I have been in the trenches of the gender war for 3 decades. My standard joke is that I have been a lifer in the "Army of Occupation:" left behind by the sexual revolution. I have repeatedly encountered the sexist man-hatred apparent in my example above. Each time I saw it, I charged in to challenge it, as I do racism. And each time my "worthy opponent" and I left each other bruised, and sometimes bleeding, but I seldom really felt that I had accomplished anything.

I first saw the face of man-hatred in the early 70s, when a woman I was dating characterized a "consciousness-raising" session she had attended as a "thoroughly satisfying 'man-hating' session". I was bewildered and a bit fearful, but I asked why she found man-hating so satisfying. I went on to make the point that when I got together with my male friends we didn't get satisfaction from woman-hating, expressing our confusion, frustration, and frequent annoyance with them, yes; but not hating, so what was the thrill in it for her? I don't remember her answer, but she certainly proved how much she hated me(n) in our subsequent dealings. I had to wait about a dozen years for my efforts to pay off. One day, out of the blue, more than 12 years after the last time we saw each other, she called me to apologize. This has happened several times to me over the years, women who have hated me contacting me to apologize and say that they finally realized that their hatred was irrational and that I had been doing exactly what they were: trying to get by the best I could. In all cases except the one mentioned above, these were not women with whom I has been romantically involved; rather coworkers, acquaintances, fellow students.

While the apologies years after the fact gave me warm-fuzzies, they did nothing to improve new iterations of the same script with new players. I became a devout observer of the phenomenon and studied it carefully every time I saw it. Over time, my understanding deepened to the realization that it was not just men that some women hated, it was maleness itself. It was so different, so alien. The hatred was based on xenophobia. They seemed to have the same contempt for maleness in dogs and iguanas as they did for it in humans.

I think at least as important as having the courage to confront is knowing what to confront, when to confront, and how to confront, as well as what, when, how, and why NOT to. The concept of triage is essential, because some causes are lost no matter what you do. Some women are so in love with their hatred that nothing you do will touch it. Confronting these women is counterproductive because it wastes our energy and emotional resources, because it creates new wounds which require healing, and because it reinforces the sense of futility that many men have that they will NEVER be heard.

There is another aspect which is even more significant, but very subtle. Dignifying some of the insanity by attempting to argue with it has a great deal to do with perpetuating it. John Garfield once stated that the only way to argue with a woman was with your hat - grab it and run. Many men are so invested in proving their strength, or denying their fear, or attempting to prove to some woman that they are not abandoners that they fail to realize when the person they are arguing with is engaged in a battle to the death to get her way. It's not about understanding, but rather about winning, and there are many women who do not feel the slightest bit bound by honor to fight fair.

While most men will quit a card game the moment they realize the deck is stacked, and quit a fight, or at least modify their fighting style, when their opponent violates the rules of engagement; many will enter barehanded into a face-slapping match with a woman armed with emotional axes and meat cleavers. Men fall into the trap created by the myth of male power, the corresponding myth of female weakness, their childhood conditioning to deny their own pain while they empathize with the woman's, the myth that women are "fairer" than men which blinds men to women's violence, and the incredible ability of some women to hide their violence and make it covert. Most of women's violence is emotional: a fact that allows it to be defined away as not violent. It takes a while for men to realize they are bleeding and even longer to understand that they are being hacked to death with paper cuts, each one very slight but, like the teeth of a saw, devastatingly effective if applied at a high enough speed for a long enough period of time. Men need to know how to say "I'm late for the door" with the same ease that they say "Wait a minute, there's another way to look at this".

Were I to encounter today the woman who bashed her housemate for being helpful, I would stop whatever I was doing and say - "I'm sorry to hear you say that. I consider that an admirable trait rather than a contemptible one. The fact that you consider it so contemptible tells me that our values are so different that we cannot possibly gain much by associating with each other. That being the case, I will waste no more of your valuable time." Then I would leave.

This approach will accomplish a couple of things. First, it frees me from having to listen to man bashing and have to decide whether I am going to sit meekly at the back of the bus, or be a Rosa Parks of gender and challenge the expectation of my subservience. Second, and more importantly, it prevents me from wasting my time on women who will most likely never listen to me and frees up my time so I can reward the women who do with that commodity so desired by women: male attention. In other words, men need to learn which women are worth loving and spend all their time reinforcing that positive quality by loving them. Stop begging to be heard and putting yourself entirely under their power to grant or withhold what you need. Simply make respecting you and your needs a necessary precondition of enjoying your company. It is a real step toward reclaiming our right to be treated as human beings. Power corrupts, and I suppose we cannot blame women for becoming corrupted by the power we have given them.

The hatred and blaming of men for every social evil is reaching truly dangerous proportions. Men are no longer treated as human beings, instead having been reduced below stereotypes to the level of caricatures. The misandry you discuss in Myth� is so endemic that suggestions can be seriously made about men that can not be made about any other subgroup. About 3 years ago I saw a book which suggested "reducing" the numbers of men to 10% of its current level, keeping the remaining ones in compounds solely for the purpose of sperm production. The mechanism of this reduction is "killing them off nonviolently". There is a book currently out which proposes a "gender tax" against men based on the fact that men are more criminally oriented, proven by the numbers of men in prison. Just a couple of months ago, Today show host Katie Couric suggested castration as a response to being jilted with no more thought than sawing off the leg of a wooden table.

Sanity has completely gone out of the dialogue, replaced by a set of dogma and axioms that are considered inherently true and above proof, and which form the basis of the proofs of all ensuing theorems. The perfect example of the extremes to which this can go is happening right now. President Clinton is under siege, totally compromising his ability to perform the duties he was elected for, by sensationalist accusations of sexual wrongdoing. Were not the female-as-victim and male-as-perpetrator stereotypes so deeply entrenched, the whole thing would be laughed off. But in today's climate of man-hating, any accusation by a woman against a man of sexual wrongdoing by is automatically believed , no matter how preposterous. Within the past couple of months I saw Genifer Flowers on Geraldo. Six years after the man was elected president, she is still making a career of being a victim.

Borrowing the feminist tool of "deconstruction" ( interesting newspeak for analysis ), one has to look at this phenomenon in terms of what makes it possible. Back in 1984 you pointed out in Why men� that there is a universal perception that men owe women for sex. You also observed, in Myth� that feminist propaganda is to the media like bacteria is to water, simply there and we consume it without realizing it. I would like to change the analogy slightly, to make it more accurate from my point of view. It is like minute traces of toxic salts which are harmless at low levels, but accumulate over time to poisonous levels. During the dozen years since Why Men� came out, and the 5 since Myth� the perception of male-female sexuality has subtly changed to sex is a WRONG that men DO to women.

The sex = rape propagandists have created such a state of hysteria that the simple act of having sex with a woman is a de facto wrong. The subtle incursion of this line of thinking has happened over the past 30 years, fueled by the writings of women such as Kate Millet, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, and Katherine MacKinnon, among many others. The witch hunt has reached such proportions than 6 year old boys are being punished for "sexual harassment" for the terrible act of kissing a little girl who asked to be kissed. If we were to apply the extreme criteria of Robin Morgan - "I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire." - then men must universally stop initiating in order to avoid being rapists. In fact they must also stop kissing women who ask to be kissed because the gender wardens are zealous in their efforts to deprive women of the right to their own desire.

In fact I have become a strong advocate for just such a strategy for men, not because I believe that sex is a wrong, but because I believe that it is the only way for men to regain some of the balance of power between the sexes in our culture. Ms. Morgan's statement could not be more anti-reality. Few in this culture would make the preposterous suggestion that women characteristically initiate sex. Women have been taught to withhold sex and affection as a means of securing the dedication of a man's resources toward her maintenance. Female mating strategies tend to rely solely on attraction; a phenomenon that is cross cultural as David Buss shows in Evolution of Desire. The 'shit work" of initiation has insidiously been turned into a crime, and men into criminals for "stealing" the bread of intimacy to turn around and feed to a woman.

It is not just the act of initiation, but the simple participation in the act of sex which totally undermines a man by placing him in a criminal status. Returning to Bill Clinton: despite all the mass of media hype, I have not once heard it suggested that his alleged tryst with a White House intern involved ANY sort of coercion or pressure. On the surface, the stories sound like ones of activity between 2 consenting adults. And, if they are true, it appears that she was the aggressor. Were it not for the universal public perception that sex is a wrong done BY men TO women, these stories would have been dismissed. I have heard no claims of other harm.

The more radical stance taken by Dworkin et al, that ALL sex is rape, seems to have subtly and insidiously taken root in the American consciousness. No is supposed to always mean no, an assertion which has been disproved by numerous researchers, and by common sense as well. But yes never can really mean yes. Mary Koss's research which was instrumental in establishing the "one out of 4 women will be raped" statistic as being as inviolable as the 4 seasons, relied on a gerrymandered definition of rape that based everything on the potential to penetrate. Penetration was not required to claim rape for a woman, but the absence of the ability to penetrate a man with a born-on penis by definition meant that women could not rape. In addition, Ms. Koss seems to be applying the "doublethink" of Orwell's novel "1984" when she insists that the woman's perception is LAW if she said that she WAS raped, but must be ignored if she says she was NOT raped. Most of the women she classed as having been raped themselves denied that it was a rape at all and called it a misunderstanding. This double standard of action is far greater than any I've seen in the culture as a whole. You pointed this out in Myth� when you observed that men are still expected to initiate, but if they do it badly ( in the woman's subjective judgment, or in the after-the-fact deconstruction of Big Sister), then they have committed a crime. In short, it has become a crime for a man to NOT give a woman what she wants or be what she wants. I consider what I call "the criminalization of maleness" to be the most dangerous and destructive influence at work in our culture today.

I believe that the time has come to "deconstruct" feminism and show it to be an inherently flawed ideology, one which is far more sexist, and blatantly so, than the institutions it purports to fight. To use your analogy from Myth�, I believe it is time to send the bath-water of feminism out for chemical analysis and I believe that the result will come back that it has become acid-rain.

Many have used the term "feminazi" to describe the excesses of the feminist power regime. I believe that this is a very apt term. No one can really compare the nazis of 1939-1945 with the National Socialists of the 1920s who were attempting to rebuild a country decimated by an imperialistic war. Lord Acton's observation that "Power tends to corrupt�" was never truer than in Germany in 1939. Key to Hitler's rise to power was his uncanny ability to use oratory to foment hatred. In the 1990s, sexual superiority has replaced ethnic superiority, but the messages of hatred and blame against the inferior have not changed. The feminists of the 1990s still carry the name, but their purpose and message no longer have anything whatsoever to do with equality. The fiction of Patriarchy fixes the false belief of a power differential in peoples minds and is used to justify a Jihad against that power in which no atrocity is too extreme.

There have been many men speaking up, and speaking out for almost 3 decades. Still, some women do not hear what they DO say. Never having succumbed to the cowardice of being "Politically Correct", I have been pointing out for years the following observations, and virtually always being attacked for them.

• Since the beginning of time, there have been approximately equal numbers of men and women who have worked to create the social environment in which we live. Either women ARE the equals of men, and have worked just as hard as men to create it because they directly benefitted from it; or they really are as weak as they claim to be, are NOT the equals of men, in which case men have probably deserved all that they have had. I adhere to the first theory. I have always considered men and women to be complete equals. Equal does not mean homogenious. The trend toward very real differences between men and women has been denied by many feminist-sympathizers, but simple observation proves them to be delusional. Equal, but very different. Historically they operated in different spheres of power, but the degree of power which each enjoyed it their home sphere was approximately balanced. Each "price" in terms of social role conformity had its offsetting or compensating "perk".

• Man-hating has been an integral part of feminism since the 1960s. Norman Mailer's Prisoner of Sex (1971) did a fine job of articulating a male counterpoint to feminist authors such as Kate Millet in interpreting the thoughts and motivations of male authors, such as Henry Miller. In Millet's work there was a presumption of malice on the part of men toward women underlying men's actions, particularly in the purely sexual realm, which simply did not exist. While it was one possible interpretation of their behavior, it was only one theory to explain it and relied on a denial of men's experience to make it stick. This false and erroneous, or perhaps deliberately false and misrepresented, malice became a "given" and from this axiom all the theorems of victimhood are derived. This assumption of malice has become so integral to the foundation of feminism that allowing men to be basically good but flawed humans subject to their own pressures would cause the entire ideology to collapse. Thus the continued efforts to deny men's experience and make all men into criminals. Malice toward women is the center of the "Patriarchy" universe. If this were allowed to be disproved, entire belief system would be shown to be untenable.

• Mailer also used the term "prisoner of wedlock", a pre-echo of your fine analysis of how the cards are stacked against men in marriage type relationships. This card-stacking has been going on for years in the form of feminist propaganda. Relying on the phenomenon we have come to call "spin", and fully exploiting the generally greater verbal abilities of females, men's actions have been consistently painted in the most negative light possible while women's identical actions have been painted as universally positive. It's like the old joke about the conjugation of an irregular adjective: I am tenacious, YOU are stubborn, s/he is PIG-HEADED. You referred to this in Myth� regarding the differences in the way you characterized men criticizing women versus women criticizing men. ( When women criticize men it is "insight, assertiveness, women's liberation, high self-esteem", when men criticize women it is "sexism, male chauvinism, defensiveness, rationalizing, backlash": same actions, different value connotations. This is a standard tactic of people schooled in psycho-babble. "I am tenacious" ( steadfastly holding to higher principles) "you are pig-headed" (stubbornly holding to an erroneous belief system and refusing to see and acknowledge my superior intelligence and understanding))

• Feminism is not about equality, it is about privilege - gender based privilege. The "crimes against women act" was a shining example of how some women expect and demand special treatment throughout society. Concepts such as "backlash" and "glass-ceilings" should be laughable, but they are taken seriously. some women seem to have fallen for their own propaganda and simply expect to only work half as hard as a man, while advancing twice as fast. "Equal pay for equal work" is a compelling anthem of victimhood, but the converse "equal work for equal pay" is seen as more oppression.

• "I am woman, hear me roar" has changed to "I am victim, hear me whine". Women have managed to parlay powerlessness into the most incredible form of power: the tyranny of the weak. The most bewildering thing that few of them seem to "get" is that the real power that men do have comes entirely from their willingness to act. In the words of the Nike slogan, power accrues to those who "Just do it". Canadian journalist Wendy Davis made the following incredible statement in her 1992 Hot & Bothered: sex and love in the 90s. "Oh they (women) like all the perks feminism has bequeathed to them over the years - stimulating careers, disposable incomes and, at least in the early stages, multiple sex partners. They're just tired of waiting for this plodding social revolution to hand over what feminism has failed to bestow - that elusive thing called true equality." Deconstructing this, we find women passively "waiting for�" someone or something to "hand over�" to them something they desire. We also find that the false promises of feminism, true equality, have not accrued to women. This is due in large part to feminism itself, as it has denied every real gain that women have made in the past 30 years. It has continued to emphasize to women how powerless they are and set the expectation that no matter how much they gain, they will still be the losers. No wonder women have become black holes, everything that falls into them disappears. The more of men's "traditional" power that women got, the louder became the cries of powerlessness. These cries blinded women to the fact that the real reason they weren't feeling more powerful was that what they had been gaining wasn't power for men either: it was entrapment. If man-hatred, female superiority, and victimism had not been so entrenched in feminism, they might have wised up. Instead they have demanded their place in our trap, and taken away our rewards for being there.

• If women were to examine their own actions, take responsibility for them, hold themselves and other women accountable, and get off their asses and stop waiting for men to "hand over" what they are asking for, they would suddenly find that they have all the power that men ever had.

• Being responsible and accountable is the last thing a man can expect from a woman in the 90s. Your own example of the "Pregnant Navy Syndrome" shows how the some women of the 90s rely strongly on the feminine mystique associated with motherhood to avoid being held accountable for debts they incur as payment for benefits they receive. One of the things that is right about men is that they have more of a sense of social responsibility when it comes to living up to an obligation they incurred by receiving some benefit. Another similar example of women in the military has occurred since Myth� came out. A female Army helicopter pilot sued the Army to be let out of her duties as a pilot so she could breast-feed her baby. Thousands of dollars were invested in her pilot training, perhaps millions considering the costs of the equipment involved, with the expectation that the armed forces and the US citizenry would gain some benefit from that investment. So potent is the "new feminine mystique" that the woman could break her contract with the Army simply to be able to assure that her "mother's milk" was delivered directly from her breast to the mouth of the infant at the infant's demand and convenience. Breast pump extraction of her milk for those feedings which occurred when she was on duty, was simply too much for her and her infant, in their exquisite delicacy reminiscent of the old fairy story of the princess and the pea, to bear. The running gag for many years in the Peanuts comic strip about Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football is one of the most telling metaphors of male/female relationships today. No matter how many times, nor in what manner, Lucy reassured Charlie Brown that she would NOT pull the football away, she always did. She NEVER kept her word. There was always a "because", a reason, a rationalization.

• There is an aspect that I would like to see more emphasized. That is the extent to which some women do this intentionally and maliciously, fully aware of the sexual power they have over men and addicted to and corrupted by that power. Statistical thinking is the greatest and most destructive fiction which afflicts us today. It is ludicrous to the point of malicious ignorance to characterize segments of the population so large and varied in simplistic terms. Any time I hear a statement in the form "MEN (or women) do/are ______", I cringe. There is an implied "ALL" that denies the reality of diversity and individual variation. I seriously doubt that anyone today would make the statement "ALL black people got rhythm" except among vetted racist friends, yet I hear the same form of statements about men many times per day. For this reason I very often qualify any statement made about women with an explicit "some", in those instances where I got sloppy and omitted it, or simply felt it was too stilted in style, please assume an implied "some". There is no statement you can make about men or women that is true of all, and many are not even true of the majority. Even the primary sexual characteristics: penis, vagina, etc. exist in such a variety of forms that thousands are born each year who do not fit into the neat divisions society has created. The overwhelming need for conformity is seen in the fact that it remains common medical practice to "reassign" those with ambiguous genitals so they fit into the cultural ideals. (This is exactly the phenomenon which underlies FGM.) Over the past 3 decades, there has been a trend to attribute the worst characteristics of the worst men to ALL men, (e.g. All men are rapists ) while at the same time denying any but the best characteristics of the best women for ALL women. Your many examples of some women getting away with murder (literally) showed how this halo effect prevents people from seeing women's violence, but seem to me to stop just millimeters short of taking women to task for their own violence. Again, we MUST start holding women accountable.

• Marriage is another trap that more often than not works to the disadvantage of the male. Statistics show that the failure rate of marriages is up to 2 out of 3, with 75% of those being at the initiation of the female. The fact remains that the best way for a woman to be able to lay legitimate claim to a man's financial assets is to ensnare him in a legally binding contract based entirely in pre-feminist law and social conventions. Last week I saw a news item regarding the divorce of Princess Diana's brother. Having been offered a settlement of approximately $6 million, the woman was refusing to settle and was seeking to have the adjudication moved to Britain where she could probably extract a larger portion of the Earl Spencer's ancestral $167 million family holdings. Were Princess Diana alive today, it would be her assets as well that this woman was going after. Women seem generally blind to the way they victimize each other in their fervor to "get" men. This is very different than another article in the same magazine about a woman who sued for half the marital assets when her husband left her after more than 20 years of marriage. In this second case, she contributed materially to their success by being a "corporate wife", and there is justice in her sharing in the benefits of that. Earl Spencer is 32, and that marriage is only a few years old. His wife cannot claim to have contributed anything to his wealth and holdings, instead simply living off the fat of his land and becoming accustomed to a lifestyle that she now seeks to hold him responsible for maintaining the rest of her life. It is interesting that the mystical power of motherhood is becoming a substitute means of laying this claim, a countermeasure to the fact that men aren't nearly as stupid as women think they are. When it became more difficult to entrap men into "A (THE) commitment", and men were requiring prenuptial agreements as a means of protecting the results of a life's work, another age-old ploy began to enjoy renewed popularity: sperm entrapment. Sex is a pretty good means of jump-starting a romance, and pregnancy is a sure-fire means of jump-starting a marriage, or at least an ongoing financial obligation. You covered this quite well in Myth� under "our bodies, no choice". Women have been hoodwinked here too, by continuing to cite statistics about marital satisfaction that haven't been updated in 35 years. Betty Frieden cited that married men were the most satisfied, single men the least, single women more satisfied than married women. If this was still true, then the reluctance of men in the 80s to move from dead last to first in the happiness sweepstakes at the expense of women, while women were obsessing at decreasing their own happiness, should be seen as a great act of self-sacrifice on the part of men.

• There is no "the patriarchy", just as there is no bogeyman, Wizard of Oz, Santa Claus or Easter Bunny.