This was sent to me by Email today, i thought i would pass it on. It came from the comment section of the article "The End of Men" - from the online magazine - "The Atlantic"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/2/
The posting was by brooklynboy3
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Everyone see the crazy man murders in VA today?
Time for another good read.
See below!!!!!!
“Violence is as American as apple pie” Eldridge Cleaver
The Long Goodbye of the American Male
Please allow me a quick story.
In late spring, I had lunch with the owner of a boutique search firm in Manhattan. Learning that her company is comprised of only women, I asked if she would ever hire a man. She leaned forward, looked me in the eye, got very quiet, and told me that she would sooner die. I laughed until I realized I was the only one laughing. The candor of her response came as no surprise to me because I see what is coming and wonder if others see it as well.
The next wave of discrimination is approaching and it is about to change everything. Our social fabric, the political arena, the financial world and the roles and relationships we have come to know. Its arrival will be painfully slow; almost imperceptible, but will soon develop into a groundswell that will strike at the very heart of America’s power elite. The discrimination of which I speak will be against men. Not old men, not bald men, not fat men; all men.
A truly equal opportunity discriminator, it will decimate the male gender because any real purpose they once served; any real merit they once added seems to be eroding as the cost of their contribution seems to far outweigh its value. Honestly, what can a man do that a woman can’t? Brain surgery; electrical engineering or repairing farm equipment? I believe they can perform those functions very well. Frankly speaking, I believe they can perform all types of work quite successfully.
I do understand that some readers might be miffed as to my comments. As such, I write this with all of the sensitivity and compassion I can muster. As an aside, please note that as a member of the male species I am quite aghast at my own prediction. On the other hand, I have always found the male of the species to be rather disappointing; grudgingly benevolent on a good day, Neanderthal and warlike on a bad one. The bottom line is sad and it is simple. Men have had their opportunity to reign supreme for endless years. Clearly it is time for a change; a dramatic change.
I know what you are thinking; you’re a nice guy. Perhaps you only cheated on your spouse once but that was long ago. You try hard not to drink that much but life has its pressures. Of course you look at women younger than your daughter but hey, you are married, not dead, right? Honestly, you really are trying but behaving well is so very difficult. That is all so nice to hear but there is no need to personalize my message. I am a nice guy as well but putting aside the docile good guy persona, let’s do a deeper dive and look at the male species in a more comprehensive way.
As a gender men seem to be violent and aggressive to a fault. (That is in peacetime of course. We will not even discuss the wartime.) If you follow news events of the day, men also seem to be more criminal as well. Lets just scratch the surface and consider a few easy examples of men in America:
• Almost weekly, a man will get a gun, kill his family and then kill himself. Odds of a woman doing this? Minimal. (After slaughtering the innocents, some men will fail in their attempt to kill themselves. I wonder why.)
• Teen boys will bring automatic weapons to their school, kill as many as possible and then kill themselves. Teen women will not. (Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are have evolved into cult heroes for many; symbols of mindless rage and male angst)
• Sexual predators will commit unspeakable crimes against women and children. The overwhelming majority of these predators will of course be men.
• The villains of this economic meltdown, from the disease that is Madoff to those on Wall Street to the rest of the criminals are almost exclusively men. (Psychopathic men of course but men just the same.)
• Care to go international? Oppression of women by violent angry men is rampant from one end of the globe to the other.
I can go on but there is no need. Speaking frankly, the reason that the world teeters on the brink of annihilation on a semi-regular basis is due to the combined and cumulative forces of male leadership. Male insecurity, male ego, seething male rage. From the disturbingly paranoid Richard Nixon to the fanatical leaders of North Korea and Iran to the childhood bullies who torment the quiet easy kids to the coast-to-coast jails that are bursting at the seams. It is all men. (When Eldridge Clever said, “violence is as American as apple pie, he was not talking about women.)
Fortunately, women, seem to be taking matters into their own hands. A recent study has shown that women are starting businesses at a rate of almost 1.6 times more often then men. Furthermore, according to Silverstein and Sayre, authors of the book Women Want More, women “now control 12 trillion of the overall 18.4 trillion in global consumer spending.” They are forming networking groups that exclude men. (Where they were once not allowed, they now control the door and as such, control the associated information, contacts and communication.)
Women are quietly building and doing and making things happen. Even more importantly, they are doing it with little of the male oriented drunken celebrations, blatant abuse of power and sexual harassment that goes on within corporate America every single day. The bottom line is that women are quietly gaining power. Just as Asian cars crept in silently and one day, crushed our carmakers, smart and committed women will slowly move to dominate and control commerce as the good old boy network collapses under its own bloat.
Please be advised that I am not a cultural biologist nor am I behaviorist or a specialist in brain chemistry. Aside from a might makes right type of Machiavellian thinking, I do not understand why men as a species have behaved in this manner. Furthermore, for either better or worse, I do not care. Some might blame testosterone and evolutionary factors. Others will blame society and culture while still others will blame Darwinism or professional sports and poverty. (Mix and match if you like) The specific answer matters little to me. I am, among other things, a writer. It is my job to chronicle what I see. It is not my job to explain, justify or create solutions that might serve to rectify as I do not possess that level of expertise.
The question here is simple; what exactly will be missing from our vaulted male dominated society if I am correct in my thesis? I am not sure. Perhaps all that will be missing will be male perspective, male opinion and the ability to wage war. I can’t speak for you but personally; I can live with that loss quite easily." ***
Thursday 26 August 2010
Wednesday 25 August 2010
The End Of Men
Very good article on how women are being empowered in recent years. There are a lot of comments on this article as well.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
Tuesday 24 August 2010
Darwin's Evolution Theory
The problem of the 'survival of the fittest' theory is that it is focused too much on the male. The most important aspect in the evolution of any animal is the mother. If the mother is able to care for her young so they survive to breed a new generation, then the species thrive. In many animals, the male only plays a secondary role in this. Which is what male chauvinist scientists do not want the public to know about.
Monday 23 August 2010
Women in times of Great Hardship
I personally think we all will be better off if women ruled our world. One of the reasons for this is illustrated in Paul Vallely book. “Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt”. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990. He was a Journalist in Africa and “The Times” correspondent in Ethiopia during the great famine of 1984/5, and in his book he writes about the incompetence, corruption and violence he witnessed in those times. So the book is a depressing read but there is one part of the book that different, where we see what is possible if women are allowed to run things. The following is a part of the book I copied out. –
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On all sides the baked white desert stretched endlessly into the distance. Within me I could feel a suppressed sense of panic at the utter desolation of the place. We were more than three day's drive from Khartoum. All around, the landscape was utterly featureless except for the occasional euphorbia bush. Its leaves were poisonous, I had been told, as if to underline the relentless hostility of the landscape. There where no roads. Our Sudanese driver had no map. It seemed that he was driving by the sun. One of my companions from time to time furtively checked his direction with a compass. It seemed hopelessly haphazard.
“Surely we are lost,” we said to him, one word at a time as if we were speaking to an uncomprehending child, though it was in fact he who could speak a little of our language and we none of his.
“No, no,” he said, and completed his sentence with a short burst of Arabic. He drove on, gripping the wheel with a constant effort as the land-rover bumped and bucked across the unyielding terrain. And sure enough about an hour later we arrived at Tendelti. I wondered that the place could have had a name at all, for there seemed to be little there to distinguish it from the surrounding desert, little anyone would have felt necessary to dignify a name. In fact it was what, well into the fringes of the Sahara desert, constituted a major landmark. Beyond the primitive refugee camp which had been set up there was a dried up wadi which, on those rare occasions when it rained, turned for a few hours into one of the mightiest rivers on the edge of the Sahara. It flowed from nowhere to nowhere, appearing suddenly and then running into the insatiable sands or evaporation in the desiccating air almost as quickly as it arrived. It also marked the boundary between Sudan and Chad. The ten thousand people in the camp were mainly refugees from that neighbouring country which was troubled by civil war. Of all those registered at Tendelti only two hundred were men. They were old or crippled. All the able-bodied had either died in the fighting or had left their women here at the border while they continued on eastward towards the Sudanese capital where they hoped to find work.
Life in Tendelti was unimaginably hard by Western standards. The water was nauseously turbid and foul-smelling. The food was insubstantial and unappetising. The straw hovels they lived in were little more than raffia mats propped up by sticks, no protection against the torrential rain storms which just at that time were falling every other day. But the women of Tendelti were finding ways to live with the four thousand children under the age of seven.
Women in any case do most of the work in Africa. Almost 80 per cent of the continent's food is produced by women, it is estimated. The men, unlike their counterparts in other parts of the Third World, restrict themselves to a little cash cropping and a lot of sitting around talking politics beneath the broad branches of the baobab trees. It is the women who are responsible for the food crops - which means the hoeing, and planting, and the weeding. As well as being responsible for the children they are also in charge of the livestock. They gather the firewood, grind the corn, prepare the food and fetch the water, which alone can take up several hours of the day. In Tendilti they had also taken over the organisational and administrative work, which normally would have been the prerogative of the men. Fourteen of them had been elected by the camp's seven tribes to run the centre and its feeding program with foreign aid which trickled in unreliably from Port Sudan more than a thousand miles away.
“We have found that they are making a much better job of it than do the men,” said Mhboba Ab-Rahel Ali, a local woman who had once been a teacher but who was then employed by Oxfam to supervise work at the camp. “Other camps are run by local Sheiks, all men, of course, and traditional leaders, and yet we have found they do not run as smoothly as this camp. It is not just that the women manage the children better in the feeding centre. They are more willing to work at problems that the men,”
That day in the camp little boys could be seen with their baby siblings strapped to their backs. In normal times this job would have been done by their big sisters and mothers but now the women were busy with men's work. Older girls were baking bricks. Mothers were building more permanent homes with walls of mud bricks and strong thatches. Grandmothers were preparing thatches of twigs from the scrubby desert bushes for the new roofs. The elected women were talking to foreign water engineers about where the wells should be drilled.
One of the recent changes at Tendelti had been a decision to end the futile attempt to distribute to everybody a share of what little food arrived. The women had devised a new system to concentrate most on those children who were most in need. Everyone else would live off mokheit and the other scant famine foods to which the desert people turned at times of desperation. Slowly the condition of the children, which Oxfam nurses had described as 'appalling' when the camp was first established, was beginning to improve. “We have organised a special sitting for the children who will not eat on their own so that we can make sure that they do take some food,” said Aleem Hassan Mamadan, who had been elected by more than two thousand members of the Asangor tribe, one of the hardest-hit groups of these cross-border peoples. Her husband and her four children had died in the famine. She and four other children survived. She was finding time to look after them as well as take part in the organisation of the camp. Other women were equally impressive. Fatuma leader of a group of a thousand Arap tribeswomen who had trekked en masse across the desert from Chad to Tendlti seven months before, in addition to her own two children she had adopted a third, a child whose mother had died in the drought and whose father had been killed in the war. Halima Mohammed Hassam, though only aged twenty-two, was the leader of 1,200 Marareet tribespeople and had similarly adopted two children of a murdered family.
'It is not difficult to manage without men,' said Matka Mohammed, a handsome women who led the 1,300 Zagawe tribeswomen in the camp. Her cheeks bore the ritual scars of a warrior family - when there were Zagawe men around the camp they startled Sudanese aid workers from the capital by threatening them with long swords when the worker suggested that the Zagawe should queue for food. Now the food was distributed with a careful eye to the most needy and a methodical fairness alien to local male leaders who would commonly wheel and deal with the food aid in their trust in the small communities throughout the famine affected region.
'We needed men to help cultivate, but the women already did most of the work and can easily take over the men's share. We needed men to dig wells, but at present there is no water in the ground, We needed men to ride horses, but now the horses have died in the drought.'
Was there anything they could not do without men? At this point my interpreter, who was also a Sudanese but a man, stopped translating and began, instead, to answer indignantly himself. Matka Mohammed looked on with eyes twinkling as he turned to me and blustered. Then she confronted him and insisted he put the question, laughed and said: 'We are not happy without men. There is one thing they are good for...' she said, and broke off with a deep mischievous laugh.
There were many terrible and miserable sights to see in Africa in those years. But occasionally there was an experience like Tendelti which cracked the stereotypes and forced a new humility on any foreign observer from the developed world. There in the desert, when deep in my stomach I knew we were hopelessly lost, our driver brought us unerringly to our destination. There amid the starvation were tens of thousands of people surviving, as their mothers and fathers had done for generations, off a meagre diet of desert fruits and withered roots which the Western nutrition experts said could not sustain life. There where normal life seemed to have shrivelled in the heat were a people taking a new control of their lives with new initiative, new senses of priority and even a continuing sense of humour.
Tendelti was the first book. In it were incarnate the truths which we have seen spelled out in that second book, the Bible. [the author is a committed Christian.] Here groups of neighbours had come together to act as a society. What little resources they shared had been allocated with justice and, it had been decided, with a disproportionate preference to those who were most in need. The sharing was not out of the surplus of the controlling elite, but came out of their sacrifice. Those who were normally marginalized by their status, the women, had been enabled to participate in the social process and in doing so had discovered a sense of control which brought them dignity despite their material deprivation. Out of it they were prepared to confront those who challenged them. It had also brought new insights on the ordering of social relations, the structures had been changed. It would be romantic to stretch the parallels any further. So destitute were these people that it was clear that they were not in possession of the resources to provide their basic means of food, clothing and adequate shelter. They certainly were denied any share in the productive resources which the creation ordinances allow is the basis for sharing in stewardship of the planet's resources: there were seeds, tools, and water pumping equipment in the regional capital - but only for those who had the cash to enter the 'free' market of which Sudanese mercantilism offers such a raw exemplar. The empowerment of the marginalized group, the women, had come about only because the men were gone, not because there had been some transformation of social relations resulting from personal of spiritual change within individuals in the group.
(The author then goes on to relate what he had observed in Tendelti to his Christian beliefs.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Vallely
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-First-World-Ethics/dp/0883446685
---------------------------------------------------
On all sides the baked white desert stretched endlessly into the distance. Within me I could feel a suppressed sense of panic at the utter desolation of the place. We were more than three day's drive from Khartoum. All around, the landscape was utterly featureless except for the occasional euphorbia bush. Its leaves were poisonous, I had been told, as if to underline the relentless hostility of the landscape. There where no roads. Our Sudanese driver had no map. It seemed that he was driving by the sun. One of my companions from time to time furtively checked his direction with a compass. It seemed hopelessly haphazard.
“Surely we are lost,” we said to him, one word at a time as if we were speaking to an uncomprehending child, though it was in fact he who could speak a little of our language and we none of his.
“No, no,” he said, and completed his sentence with a short burst of Arabic. He drove on, gripping the wheel with a constant effort as the land-rover bumped and bucked across the unyielding terrain. And sure enough about an hour later we arrived at Tendelti. I wondered that the place could have had a name at all, for there seemed to be little there to distinguish it from the surrounding desert, little anyone would have felt necessary to dignify a name. In fact it was what, well into the fringes of the Sahara desert, constituted a major landmark. Beyond the primitive refugee camp which had been set up there was a dried up wadi which, on those rare occasions when it rained, turned for a few hours into one of the mightiest rivers on the edge of the Sahara. It flowed from nowhere to nowhere, appearing suddenly and then running into the insatiable sands or evaporation in the desiccating air almost as quickly as it arrived. It also marked the boundary between Sudan and Chad. The ten thousand people in the camp were mainly refugees from that neighbouring country which was troubled by civil war. Of all those registered at Tendelti only two hundred were men. They were old or crippled. All the able-bodied had either died in the fighting or had left their women here at the border while they continued on eastward towards the Sudanese capital where they hoped to find work.
Life in Tendelti was unimaginably hard by Western standards. The water was nauseously turbid and foul-smelling. The food was insubstantial and unappetising. The straw hovels they lived in were little more than raffia mats propped up by sticks, no protection against the torrential rain storms which just at that time were falling every other day. But the women of Tendelti were finding ways to live with the four thousand children under the age of seven.
Women in any case do most of the work in Africa. Almost 80 per cent of the continent's food is produced by women, it is estimated. The men, unlike their counterparts in other parts of the Third World, restrict themselves to a little cash cropping and a lot of sitting around talking politics beneath the broad branches of the baobab trees. It is the women who are responsible for the food crops - which means the hoeing, and planting, and the weeding. As well as being responsible for the children they are also in charge of the livestock. They gather the firewood, grind the corn, prepare the food and fetch the water, which alone can take up several hours of the day. In Tendilti they had also taken over the organisational and administrative work, which normally would have been the prerogative of the men. Fourteen of them had been elected by the camp's seven tribes to run the centre and its feeding program with foreign aid which trickled in unreliably from Port Sudan more than a thousand miles away.
“We have found that they are making a much better job of it than do the men,” said Mhboba Ab-Rahel Ali, a local woman who had once been a teacher but who was then employed by Oxfam to supervise work at the camp. “Other camps are run by local Sheiks, all men, of course, and traditional leaders, and yet we have found they do not run as smoothly as this camp. It is not just that the women manage the children better in the feeding centre. They are more willing to work at problems that the men,”
That day in the camp little boys could be seen with their baby siblings strapped to their backs. In normal times this job would have been done by their big sisters and mothers but now the women were busy with men's work. Older girls were baking bricks. Mothers were building more permanent homes with walls of mud bricks and strong thatches. Grandmothers were preparing thatches of twigs from the scrubby desert bushes for the new roofs. The elected women were talking to foreign water engineers about where the wells should be drilled.
One of the recent changes at Tendelti had been a decision to end the futile attempt to distribute to everybody a share of what little food arrived. The women had devised a new system to concentrate most on those children who were most in need. Everyone else would live off mokheit and the other scant famine foods to which the desert people turned at times of desperation. Slowly the condition of the children, which Oxfam nurses had described as 'appalling' when the camp was first established, was beginning to improve. “We have organised a special sitting for the children who will not eat on their own so that we can make sure that they do take some food,” said Aleem Hassan Mamadan, who had been elected by more than two thousand members of the Asangor tribe, one of the hardest-hit groups of these cross-border peoples. Her husband and her four children had died in the famine. She and four other children survived. She was finding time to look after them as well as take part in the organisation of the camp. Other women were equally impressive. Fatuma leader of a group of a thousand Arap tribeswomen who had trekked en masse across the desert from Chad to Tendlti seven months before, in addition to her own two children she had adopted a third, a child whose mother had died in the drought and whose father had been killed in the war. Halima Mohammed Hassam, though only aged twenty-two, was the leader of 1,200 Marareet tribespeople and had similarly adopted two children of a murdered family.
'It is not difficult to manage without men,' said Matka Mohammed, a handsome women who led the 1,300 Zagawe tribeswomen in the camp. Her cheeks bore the ritual scars of a warrior family - when there were Zagawe men around the camp they startled Sudanese aid workers from the capital by threatening them with long swords when the worker suggested that the Zagawe should queue for food. Now the food was distributed with a careful eye to the most needy and a methodical fairness alien to local male leaders who would commonly wheel and deal with the food aid in their trust in the small communities throughout the famine affected region.
'We needed men to help cultivate, but the women already did most of the work and can easily take over the men's share. We needed men to dig wells, but at present there is no water in the ground, We needed men to ride horses, but now the horses have died in the drought.'
Was there anything they could not do without men? At this point my interpreter, who was also a Sudanese but a man, stopped translating and began, instead, to answer indignantly himself. Matka Mohammed looked on with eyes twinkling as he turned to me and blustered. Then she confronted him and insisted he put the question, laughed and said: 'We are not happy without men. There is one thing they are good for...' she said, and broke off with a deep mischievous laugh.
There were many terrible and miserable sights to see in Africa in those years. But occasionally there was an experience like Tendelti which cracked the stereotypes and forced a new humility on any foreign observer from the developed world. There in the desert, when deep in my stomach I knew we were hopelessly lost, our driver brought us unerringly to our destination. There amid the starvation were tens of thousands of people surviving, as their mothers and fathers had done for generations, off a meagre diet of desert fruits and withered roots which the Western nutrition experts said could not sustain life. There where normal life seemed to have shrivelled in the heat were a people taking a new control of their lives with new initiative, new senses of priority and even a continuing sense of humour.
Tendelti was the first book. In it were incarnate the truths which we have seen spelled out in that second book, the Bible. [the author is a committed Christian.] Here groups of neighbours had come together to act as a society. What little resources they shared had been allocated with justice and, it had been decided, with a disproportionate preference to those who were most in need. The sharing was not out of the surplus of the controlling elite, but came out of their sacrifice. Those who were normally marginalized by their status, the women, had been enabled to participate in the social process and in doing so had discovered a sense of control which brought them dignity despite their material deprivation. Out of it they were prepared to confront those who challenged them. It had also brought new insights on the ordering of social relations, the structures had been changed. It would be romantic to stretch the parallels any further. So destitute were these people that it was clear that they were not in possession of the resources to provide their basic means of food, clothing and adequate shelter. They certainly were denied any share in the productive resources which the creation ordinances allow is the basis for sharing in stewardship of the planet's resources: there were seeds, tools, and water pumping equipment in the regional capital - but only for those who had the cash to enter the 'free' market of which Sudanese mercantilism offers such a raw exemplar. The empowerment of the marginalized group, the women, had come about only because the men were gone, not because there had been some transformation of social relations resulting from personal of spiritual change within individuals in the group.
(The author then goes on to relate what he had observed in Tendelti to his Christian beliefs.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Vallely
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-First-World-Ethics/dp/0883446685
Sunday 22 August 2010
Saturday 21 August 2010
Empowering Women
Some Feminists have pointed out that for women to be empowered requires the whole patriarchal society to be changed. The reason for this, is that the patriarchal society was created by men for men. Men are fundamentally different from women, in that they are naturally more completeness than women. Like other species of male animals like stags, rams or bulls who fight each other every spring for access to females. Male animals also like to fight and compete with each other, this is why patriarchal societies have wars with each other. Women on the other hand are driven by their maternal or nurturing instincts, so their focus is more on the caring of children as well as the sick and elderly. So for this reason women are not as competitive as men.
Everything to do with the patriarchal society is competitive. We have the capitalist system where industrial companies, shops or banks compete with each other for business and market share. Every patriarchal organization is based on a hierarchical system where men compete with each other in moving up the pecking order. In democratic politics we have different political parties competing with each other for votes and political power.
All these competitiveness create a big dilemma for women. Although in Western countries women won equal rights for themselves back in the 1970s. To benefit from these equal right women found they had to become as completeness as men. The choice they found they had, was either to compete with men for wealth and power, or find themselves condemned to do only low paid jobs. So many women took on this challenge and even went to assertiveness class, to learn how to be as assertive and competitive as men.
How far some women were willing to go in learning to be as completeness and assertive, we can see in Margaret Thatcher. She did learn how to be, “one of the boys”, so well, she became the leader of a very right wing political party. Then later she became Prime Minister and became known as, “The Iron Lady”. She proved herself to be a very decisive war-leader in the Falklands war, and in peacetime she was a very ruthless, Machiavellian politician. So she has proven that women can play men at their own game and beat them. The only trouble was with her leadership, was that she was so tough and macho, that she never showed any of the nurturing qualities that women have.
This then is the problem, many career women find they have a choice of either obeying their maternal instincts to have children, which handicaps them when competition against men in their career, or not have children at all. Some women even try to be superwomen and try to combine a successful career with motherhood.
Yet, in spite of all the problems women have in competing against men for wealth and power, more and more women seem to be willing to do this. Before the Feminist revolution of the 1960s and 70s, most schoolgirls outperformed schoolboys at school up until the age of puberty and then they mostly lost interest because it was accepted that women will end up getting married and have children and become housewives. Then in the 1980s this all changed and for an increasing number of schoolgirls their academic performance no longer dropped away at the age of puberty and they began to out perform boys in higher education. So much so, that in the 1990s, more girls were going to university than boys. This has been the trend every since, where the gap between girls and boys in academic studies has increased.
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