As I mentioned above, please do not construe this as a critique of your work, which I tremendously admire and appreciate, but rather as an attempt to point out some of the purely male perspectives which I did not feel you covered in your works. Since the time when you were writing Myth� there have been several good publications which addressed the issues, due in part to your willingness to break the new ground. I am quite happy to see that many of them are by women, particularly those which are the most critical of women. There is an "old girls" network just as widespread and powerful as the much maligned "old boys" network. Men have been unable to criticize women because their observations could always be dismissed by the feminist Chatty Cathy dolls parroting their favorite slogans: "patriarchy, misogyny, gets violent when threatened by loss of powers, yadda, yadda, yadda". It didn't even matter what order they were in or how many times they were repeated, accusing men of the word then making a separate accusation about its definition.

Christina Hoff-Sommers - Who Stole Feminism, 1994,
Katie Roiphe - Sex, Fear, and Feminism, 1993
Jack Kammer - Goodwill Toward Men, 1994
Andrew Kimbrell - The Masculine Mystique, 1995
Kate Fillion - Lip Service 1996
Judith Levine - My Enemy My Love: 1992
David M. Buss - Evolution of Desire - 1994
Marvin Harris - Our Kind, 1989

I'm sure you are familiar with all these works. Taken together they present a very different picture of gender relations than the public media suggests, one which is far more in line with my own experience and the experiences of the people I know.

For years, I bought part of the feminist line of propaganda. I was no more enamored of the actions of men older than I than were most women. You have explored, and Robert Bly has mythologized the "father wound". Men who came of age in the 1960s did so largely without fathers to guide them, and already subtly poisoned against older men by the father's stifled rage at his own entrapment leaking out in the form of emotional or physical abuse or in some form of dehumanization and exploitation. If you do any reading for pleasure, I would highly recommend Ender's Game by Orson Scot Card. I consider it the ultimate "men's" book, not because it "deconstructs" the issues, but because it tells the story of how a boy is conditioned into taking responsibility for the entire world, manipulated into a deadly game by concealing its true nature from him, and by placing him repeatedly in live threatening situations where he must kill in order to avoid being killed, teaching him that "no one will ever help you."

As the porn, commitment, violence, rape, abuse hysteria escalated through the 80s, I believed the lies women were telling about men. I believed that � of all women got raped. At one point I had met so many women who claimed lifelong damage as a result of childhood experiences of incest that I was beginning to believe that every woman alive was victimized as a child and that all the men in the world, EXCEPT ME, were child molesters at heart. It was the "NOT ME" part that saved my sanity, but also served to hide from me some of the realities of what was going on. I kept comparing the public exposition of men to myself and the men I knew, and concluded that the problem was with the sampling techniques. They just happened to find a skewed population. It wasn't until Who Stole Feminism came out that I realized the dimensions of the hoax and how intentionally it had been perpetrated.

In those moments when my humor is available to me on these issues, I am reminded of that great morality play - The Wizard of Oz. "I AM the great and powerful Patriarchy, ignore the (wo)man behind the curtain!!"

Since then, I have spent a great deal of time looking behind that curtain at the women and men pulling the levers. It is fascinating to me that the very women who so loudly proclaim their wounding by the traditions of a male god have created a male god of their own and named it "Patriarchy". Listen to their claims and you will find that they attribute to "Patriarchy" virtually identical powers to those attributed to Jehovah and Allah. In fact, the powers of "Patriarchy" are greater than either of those gods because they give humans limited free will to see whether they have the wherewithal to pass the entrance exam to heaven. "Patriarchy" on the other hand, moves everyone like puppets. The women cutting off their daughters' genitals in Africa and the middle east cannot even control their own hands. "Patriarchy" reaches into that hut and MAKES those women cut those precious and vulnerable little girls' pussies off. In the agricultural region where I grew up we had a name for this kind of stupid thinking. We called it "HORSESHIT".

If the only way to get rid of this toxic nonsense is to throw out the baby with the bath-water, I am quite ready to do so. There are 2 universal laws that we as a culture are in a state of complete denial about.

• There just ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Everyone CANNOT "have it all". There just isn't enough of "it" to go around. When already highly privileged people complain that their privileges are not as extensive as they'd like them to be, I tend to go deaf. As you inferred in the discussion of the "glass cellar" (as well as in Why Men� ) women seem to have a tendency to only look upward. They compare themselves not with their social peers, but with the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous". In the old metaphor of is the glass half empty or half full, women tend to gaze exclusively at their own emptiness. Even when the glass is 99% full, women seem only able to see the 1% which remains empty. The same is true of African Americans seeking apologies or reparations for atrocities committed against their ancestors, and conveniently gloss over the fact that had their ancestors stayed in Somalia or Rwanda their material conditions would be far poorer today than even disenfranchised ghetto dwellers. Our material standard of living is based on confiscation of the resources and output of other countries at a fraction of their real value. A woman who claims solidarity with a Philippine woman because they both make 69 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts, and uses the differential to prove the universal "oppression" of women, slides a convenient curtain across the fact that the wage differential in the Philippines means that the man makes a whopping $750/ year compared to his wife's $450 while the American woman makes 60 times what the man does and 100 times what the woman does: 1.3 cents and one cent on the dollar respectively.

• We are natural beings and in nature the penalty for stupid is death. You get eaten, you starve to death. We have become a nation of victims, devoid of responsibility for our actions. Now we pay people for being stupid. We award them cash settlements. Someone shoots himself in the foot and he wins a million dollar lawsuit against the gun manufacturer who has to start putting warning labels on guns: "these are dangerous items". In my state, 2 � times as many law degrees have been conferred since 1967 than had been conferred in the 140 years prior. The recent matter of Kelly Flynn, the female bomber pilot dismissed for refusing to follow orders to end an affair with a married man illustrates how the transfer of responsibility available to women is complete. She was quoted as having said that "the Air Force did not teach me how to be a human being". Excuse me?! That is not the purpose of the Air Force. It is rather assumed that one will either bring that skill with them, or go about acquiring it during off duty hours. The Air Force taught her how to fly, which was the agreed upon contract. In return she incurred the direct and explicit obligation to follow military discipline, which she refused to do. A similar refusal by a man in a battle situation could result in him being shot or endangering his entire unit.

The Flynn case perfectly illustrates one of the foundation issues of the gender conflict. Using the tool of spin, cultural institutions such as the military or business can be said to be "male dominated". (translation - that's a BAD thing ) The fictions of patriarchy and creationism allow the speaker to indulge in the delusion that they were created as "male dominated" by Patriarchy and conveniently ignore the organic way in which they became so. Engaging in moralistic thinking, and we all know that "women are morally superior to men" ( retch, puke, vomit), it is easy to decide that they "should" be different. Setting out to change them into how they "should" be, based entirely on subjective wants and preferences and without once asking why they are that way, is exactly the same kind of megalomaniacal thinking that underlies slavery, colonialism, genocide, holy wars, FGM, poisoning the environment with DDT, destruction of the rainforests and the ozone layer, and in fact most of the ills which now plague the human race. The old design dictum - form follows function - means that the structure of something is inextricably linked to its purpose. Changing its structure without understanding its purpose, interventionism, is directly related to self-centered arrogance and will to power, and is virtually always destructive. Ms. Flynn's attempt to redefine the purpose of the military strictly in terms of her own subjective situation, i.e. "it did not teach me how to be a human being" echoes women's attempts to redefine business, culture, and men themselves purely in terms of women's subjective needs. Gallileo's pointing out that the earth was not the center of the universe landed him in virtual prison for the rest of his life. Men pointing out to women that they and their needs are not the center of the universe is landing men of today in real prison.

As the worn out old joke goes "the female makes the rules". And she can change them at any time. The old feminine mystique is just as present today as it was in 1963 when Betty Frieden wrote about it. Like women, the clothing and hairstyles it wears are updated for the 90s, but a woman still always has the right to "change her mind" just as she wants the right to be taken completely seriously and have the man do exactly as she wants, both before she changes her mind and after. Unfortunately for her, she forfeits this right by not knowing her own mind. Today's divorce statistics indicate that the reason women are the "commitment giants" as you called them, is because they do not feel bound by the commitments they make in the same way that men feel bound. Marriage remains very attractive to women because they can bail out at any time, taking half or more of the man's assets, and even if HE bails, she will likely still get half or more of the assets.

The point I am making is, again, not that ALL women do this, but that SOME DO, enough to be very concerned about. It is the cultural denial of this that halts us in our efforts to achieve equality and end sexism. And it is the cultural denial that men have good sides, that they are often fairer than their female counterparts, that has become the self-fulfilling prophesy of creating misogyny where it did not previously exist. ( An interesting side note on gender bias in language. Misogyny slides right by my spell checker, while misandry comes up as not in the vernacular. It reminds me of Jack Kammer's observation that there is a word for crossing in the middle of the street, jaywalking, but there is no word for crossing at the crosswalk because that is the socially acceptable thing to do. We have a common word for irrational hatred of women, but none for hatred of men because it is so normal that few think to name it, )

It is 1937 and I am a Jew living in Warsaw, Poland. It is 1950 and I am an African American living in the south. Men are the "niggers of the 90s" and unless they wake up to what's going on they just might find the gender wardens herding them into the ovens to "non-violently murder" them. People dismissed Mein Kampf then were astonished when Hitler did exactly as he said he would do. Perhaps it will not go that far, but some scrutiny of the atrocities being committed today is essential. I'm sure you are aware of the case of William Heatherington. Despite the fact that the semen samples taken from his wife contained sperm, while he had had a vasectomy, he was still convicted of marital rape and has spent more than a dozen years in prison. How many more like him are included in the statistics that the author of Men Are Not Cost Effective uses to justify her "gender tax"? (or as I call it, the "penis penalty" ) What about the case of B.L.B, the 10 year old black boy, taken out of school, tricked into waiving his Miranda rights (which any child psychologist will tell you are way too abstract for the average 10 y/o to understand), and convicted of sexually molesting a white girl by sticking his finger in her vagina while they were in a sandbox together despite: 1) while there were scratches and sand in her external genital area there was none internally as would be expected from forced unwelcome entry in a sandbox; 2) her brother present in the sandbox at the time the alleged incident occurred stated that nothing of the sort happened; and 3) the girl was unable to identify her alleged attacker even though he was present in court right in front of her. Are men waiting until this happens to their sons, or perhaps themselves, to speak out against such willful bad use of good laws?

As I said, I have been speaking out on such issues for almost 3 decades. It is not because I have not been saying it that I have not been heard, but rather the wall of cultural denial and the fact that I have held a very politically incorrect viewpoint and have been shouted down. Still I speak whenever the opportunity presents itself; in this case to you.

I am curious whether, in the 5 years since Myth� was published, you have continued to move away from your previous views in the same direction and at the same speed. I anxiously await your next book. If it is not already in pre-publication (I seem to remember hearing that you had one ready to go which you could not finesse past the "lace curtain" which veils the people pulling the levers which make the smoke come out and Oz's head of the publishing industry appear to speak), I hope to see more coverage on some of these issues in future works. In particular there are 2 points I would like to see treated by a major author, given the fact that I have less than a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting published.

The first is the aspect of the culpability that men have for their own situation.

I am going to use your own experiences which you wrote about to illustrate. I considered it immensely brave and honest when you admitted in Myth� the way in which you had pandered to man-hating in order to remain the darling of women: the man who is sensitive to their issues. This is the first thing that men must overcome, and it is as insidious as hell. I intentionally used the emotionally explosive word "niggers" a few paragraphs back to emphasize how we have many historical models for why men are becoming the "suicide sex".

Spike Lee, in his biography of Malcolm X, articulated a dilemma facing blacks. He spoke of "house niggers". Compared to their lower status brothers and sisters, life for "house niggers" was relatively comfortable. They got to sleep where it was warm. They got to eat the same food as "de massa". They were generally spared the backbreaking and uncomfortable conditions characteristic of the lives of the "field niggers". As a result, "de massa's" concerns WERE the "house nigger's" concerns, and any real progress toward equality for their people in general would likely come about only when they stopped being "Uncle Toms" and validating the treatment that blacks were receiving. If THEY were happy, then it was not the condition of slavery that was repugnant to blacks, but just how uncomfortable it was. As long as "house niggers" and the "Uncle Toms" told the slave owners that it was OK to own slaves if you gave them "loose shoes, tight pussy, and a warm place to shit" (as Earl Butz ended his career by saying ), the slave owners could convince themselves that they were in fact benevolently taking care of children.

I contend that a completely analogous situation exists today with women in the position of the slave owners, and men as the "house niggers". You, sir, were at one time the "house nigger" to end all "house niggers". You sold out men to curry favor with women, as comedian Tim Allen has done. I am not saying this as an accusation, simply an observation. We've all done it. We all fear the punishment of having affection and intimacy withdrawn, so have lied many times to avoid it. We have, all of us, been "house niggers". We have avoided the painful consequences of speaking out in order to secure our short term comfort, and often just to curry favor by proving that we are "different from all those other awful men".

The second aspect relates to how and why men have been brainwashed into doing this.

I disagree strongly with your characterization of men as being "addicted" to female beauty. The use of the word "addiction" carries strong and misleading connotations. While the addictions paradigm may serve as a plausible explanation of behaviors, so were the "celestial sphere" and convoluted mathematics plausible enough to allow the erroneous paradigm of the earth as the center of the universe to persist for many years. When Galileo suggested an alternative explanation which fit the facts better, he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

I was particularly surprised by this characterization, since so much of the rest of Myth� was devoted to the real explanation: immorTALity , not immorALity. Addiction is a word that connotes pathology, and there is nothing pathological about males of any species finding females of that species attractive. This is why I consider David Buss's work so important. GENDER is a social construct, while SEX is a biological one. Simply calling it gender instead of what it is, is part of the curtain which obscures the lever pullers from view. Sex is at the species level what eating is at the individual level. They are the mechanisms for survival. Without sex, the variety of life on the earth would be a minute fraction of what it is.

I contend that it is essential to purge the language of pathology from discussions of male sexuality and look at the organic nature of the development of the customs and the biological foundations of men's behavior. As long as men are shamed for how they act and react, they can never understand the real nature of those actions and reactions. If we replace the word "addiction" with "fixation" and apply the very realistic idea that were not the male element of a species "fixated" on merging with the female element of that species, the species will soon become extinct, the behaviors now make perfect sense. In a very real sense, there is only one purpose to any individual life: continuation of the species. In addition, the unique use of covert ovulation by the human female creates a situation where human males must pay more attention to, and have a more intense focus on, females of their species to capitalize on occurrences of mating receptivity than the males of any other species, whose females trumpet such readiness to the world in a variety of ways. Speaking of the ways men manifest this purpose as "addiction" and pathologizing it makes life itself pathological. In all species which reproduce sexually, the male element is the reproductive servant of the female. If males do not deliver adequate amounts of sperm on demand to fertilize the available ova, the species starts down the road to extinction. To prevent this, mother nature has built into every male the need to fertilize which is stronger and more compelling than the need to eat.

The dark underbelly of The Beauty Myth is that women have become very adept at faking the signs of sexual receptivity to trigger a mating response in men. The tired old male-bash "men think with their penises" is far closer to reality than men wish it was. Sexual responsiveness does not occur in the cerebral cortex, it occurs in the spinal cord, brain-stem and limbic system. In the days when such experiments were not attacked by animal rights activists, the function of the cortex was studied by sucking out the cortex of cats and observing the results on behavior. They could still eat, mate, and a host of other survival behaviors, but social skills and inhibition of reflexes were seriously disrupted.

Men today swim in a sea of signals of female sexual responsiveness, most of them false. I haven't confirmed this factoid, but I have heard that the practice of wearing lipstick originated among prostitutes as a signal of their willingness to perform oral sex. The red engorged lips of the face triggered a set of reflexive responses evolutionarily targeted at another set of red engorged lips. If this is true, consider the false signals that every man encounters hundreds of times per day and the intensity of the current mess will be shown to be unavoidable. Naomi Wolf's book is an excellent example of the axiom of victimhood operating to convince a writer that she does not need to really study history and that her superior "women's way of knowing" will allow her to find all the answers she needs inside her own navel. Women deliberately use false signals of sexual receptivity as a means of gaining power over and manipulating men. And this is always excused by blaming it on the fact that men want it. I had to resort to a screaming match with a female friend on the subject of makeup to get enough of a break in her wall of denial of victimhood and statistical thinking to get her to hear "I am a MAN and I am telling you that I HATE it!!! Don't tell me that is what men want. Sure, we respond, but if someone gets in our line of vision wearing a clown mask we will pay attention to it too. That does not mean that we WANT everyone to go around wearing clown masks." I finally beat down her presuppositions enough that she actually went out and asked men what they thought, and amazingly listened to what they had to say. The response was unanimous: "HATE it!!!" ( She did learn from this experience. Later when I told her that men occasionally fake orgasm, she found it as difficult to believe but didn't fight me. Informal survey results confirmed what I said, as well as how willing men are to talk openly about very sensitive issues if you just ask, are willing to listen to what they say, and do not attack them for the basic human right of being the way they are.)

The problems that arise when a biological need is co-opted to have social meaning which over-rides the biological meaning can easily be seen in the other primary example of survival behavior: eating. More than 20 years ago, there was a book out called Fat is a feminist issue. The author's contention was that food had been co-opted to serve a social purpose and the normal regulatory mechanisms which prevented gross obesity had been short-circuited. Eating disorders were an after-the-fact way of dealing with the disruption of the control mechanisms. She suggested women redefine their "relationships" with food, as a first step to reclaiming their own power. Now, 20 years later, that genius of documenting contemporary neurosis, particularly female neurosis, Cathy Guisewhite, has put out a cookbook called Girl Food. To "girls" there is "swimsuit food", "breaking up food", etc. In an interview with Tom Snyder, she made the comment that "men eat when they are hungry, which is a great way to relate to food". To borrow her metaphor, to men there is one kind of food: "hungry food".

My contention is that women have co-opted sex in the same manner that they co-opt food. Most men are aware that even for them there is a second kind of food: "obligation food". "Clean your plate, I slaved for hours cooking you this meal." The way that this is used to mind fuck men can be seen in the old joke about the Jewish mother insisting that her son tell her whether he would prefer beef or chicken. When the son finally chooses beef, the mother hits him with the guilt trip "What!?!? You don't like my chicken?" The fact that SOME women seem to be experts at setting men up for opportunities to be the bad guy, so they can play the victim and use the mechanisms of shame and guilt to manipulate them, is too widely recognized to be denied.

In the same manner that men eat when they are hungry, they can be said to want sex when they are horny. This is where remembering that it is SEX and NOT GENDER that we are talking about comes in. The loss of a woman's sexual value as she ages is precisely analogous to the loss of a foodstuff's nutritive value as it ages. The sex drive, desire, is mom natures little insurance policy against extinction. The women who naturally and effortlessly provoke it, are the ones who are the best candidates for child-bearing. Buss goes into this at length in Evolution of Desire.

Over the years, society has substituted a monstrous fiction, romantic love, for the realities of reproductive desire. It is fascinating that the ABCs of sex is still referred to as the "birds & the bees" while at the same time denying and negating the result of observation of said creatures. What we have today is analogous to the situation of socially deciding that we knew when bees "should" pollinate those flowers, and it wasn't when the bees thought it was. So when the flowers bloomed, we put plastic bags over them to keep the bees away. Then when we thought the time was right, socially, for the bees to pollinate we go out and paint the wilted blooms to sort of "look" like they are supposed to and yell at the bees that it is ok to pollinate now. I seriously doubt that the bees would pay much attention.

The fiction of romantic love is exactly analogous to the celestial sphere and convoluted math necessary to perpetuate the false belief that the earth was the center of the universe. It supports a false paradigm which is based more on an inherent sense of superiority than on observation. It is supported and enforced by those who benefit most from the false paradigm. Alternative paradigms are rigidly suppressed, by making those who suggest them into political prisoners to silence them if the threat of so doing is not enough to silence them. False accusations of rape serve the "useful political purpose" of being able to turn any man who opposes the desires and will of a woman into a political prisoner.

Romance fits very neatly into the moralistic framework used by society to control births which could otherwise not be supported until the child had passed through both the physical and the artificially extended social maturation stages. Romance equals devotion, which means exclusive allocation of material resources to the woman and her offspring. Romance is also a very pretty and "pure" term for that "nasty" lust. Men get horny, women fall in love. Women are tenacious, men are pig-headed. Romance is "morally superior" to lust. The feelings and drives are in fact identical, but they are called by two different names with completely disparate sets of emotional loading and connotations.

Harvel Hendrix, Ph.D., found that people "fall in love" with an imago, an idealized parent. The sensation of "falling in love" is therefor a sense of safe dependency. However, since the parent is idealized, it is the projection of subjective wants and needs combined with the fantasy that those needs will always be automatically met, whether expressed or not, that leads to so much trouble. Disappointment is inevitable when the one "in love" is forced to confront the reality that the person she is "in love" with exists entirely within her own head. Any characteristic which does not conveniently fit the fantasy becomes a source of conflict. Unless the person is able to make the leap from being "in love" to mature loving, the relationship will eventually be torn apart by disappointment and frustration. The more unrealistic the expectations going in, the more likely that carnage will result. Josh Harris is a genius to have figured this out at age 22.