Installment 9. 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.
Feminacentrism
Feminacentrism is another manifestation of Womenfirsters’ power to define the agenda. It requires looking at all problems exclusively from women’s perspective, or for the purpose of seeing how women are affected. It is based on the idea that women are more virtuous, more important than men. Feminacentrism is blind to the problems men face.
Announcing (drum roll, please)
the Winner of the Award for
The Most Incredibly Feminacentrist Statement of the Twentieth Century“Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.”
— Hillary Clinton at the First Ladies’ Conference on Domestic Violence in San Salvador, El Salvador, November 17, 1998
(You dead and maimed guys are so lucky!)
“It’s not fair that you want to treat us fair!”
A feminacentrist “study” of gender bias in the Ninth Federal Judicial Circuit in 1993 asserted that gender-blind sentencing guidelines were unfair to women. “If women received lesser sentences prior to the implementation of the Guidelines, and now their sentences more closely approximate those given to men, the Guidelines would have had a disproportionately harsher effect on women than on men. In other words, while many defendants receive longer sentences under the Guidelines than previously, women’s sentences may have increased more than those of men.”
—derived from the Final Report of the Ninth Circuit Gender Bias(ed) Task Force, note 108, page 181
Suppose in the 1950s we had said that measures to equalize education between women and men were unfair to us because they increased women’s schooling more than ours. Would anyone —much less a supposedly rational federal circuit court —have wasted the paper and ink to print such an argument?
Feminacentrism in the Media
For a story on August 5, 1987 reporting that 3,416 men were slain at work—82% of all at-work killings—USA Today used this headline: “732 women were murdered on the job.”
“[T-shirts with the slogan ‘Destroy All Girls’ in very small type on the washing-instructions tag] are awful… I think we’ve got to take a look at what’s going on in the culture as a whole that [anti-female] attitudes get expressed all over the place.”
—political consultant Jacqueline Salit; CNN & Company, May 19, 1997
“Roseanne started her national television career on the ‘Tonight Show’ saying, ‘Did you hear the one about the woman who stabbed her husband 37 times. I’m really impressed by the restraint that she showed.’… I think that was a big part of her appeal.”
—political consultant Jacqueline Salit; CNN & Company, May 19, 1997
On December 30, 2000, the Washington Post reported that 115 girl babies and 158 boy babies were killed in the USA in 1997. But what headline did the paper use on that story? “A Matter Of Violent Death and Little Girls.” Thirty-seven percent more boys than girls were killed, but the story focused on the girls.
Keep an eye out for this when you go to the movies. When a screenwriter wants the audience to dislike a male character, all the writer has to do is show the character in an argument or disagreement with a female, or show him being unkind to her. There’s no need for the audience to know why he’s upset with her, and no need to explain his background or the details of the disagreement. The audience will automatically assume that he is wrong; they will be well on the road to not liking him just by virtue of the fact that there is anger or unhappiness between him and a woman.
She’s unhappy. He’s a bastard. Or a jerk. Let’s get him. Case closed. Except for the sentencing, which will now unfold on the screen.
This is feminacentrism at work.
Feminacentrist Spin Control Makes Men Dizzy
“Did you ever notice,” a male friend asked me, “that we have the word misogyny for anger at women, but we don’t have a word—except misandry, which no one knows or uses—for anger at men?”
“Yes, I have,” I answered. “Isn’t that something?”
“It sure is,” he said. “It just proves that being angry at men is simply not allowed.”
Surprised, I said, “Gosh, I came to an entirely different conclusion.”
“How could you possibly come to a different conclusion?” he asked. “It’s obvious.”
“Well, what’s the word,” I asked, “for crossing the street against a light or in the middle of a block?”
“That’s jaywalking,” he answered.
“And what’s the word for crossing the street at an intersection with a green light?”
“There isn’t any word for that. It’s just called crossing the street.”
“And so maybe,” I suggested, “the reason we have a word to spotlight anger at women is because we want to punish and discourage it, and the reason we don’t have a word for anger at men is because, like crossing the street with a green light, it’s perfectly okay.”
My friend had no response—other than to insist that surely I must be wrong.
In August 2001, the highly-rated Canadian TV show W-FIVE aired a program on workplace deaths and injuries among youth. The Canadian reality is probably not terribly different from the situation in the States, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. From 1996 thru 2000, according to the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 872 young people between the ages of 15 and 19 were killed at work in the USA; 782 were male; 90 were female. W-FIVE never mentioned and never researched a gender component to the problem it was covering, even though all three of the victims it profiled were male.
It is not that the people at W-FIVE are heartless; in fact the producer who faxed me the transcript was a nice as she could be. It’s just that we don’t think—or perhaps don’t want to think—of how the male role is so closely tied to injuries and death.
It is difficult to imagine that a report on anorexia would fail to mention how sex and gender pressures affect girls and women. But it is all too common for us to look male problems squarely in the face and not acknowledge that what’s happening to men and boys is happening to them precisely because they are male.
Feminacentrism is the culprit. It demands that we see and pay attention only to problems that affect girls and women. Males are cheap, it says. If they break they can easily be replaced.
In their book Raising Cain, psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson point out that the Bible story of Cain and Abel is about a man who kills his sibling because he feels his parents love, respect and appreciate his sibling more than they do him.
If females can be thought of as males’ siblings, males have a lot of reason to feel like Cain these days. And that’s not good for anyone.