecting, dismissive, and verbally abusive,’ she says. ‘This kind of aggression has as many negative consequences as physical aggression. The victims of social aggression become anxious, depressed, fearful, and have a lower self-concept.’ The implication is that, as future parents, socially aggressive females have the potential to inflict great harm, which can go undetected by society.”
— Queen’s University press release, March 18, 1997
“[Women] bully in more or less the same way [as men] with the exception that females are actually much better at it, they’re much more devious, much more manipulative, much more subtle about it and they leave a lot less evidence as well—and they can often do it with a smile.”
— Tim Field, who established Britain’s National Workplace Bullying Line in 1996, reported in The Australian, July 12, 1999
“[T]he central organizing principle of primate social life is competition between females and especially female lineages… Females should be, if anything, more competitive than males, not less, although the manner in which females compete may be less direct, less boisterous, and hence more difficult to measure… We are not yet equipped to measure the elaborations upon old themes that our fabulously inventive, and devious, species creates daily.”
— Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Ph.D. in her 1981 book The Woman That Never Evolved
“Most of the damage women do is indirect. If she only bats her eyes to induce a guy into a fight, nobody’s going to blame her. Women do a lot of things that provoke and trigger responses in men. But nobody seems able to see that.”
— Herb Goldberg, Ph.D., author of The Hazards of Being Male in an interview with Jack Kammer, December 2, 1990
Recently I had a conversation with a group of women in which I said that women generally seem to do a much better job of sticking together than men do. I wasn’t asking for a reason or a cause. I wanted to talk about the effect. But the women didn’t want to talk about that. They immediately got defensive and threw out a reason, almost like a roadblock. The reason that women stick together, they said, was “because we have to.”
The clear implication was that if women don’t stick together we bad and powerful men will take advantage of them since they’re so good and powerless. By pretending to be powerless and by pretending to act only in reaction to what we do to them, women irresponsibly free themselves to do whatever they want to us and not feel bad about the offenses they commit.
We have to stop allowing them to pretend to be powerless. We have to insist they talk about effects as well as causes, and about causes other than the ones they want us to accept.
The Power of Emotions
Computer hardware looks impressive. Software doesn’t look like much. But anyone who understands computing knows that the power is in the programming.
When it comes to emotions, we’re like ditzy women who think they can’t balance a checkbook, like utterly dependent females who run to men for their weekly allowance. We let women handle our emotions for us. That gives them a lot of control.
“A contemporary man often assumes that a woman knows more about a relationship than he does, allows a woman’s moods to run the house, assumes that when she attacks him, she is doing it ‘for his own good.’”
—poet Robert Bly in his 1990 book Iron John
“Psychologically speaking, nine out of 10 women will take nine out of 10 men in a fight to the finish, not with direct, head-on aggression, but with guilt, shame and blame… As men we need to learn how not to be vulnerable to women when we shouldn’t be.”
— philosopher Sam Keen, author of Fire in The Belly, quoted in Yoga Journal, May/June 1991