The frequently heard whine "I'm not getting my neeeeeeds met", is the lament of a child who refuses to grow up and recognize how unrealistic her expectation is that the other person is able to, "should", and would be willing to if both of the previous were true. There is an inherent unwillingness to grow up at its foundation. This is yet one more manifestation of how female passiveness, unwillingness to take the responsibility to act, and unwillingness to take responsibility for their actions, lock women into their sense of powerlessness, which men will never be able to do anything about. The fiction of romantic love, with all its foundation "shoulds" based on moralistic thinking, is a central influence keeping women in states of immature dependency. Everything they want, they expect men to "hand over" regardless of whether it exists or not.

The gender bias of the language and social constructs of love and romance is directly analogous to the racial bias of IQ tests. Americans of any racial background fail miserably the "IQ" tests designed for aboriginal cultures where math and verbal skills are insignificant but the ability to judge the size and weight of an animal by the depth of its tracks are essential survival skills. Men's supposed lower EQ (Emotional Quotient) scores are due to the fact that the constructs of love and romance are not survival skills for men, in fact they are anti-survival, as you illustrate so well in Myth� .They are survival skills for women, as are most of our social institutions. Continuing the analogy, as Americans of African descent typically score lower on IQ tests, reflecting as much their refusal to accept social values created by a European tradition, men score lower on EQ tests, because they refuse to accept the social values created by a female tradition. One outcome for both groups remains identical, prison for refusing to comply to the majority social value. The fact that compliance is impossible because the underlying assumptions are false is hidden behind the curtain of majority rule.

Erich Fromm, in his 1956 The Art of Loving and Joan Gattuso in her 1996 A Course In Love both tackle the fictions of romantic love and show how destructive they are. Gattuso's "need to be special" is simply another face of the same phenomenon Hendrix called "the imago" and that Plato idealized as two incomplete halves searching for each other, which was illustrated in that recent "chick flick" Jerry McGuire. The emotional denouement of the film came when he pledged his undying love for, and need of, her with the hankie-waving "You complete me". Fromm pointed out that the modern concept of romantic love objectifies people (Hendrix's imago) and paints the secret of love as finding the right object to be loved by. As you pointed out in Why Men� , an essential attribute of such a male object for women is financial success, which assures their survival and status.

There is an unresolvable paradox, however. There is no real feeling of "being loved", in the same way that there is an experience of "being hit". People can experience feeling warm, safe, content, understood, valued, appreciated, and many other things. But they cannot experience "being loved" unless they interpret those other feelings as being evidence of such. Fromm contends that love is a verb, not a noun, and it is the very expectation of experiencing it through receiving rather than giving that deprives people of the experience. Men tend to show their love by what they do best, i.e. by DOING. When a woman expresses dissatisfaction or discomfort, men show their love by doing something about the cause. Women used to see this as love and understand that it was men's ways of showing love. They recognized their feelings of appreciation and comfort as being part of the "love phenomenon", in the same way that men feel loved when women listen to them and understand their needs, not from anything that the woman pours on him but directly from the sense of safety and acceptance that he feels internally as a result of her actions.

Now that women have grabbed that moral high ground and demanded that men become women in their social and intimate dealings, that they become girlfriends with a penis that works like a vibrator, they have cut themselves off from being able to experience love. And by denial of their own lust and refusal to take responsibility for it, they have cut themselves off from the very environment which is most conducive to creating those feelings between men and women. Women can now never experience the feeling of love, because loving men is the last thing they seem willing to do these days. The paradigm of victimhood has locked them into a closed system from which there is no escape. And the paradigm of female superiority forces them to reject anything that men say, so they cut themselves off from the wisdom of men, which might enable them to escape.

Every time humans attempt to impose a moralistic "should" on natural processes, the result is disaster. Deciding that insects were "pests", because they interfered with human desires and needs, led to broad scale poisoning them with chemicals that we didn't understand. Years later we find it accumulating in other environments and destroying species of wildfowl, fish and reptiles. ( An interesting and nasty side note: DDT is one of a class of chemicals termed "estrogenic". Recent research is begining to show how disruptive of natural processes these chemicals tend to be, causing cancers characteristic of old women in the teenage daughters of women taking them, and profound birth defects in amphibians and reptiles. Perhaps the bad rap that testosterone has been taking for years is just another "curtain" to hide the fact that it is estrogen which is the culprit. We all know that PMS stands for "Permissible Man Slaughter", and I refer to it as "Estrogen Psychosis". I'm not serious here, just playing devil's advocate against the HORSESHIT that some of these women have been putting out.) Defining men entirely in terms of female desires and needs is having similarly destructive effects.

The real "Beauty Myth" is that women need layers of paint to attract the sexual attention of men. Behind that curtain lies the reality that society had to find a means to cope with the extremely long period of dependency of human young. You have already covered most of this in Myth�, but I think that there are some perspectives that you either missed, or deliberately soft-pedaled to avoid alienating your female audience. Aboriginal cultures, like Arkansas, recognize that physical maturity and social maturity occur fairly close together in time. At age 15 people are considered adult, albeit immature ones. They are expected to take on adult responsibilities and generally have adult privileges. In "more developed" cultures, i.e. those with extreme ranges of wealth and status, the entrance requirements to "adulthood" are so extreme that an artificial socially-designed waiting period called adolescence is imposed. During the period when they are most drawn to each other and most receptive to each other, young men and women are socially separated from each other to prevent the production of children which they themselves cannot support within the defined social structure. I contend that the ban on premarital sex is entirely due to intuitive understanding that producing children who cannot be supported and may die, or impose an additional burden on a society which may already be strained, is generally a "bad" thing.. In the absence of birth control technology, abstinence was the only effective solution.

Having disrupted the natural forces drawing young females and males to each other, and having indoctrinated them with the notion that they have mutually exclusive goals, social mechanisms are required to bring them back together and to keep men from going back to Mars and women to Venus. A brief survey of literature and myth throughout history, plus a few of the current techno-nerd jokes, will show that there have always been a significant number of men whose interest in sex was far less than the level dictated by the Satyr myth. For grins, here is my favorite:
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An engineering student is walking on campus one day when another engineer rides up on a shiny new motorcycle.

"Where did you get such a rockin' bike?" asked the first.

The second engineer replied "Well, I was walking along yesterday minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said 'Take what you want.'"

The second engineer nodded approvingly "Good choice, the clothes probably wouldn't have fit." __________________________________________________________________________________________________

By the systematic torturing, terrorizing, and isolation characteristic of child rearing practices for boys in many cultures, society has assured that men will have basic needs which they cannot imagine being met except by a woman. By teaching women to withhold sex and intimacy until a binding support contract which will help insure the survival of herself and her offspring, while stressing the primacy of such a contract to her happiness and well being, society has brainwashed her into believing that she has basic needs that can only be met by a man. Thus society assures a certain mutual dependence which will draw men and women together for the purposes of creating children, which is what society eats.

This begins a "hold out" war that both sides lose. Men who cash in their autonomy and spirit for the short term comfort of being "house niggers", often find, as you observed, that the desired intimacy and emotional connection is far from automatic. Voluntarily submitting to being broken to the harness and serve as a special form of beast of burden to drag around a family financially and emotionally is not a guarantee that his emotional needs will ever get met. James Thurber made a literary career out of observing this phenomenon. On the other hand, men who demand that their needs be respected and wait to see whether the woman is capable and willing of doing so are called "Peter Pans who can't make a commitment". If they sleep with the woman in the meantime, the cultural perception is that they have stolen something from her and are called "rapists".

Like the female spouses of abusive husbands, men are commonly afflicted with the "Stockholm Syndrome" and identify with and develop an emotional bond to their abusers. The abusiveness and violence, particularly emotional violence, of women is one of the phenomena most vehemently denied by feminist propaganda. Erin Pizzey has done groundbreaking work in studying female violence, and had it recursively proven by threats of violence against her and her publisher. As you observed, it takes a great deal more courage and integrity to speak on behalf of men than it does to join in the popular sport of bashing them.

Until men in large numbers begin to speak up against the bashing, we are simply going to have to put up with it. The fiction that women are "the fairer sex" was repeated to me last week, by a man. The first step is to de-mythologize women, as you mention and as Sam Keene refers to a "taking leave of WOMAN". The most important false belief to destroy is the moral superiority of women. Going back to the analogy of food, if we were to buy in to women claiming that their way of relating to food was the morally superior one, we might end up being the most obese nation on earth. ( hmmm? We ARE the most obese nation on earth. ) Likewise, if we allow women to demand that men accept their view of mating and sexual relationships as being THE (one and only ) correct one, then we will disrupt the self-balancing mechanisms which regulate mating behavior. I contend that this is precisely what has happened.

The delicate social and cultural checks and balances which each gender had to balance the power of the other have been largely disrupted. And a long overdue disruption it was. The early feminists did have it right that the gender roles were too confining and no longer adaptive given the realities of 20th century life. That much I agreed with and early on adopted the stance you describe for yourself - aspects of the movement which I felt were legitimate, I supported. The rest I did not support, hoping they would collapse due to their own ideological weight, as the ideological fiction on which the Soviet Union was based eventually collapsed. However, if feminism lasts the same 75 years that Bolshevism did, I will not be alive to see its collapse. And, as I go into below, I believe that neither will most of the human race. Thus I spend my time and energy to hasten its early demise.

I use the historical models of both Bolshevism and National Socialism very deliberately. The choice truly is to study history and learn from it, or endlessly repeat it. Both those movements started out ostensibly with a very positive social purpose. However, power hungry opportunists were able to pursue their self-serving agendas under the aegis of those movements by carefully obscuring their real motives and purpose until they and their followers had gained enough power to feel free to operate unopposed. Trotsky had to be assassinated because his ideological zeal and purity prevented the Red leaders from simply moving in to the imperial palaces and conducting business as usual with a changeover of administration. In the same way, early leaders of the feminist movement have been moved to the periphery or purged from the movement entirely.

I basically disagree that feminism was necessary to create change. Everything changed in the decade when this 2nd wave of feminism surged. The anthem of those soon to come into power was "We fight the system". We had a "sexual revolution" and people practiced "free love". We distrusted the "military industrial complex", resisted the draft, became concerned about the environment and the population bomb, and dedicated ourselves to civil rights and fighting racism. White young men gave their lives helping enfranchise blacks by voter registration. An entire generation of men stood at the threshold of adult power ready to use that power to participate in creating change.

I have written a piece called "Is there a Martin Luther King, Jr. Of Gender?" Had Dr. King called his movement "blackism", had he preached that all whites were evil, had he claimed inherent moral superiority of blacks, had he called for a whiteness tax or suggested "nonviolently murdering" 90% of all whites, the white majority would never have allowed the Civil Rights legislation to be enacted into law. The failure of the ERA should be studied as an excellent example. Most people draw the wrong conclusions. With very recent extreme racism in our history, as a country we still enacted legislation aimed at protecting the abuse of power by the 85% majority over the 15% minority. However, when we voted on enacting legislation to protect the 52% majority from abuses of power by the 48% minority, as a country we balked. Why? Women are the true majority of voters, and if they had exercised their political clout to vote out of office those who did not represent their concerns, the 7 years given for ratification would have been sufficient to replace every politician who could affect the vote. The fact that the most vocal opponents to the ERA were women, men had already adopted the strategy of passive resistance and were too busy trying to make livings to support their wives, should have told a lot of people something about the true needs and wants of women. Feminism discounted these women, just like it discounted men, and told them they were stupid for wanting what they wanted and that the feminists "knew better" what they "should" want.

Hoff-Sommers quotes an interaction between Simone de Beauvoir, author of "The Second Sex", one of the bibles of the movement, and Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique", one of the other bibles, which is generally credited with having launched this so called "second wave" of feminism. Ms Frieden said to Ms. Beauvoir that she believed that women who wanted to stay at home and raise their children should have the freedom to do that. Ms. Beauvoir replied: "No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make it." (emphasis added)

This statement by one of its godmothers seems to reflect the true agenda of feminism: less choice for women rather than more, and adherence to a "new and improved" set of social conformity roles. The word "should" occurs 4 times in 49 words. Ms de Beauvoir's megalomaniacal arrogance can clearly be seen in her willingness to deprive women ( not men ) of freedom of choice. I contend that this is precisely the same mentality that allowed slave owners to believe that humans could be property, Europeans to believe that they were entitled to slaughter and attempt genocide on indigenous peoples while confiscating their land and resources, Nazis to murder 10 million people, and African and Middle Eastern peoples to cut the genitals off 100 million women. It is this MENTALITY we must fight, not the bodies it hides in. The absolute certainty of superiority and willingness that comes from it to impose ones will on others.

In one respect, the social movement of feminism is an amazing success. In less than 30 years, Ms. Beauvoir's vision of how the world "should" be, has come to pass. Very few women today have the choice to stay at home and raise their children. Instead we have created entire industries of "kiddie parking lots " called day-care, and "future consumer/producer factories" called educational institutions. Culturally we have stopped doing what no one did for Kelly Flynn and she expected the Air Force to do: teach them how to be human beings. Instead we treat them exactly as we have come to treat beef cattle: concentrating large numbers of them together so we can efficiently feed them the necessary foods and supplements (education, vocational training, social expectation indoctrination) to get them ready for "market", the JOB market..

If the civil rights movement had left no place for whites who hated racism as much as blacks did to partner with them, the racism of the 50s would still be much closer to us. It would be ludicrous to claim that racism is gone from the States, but apartheid certainly is and that is major progress. No one can point to any place in the world where racism doesn't exist. It is part of the human condition that we ought to be working to transcend instead of wallowing in victimhood. Racism is killing, maiming, and dumping suffering on far more people in tiny Bosnia, and in Rwanda, Somalia, etc. today than in the entire US.

I contend that it is the "fem" in feminism which is the root of its failure. It defines everything as a gender issue and by definition pits men's interests against women's. This is why I also reject the term "masculism", aside from the fact that it sounds too much like "me-too-ism". The issues are NOT gender issues, but social role conformity issues.

A movement ostensibly for "equality" which does not represent the issues of both sexes equally, but instead focuses exclusively on the issues of one and fights for gains for that one without ever once being willing to address the legitimate concerns and issues of the other, is sexism at its purest. Dismissing men entirely by use of the fictions of Patriarchy and male power means that men must work against their own best interests to be part of the movement: which few men are foolish enough to do for very long. Stupidly attaching significance to a random sequence of letters and spending time attacking the strawman of history being literally his-story effectively diverts attention from the card being palmed, the shell being switched, and allows the con to work. Purporting to represent the best interests of women, while arrogantly depriving them of the right to decide for themselves what those best interests might be, is the worst form of betrayal; which is exactly how Hoff_Sommers charactrizes it. Suppose that women do gain the political power to tax men, kill 90% of all men (non-violently as only morally superior women are able to), or herd them into "discipline camps"; none of which would be possible if men were 1% as bad and obsessed with power as these women claim; what leads women to expect that the ones who have already betrayed them with little power will suddenly begin to do otherwise when they gain more? And what leads women to expect that the new set of social conformity roles, now forced on them by women rather than men, are going to be any more to their liking than the old ones? It is essential to get any reference of any sort out to gender out of the party and focus on the issues.

The 2 most persistent curtains that men have to fight, aside from the ever present and persistent assumption of female moral superiority, are 1) denial of present reality by exclusively focusing on other times and other places, often in an entirely revisionist light and completely out of context; and 2) the indictment of ALL men for any atrocity of any man at any time in history. The mechanisms of guilt and shame are used to keep men perpetually off balance.

History is history, it cannot be changed. Even if the power differential between the genders which feminists claim exist were ENTIRELY reversed, ( as seems the real goal of feminism ) that would and could never change what happened 100 years ago. One hundred years from today, Freud will still have made his stupid comments about "clitoral versus vaginal orgasms". If that will not be a legitimate excuse 180 year after it was said, it shouldn't be a legitimate excuse 80 years after the fact. If we allow it to be legitimized today, we freeze ourselves in that awful past. Atrocities committed today in vengeance for past wrongs simply become the wrongs of tomorrow which will require atrocities to avenge. And so on, in an endless cycle I call "the chain of violence". Had Dr. King encouraged blacks to vent upon whites the hatred that women vent on men, there would have likely been a race war. There is only so much penance we are willing to do for atrocities committed by our great-great-grand-sires.

The same thing is becoming true of women. The most vocal and vociferous man-haters have left men no room in a movement for equality, except the role of "house nigger", and no room for a male perspective as valid but different. We are evil personified. They are eloquent in the atrocities they long to heap on us as soon as they gain enough power, then wonder why men do not automatically "hand over" all the power these women are asking for.

Men are frustrated by the gender debate because it isn't a debate, it's a tirade, a diatribe, a sermon heaping guilt and shame on men for actions most of them have never done. Like Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football, agreements made are never adhered to. Having been suckered into it by thinking it was a debate, men tend to be totally taken off guard that it becomes a fight for the woman to get her way. Not long ago I had a conversation with a woman regarding a class I was proposing to teach for men about examining the ways in which they participate and feed into the misunderstandings and conflicts. I believe that the essential first step is for men to grant themselves a pardon for crimes they did not commit. The load of shame and guilt that many men carry around is unbelievable, and virtually all of it is about the actions of someone else over which he had no control. The woman was white, so I used the model of racism. I was born in 1952. There is no possible way I could have affected events which produced slavery occurring in 1652, or 1752, or any other year before I was born, and damn little that I could do as a powerless adolescent. Using an atrocity committed 300 years ago as justification for committing an atrocity to me today, just doesn't make sense to me. She agreed wholeheartedly.

But when we got on the topic of gender, the rules changed. Anxious to dig up the rotted carcasses of historical oppression of women BY men, She referred to Aristotle's medical opinions ON WOMEN. Having long watched the shell game, the 3 card monte of gender debate, I saw her palm the card and confronted her. Reaching back a couple of thousand years to select out of a pool of ignorant and erroneous ideas that one specific idea which PROVED women were the victims of men wasn't going to be allowed. I tossed a flag for illegal procedure. Aristotle's medical opinions in general were wrong and useless to the point of being destructive. He subscribed to the theory of "humors" (hence the saying "good/bad humor") - fluids which circulated through the body and caused illness or health. This belief led directly to the medical practice of treating illness by extracting the sanguine humor (blood) and bleeding patients with instruments or leaches. This ignorant practice persisted for close to 2300 years and was only abandoned when Pasteur had his flash of insight which gave us the understanding of germs, slightly more than 100 years ago. Medical science has made thousands of times more progress in the past 120 years than it did in the previous 120,000. Ignorant statements, or actions, of the past must be considered in the general context of ignorance in which they occurred. No one today could take Aristotle's view that the earth was the center of the universe and construe that the history of physics which began with Galileo, and proceeded through Newton and Einstein and eventually created the field of electronics, and which depended entirely on rejections of Aristotle's ignorant views , was evidence of a history long conspiracy to deprive us of microchips. But that was precisely the line of logic that this woman was trying to pursue. I didn't buy it.

Another major bone of contention men have with the way women have conducted the dialogue is that the issues which women tend to focus on seem monstrously trivial to men. All the energy gone into the argument of HIStory versus HERstory seems like majoring in minors. Its just a word. If you don't like it. make up another one. Or at least be consistent. Lets also talk about HERsteria, and the tendency of women to be HERstrionic. Grow up!!!! Get a life!!! Or at least a brain.