According to a recent poll only 18% of U.S. people consider themselves feminist.¹ On that account we can expect readers of romance novels to comprise not more than 18% feminists, and likely far less due to the fact that feminists disparage traditional approaches to romance…. at least according to their rhetoric.

A more generous National Geographic/Ipsos survey² of more than 1,000 American women found that 29% of respondents identified as feminists. From the study its worth noting, as an aside, the political spread among feminist women, with Republicans scoring low in feminist self-identification, Democrats scoring high, and Independents somewhere in the middle:

In line with these surveys, we can assume that women who identify as feminist represent less than one third of all women in the USA. With this fact in mind, imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that a whopping 60% of readers of romance novels are feminist, which means that almost two thirds of romantic love enthusiasts are…. feminists! This finding is from a survey of 800 people, which discovered the following details about the average romance reader:³

Author of the survey summarised the question and answers in the following way:

“In the survey of romance readers, I asked if one identified as feminist, believed in equality but wouldn’t use the term feminist – or, not at all. 61% of respondents replied in the affirmative to the first option. While many commentators expressed their ire at the believe-in-equality-but-wouldn’t-use-the-term-feminist option, 35% selected this. Just 3% said not at all (“The third option makes me cry,” one self declared feminist wrote).

The more I read from both sides, the more I realized that we’re more alike than we let on. Whether you call it chivalry or manners, we all want someone to open the door for us.”³

Her last sentence proposes a rationale of (the high number of) feminist readers of romance novels: that they still want doors opened for them, whether actual doors, or doors into better jobs, boardrooms and other kinds of feminist power that are gifted to them by the actions of chivalric men. This point about feminist rationale was confirmed in a study by Gul & Kupfer⁴ which discovered that feminists felt the positive sides of benevolent sexism outweighed the negatives even if they believed it was somewhat patronising.

Many feminists believe that romantic love is a subversive trope, a positive one that works to increase the power of women relative to men. Elizabeth Reid Boyd, of the School of Psychology and Social Science at Edith Cowan University, and Director of the Centre for Research for Women in Western Australia with more than a decade as a feminist researcher and teacher of women’s studies, tells:

“I muse upon arguments that romance is a form of feminism. Going back to its history in the Middle Ages and its invention by noblewomen who created the notion of courtly love, examining its contemporary popular explosion and the concurrent rise of popular romance studies in the academy that has emerged in the wake of women’s studies, and positing an empowering female future for the genre, I propose that reading and writing romantic fiction is not only personal escapism, but also political activism.

Romance has a feminist past that belies its ostensible frivolity. Romance, as most true romantics know, began in medieval times. The word originally referred to the language romanz, linked to the French, Italian and Spanish languages in which love stories, songs and ballads were written. Stories, poems and songs written in this language were called romances to separate them from more serious literature – a distinction we still have today. Romances were popular and fashionable. Love songs and stories, like those of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, were soon on the lips of troubadours and minstrels all over Europe. Romance spread rapidly. It has been called the first form of feminism (Putnam 1970).⁴

Readers of my writings are familiar with the idea that romantic love and feminism constitute a seamless tradition of gynocentrism that first began in the royal courts of Europe.⁵ There have occurred transformations in the campaign strategies of feminists throughout the ensuing centuries, but the primary impulse remains consistent through each new generation of feminist activity: to increase the power of women via the institution of a ‘sexual feudalism’ – ie. the proposition that men should act as a quasi serving-class for women.

The following examples of romantic love in Victorian literature are excerpted from the book Male Masochism by Carol Siegal ⁶. Notice the thematic continuity of this literature with the earlier sexual-relations contract first invented in Medieval Europe:

“A great deal of what [Victorian] women’s literary works had to say about gender relations may have been as disquieting as feminist political manifestos, and ironically so, in that the novels seem most anti-male in the very places where they most affirm a traditionally male vision of love. While women’s lyric poetry tended to reverse the conventional gender roles in love by representing the female speaker as the lover instead of the object of love, women’s fiction most frequently reproduced the images, so common in prior texts by men, of the self-abasing male lover and his exacting mistress.

For example, in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff declares himself Cathy’s slave; in Jane Eyre, Rochester’s desire for Jane is first inspired and then intensified by his physically dependent position; in Middlemarch, Will Ladislaw silently vows that Dorothea will always have him as her slave, his only claim to her love lies in how much he has suffered for her. In several Victorian novels by women, men must undergo quasi-ritualized humiliation or punishment before being judged deserving of their lady’s attention. For instance, in Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, the fair Lyndall condescends to treat her admirers tenderly after one has been horsewhipped and the other has dressed himself in women’s clothes to wait on her. Although Victorian women’s novels do explore the emotional insecurities of the heroines, their apparent self-possession is also stressed, in marked contrast to their lovers’ displays of agony, desperation, and wounds.”

The author goes on to say that male masochism and the dominatrix-like behavior of women in much literature is continuous with courtly love literature from the Middle Ages. And whilst some men self-consciously chose their lowly position in relation to women, the men described in Victorian women’s novels lacked such volition and were helplessly controlled by the power of love and beauty:

“These texts also insist that the true measure of male love is lack of volition. While the heroines make choices that define them morally, the heroes are helplessly compelled by love, and not judged to love unless they are helpless. In this respect Victorian women’s fiction recovers the ethos so often expressed in medieval courtly romance that love must be “suffered as a destiny to be submitted to and not denied.” It also departs from the conventions of medieval romance in describing the helpless submission to love as an attribute of true manliness, and thus Victorian women’s fiction directly attacks the degeneration of chivalry into the self-conscious and controlled “gallantry” of eighteenth century libertines.”

Just like their forebears, feminists constitute an army of women working to preserve and extend the tradition of elevated womanhood that has been championed over the last millennium, making the feminist project a remarkably traditional enterprise while putting a lie to its claim to be a forward looking, progressive movement.

The only question left to ask is how, exactly, can this tradition be most accurately characterised? Is it a philosophy, an ideology, human nature, or the slow cultural build-up of behaviorist techniques applied to heterosexual relationships? Its probably a little of all these things, but I’m going to follow the European tradition at the root of romantic love, which saw it primarily as a religion complete with its own guiding Goddess. Her name, as spoken in medieval Germany and through the centuries was Frau Minne.

I have published details about this Goddess before, so rather than rewriting the details I invite the reader to visit the article⁷ and look further into the essential religiosity at the heart of our gynocentric cult. Furthermore, as recently stated by Alison Tieman, divinity has today become associated with every human woman, imparting to her the power of “I am a Goddess” in much the same way as once done to pharaohs or emperors, or divinised mortals, who became God-men in ancient times and received religious devotion due of a God. That is, half the human population has undergone an apotheosis, while the other half stand in awe and service.

The differences between a god-complex arising variously from a psychotic episode, in cases of extreme narcissism, or in a society that has seen fit to elevate an individual/s to God status is perhaps moot. These things more often appear together, in combinations. Whatever the causes, we are safe to conclude that feminism amounts today to a global religion, one as powerful as any that have gone before it, with women collectively representing the Godhead to an enthralled male audience.

References:

[1] Only 18 percent of Americans consider themselves feminists, Vox 2015
[2] Less than a third of American women identify as feminists
[3] Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained.
[4] Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Romancing Feminism: From Women’s Studies to Women’s Fiction, 2014
[4] Gul, P., & Kupfer, T. R. (2018). Benevolent Sexism and Mate Preferences: Why Do Women Prefer Benevolent Men Despite Recognizing That They Can Be Undermining?. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 0146167218781000.
[5] Damseling, chivalry and courtly love (part two)
[6] Male Masochism by Carol Siegal
[7] ‘Frau Minne’ the Goddess who steals men’s hearts

By Doug Mortimer

If you have ever had a mortgage, you know what equity means.  You own your house in conjunction with your mortgage company.  The relative amount of skin in the game is each party’s equity.  It’s not difficult to understand.  If you put down 20% on your house and the mortgage company foots the rest of the price, then they have 80% equity in your home.  Go ahead and call yourself a homeowner but you’re not.  You’re more like a minority stockholder.

Somehow the concept of equity has been perverted in recent years.  According to wokenik social theory, if half the population is female, then half the cushy jobs should go to females.  This is not equity, it is a quota system.  I still remember a half-century or so ago when the concept of affirmative action was broached and its proponents insisted they were not demanding quotas.  Heaven forfend!

Well, now it’s come to that.  But it’s no longer a bad thing.  Now it’s a good thing.  Funny how that works out, isn’t it?  Is it possible to turn the tables, however?  Could men get away with demanding quotas in certain industries in the interest of equity?

A good place to start is an industry that is so oriented towards the female sex it has all but shut out the opposite sex.  I’m talking about publishing companies that specialize in romance novels.  That particular branch of the publishing industry is more female-friendly than a convention hall filled to the rafters with Xena: Warrior Princess fangirls.

According to the folks at Harlequin Publishing, 99% of the readers of romance novels are women, and most of them are long past nubility.  Perhaps readers isn’t the most apt word for these women.  Women who buy romance novels don’t just read them, they devour them!  To this day I still recall a visit I made decades ago to a shopping mall bookstore where I witnessed a middle-aged woman carefully carrying a towering stack of paperback romances and gingerly placing them on the counter – without spilling one!   She was literally buying them by the yard.

If you ever visit used paperback stores, you know most the stock fits into several predictable categories.  If you check out the space devoted to romance novels, I daresay you will find more square footage than for science fiction, mysteries, westerns, or any other popular paperback genre.  Most romance novels are traditional, but there are also various sub-genres.  Just as pornography caters to an array of fetishes, so do romance novels…interracial, lesbian, cowboys, nurses, time travel – even Amish!

Now I don’t object to the fact that 99% of the readership is female.  Equity in terms of readership would serve no purpose for the manosphere.  Besides, outside of school, you can’t command people to read books they don’t want to read.

But I do think men should demand equity in the writing of such novels.  There’s a lot of money to be made on this stuff.  In 2017, romance/erotica made $1.44 billion.  The second best-selling genre was crime/mystery at roughly half as much, $728.2 million.  So a male scribbler who mastered the formula of the romance genre could greatly enhance his income.

Another statistic says that 90% of the writers of romance novels are women.  It may be a surprise that even 10% of the writers are men, but you could never tell that by looking at the names of the authors.  One must look long and hard to find a romance bearing the name of a male author.

To be sure, pen names are used for a variety of reasons.  Some more high-toned female authors may use a pen name because they wouldn’t want their colleagues in academia to know that they dabble in such a low-status genre (though there are critics who assert that the only reason romance novels are lacking in prestige is because the genre is dominated by females).  So it’s understandable that men who write romance novels would use some sort of female pseudonym.  They don’t want their buddies to know what they’re doing, but more importantly, a prospective female reader might look askance at a paperback romance penned by a man.  How could a male author create a believable heroine?

Well, we could mention Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary), or Henry James (Daisy Miller) for a few, but those are examples of bona fide high-falutin’ literature read by both males and females.  Mass-market genre fiction, is another realm entirely.  So let’s ponder whether or not a male author can write to the romance market.

Except in cases of extreme narcissism, it takes two to tango in a romance novel.  Lesbian romances aside, the heroine must have some sort of man to pair off with.  The female authors have no trouble creating swains for their heroines.  Are any of these male characters believable?  How could a female author possibly create an authentic male character?

Remember, none of the female authors has the lived experience of maleness.  Personally, I hate that phrase “lived experience,” since it is redundant, unless you’re talking about vicarious experience.  Also, I don’t like it because it is almost always employed by someone complaining of having been marginalized.  Human marginalia are inevitable in any society, but you can’t come right out and say that.  Nevertheless, I’m going to wield the concept of lived experience, even though my use of the phrase reeks of patriarchy.  I confess to being an old white male or, if you prefer, a dead white male in training.

To most men, the hero of a romance novel is laughable.  He is almost always the answer to a woman’s prayers.  If he is not rich (though living in a mansion doesn’t hurt), he has great expectations.  If he is not drop-dead handsome, he is rugged and spends his time “doing manly things.”  But they’re the good kind of manly things.  He would never do chainsaw sculptures and sell them at flea markets.

He may have a drink now and then, some sort of expensive imported spirits, but he will never drink himself into a babbling stupor.  And he might enjoy an occasional sports event on the tube but he would never watch football nonstop all weekend, every weekend from September through December – and he certainly wouldn’t waste his time on a fantasy football league.

He will likely have an impressive set of wheels.  No, not a muscle car, but some sort of understated/overpriced import.  His dashboard will not be graced by a quivering topless hula dancer.  No fuzzy dice or air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror.  And unlike his coarser brethren he would never think of keeping a Big Gulp cup in his car for an emergency piss bucket.

The male romance hero might seem to have it all…except for one thing.  He lacks a good woman (conveniently enough, the heroine) to complete him – his better half, as married folk were wont to say.

If he has some sort of deep, dark secret, so much the better.  I don’t mean that he is a serial rapist in remission or he suffers from chronic projectile diarrhea or seborrhea of the genitalia.  It has to be some romantic deep, dark secret.  Something that he shares with no one…but our heroine, who can help him bear his burden.

One example you might remember from high school English is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.  Granted, we’re talking 1847, almost a century before the rise of the paperback, but it is an instructive example.

Jane Eyre’s employer, Mr. Rochester, is a brooder.  He has a good reason to brood, however.  He is already married to a nutter, albeit tucked away, who turns out to be a suicidal pyromaniac!

Brooding and moodiness are good traits for the male lead in a romance novel.  Charlotte’s sister Emily created an equally famous male brooder – remember Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights?  In fact, going all the way back to Hamlet, why do you think Ophelia found the moody Dane so attractive?  Of course, she went nuts in the process, but overdosing (five acts!) on brooding and moodiness will do that to a girl.

In a different medium, consider the case of James Dean.  He became a legend even though he only starred in three movies (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, and Giant).  But the moody S.O.B. brooded in every one of them!  Marlon Brando and Paul Newman deserve honorable mention in any cinematic brood-off, but they lived long enough to exhibit other forms of behavior.  I think Dean was fated to be the cinematic equivalent of a Byronic hero, so-called because the famed poet, George Gordon (Lord) Byron, a leading figure in the Romantic movement, was given to moody brooding.  Why do I say Dean was destined?  His middle name was Byron!

Dean was only 24 when he died; true, the bobbysoxers swooned over him, but they and he were a bit too young for romance fiction.  His fans, however, were future consumers of romance novels and he was on track to be a mature but moody man, an archetypal male lead in a romance novel.  But the brooder is not the only archetype.

Another good choice is the alpha male.  What female reader wouldn’t want one of them for a soul mate?  Think Rhett Butler/Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind.  Scarlett O’Hara sheds two husbands before she finally gets to Rhett Butler, a can-do kind of guy who stands up to her and calls her out on her narcissism.  The more a woman gabbles on about her independence, the more she is begging for a man to keep her in line…but she will never admit that to anyone, and maybe not to herself.  Rhett Butler is such a man.

Whether the male lead is an alpha male or given to moodiness, true love never runs smooth.  There is always some major obstacle keeping the man and woman apart.  Eventually, the obstacle is cleared away and the man and woman are free to get together and commit.  In the case of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Cathy do not consummate their relationship in the flesh, but the tale ends with their ghosts wandering the moors together.  (Interesting to note that a contemporary sub-genre of the romance novel is the paranormal romance novel.)

So we’re not talking about high school sweethearts who never dated anyone else, get married and remain married till one of them assumes room temperature many decades later.  That’s too easy.  Not a bad life, maybe even desirable, but not romantic.

Now it would be great if male authors drew upon their lived experience to create more realistic leading men.  I’d love to see a romantic leading man who plays beer pong, collects comic books, and has indelible skid marks on his underwear.  But would that appeal to the female readership?  Sad to say, I think not.  But that doesn’t mean aspiring male authors should give up.

For example, consider a romance novel about a man with a harridan of an ex-wife who has so haunted the man that he simply avoids the opposite sex…until he meets a NAWALT heroine…with a killer bod and season tickets for the Red Sox.

Or a story about a guy brooding over his inability to advance because his office politics is dominated by queen bees, quota queens, and other parasites, so he has totally soured on women…until he meets a NAWALT heroine…with a killer bod who owns a craft brewery that turns out a scintillating Double IPA.

Or he’s been violated by a divorce court judge and vows he will never get married again…until he meets a NAWALT heroine…with a killer bod and an extensive DVD library – including the complete works of Charles Bronson.

Unfortunately, there is no room for the avowed MGTOW in a romance novel.  Oh, he may be one at the beginning of the novel but by the end must repent and pair off with the heroine.  Riding off alone into the sunset may work just fine in westerns, but not in romance novels.

Considering the income potential of churning out romance novels, I think equity in the authorship of same is a course worth pursuing; however, I don’t think demanding equity in the writing of romance novels will avail us anything.  Remember, women’s rights are human rights but men’s rights usually appear with quotation marks around them (printed when written, air when oral).  So demonstrating/rioting in front of Harlequin Books HQ might get you on YouTube but it probably won’t get results.  There’s more than one way to assault a fortress, however.

Consider the possibility of writing under a female pen name.  If you have a unisex name like Terry or Leslie, you’ve got it made.  If not, then something dignified and mature, vaguely Ango-Saxon…like Nora Roberts, Johanna Lindsey, Julia Quinn, Jessica Bird, Julie Garwood…these are all good, but these names have been taken  Stay away from names like Appasionata or Hypatia.  Certainly not Zsa Zsa.  Nothing too ethnic – no LaKeisha Washington or Sadie Rabinowitz or Agnieszka Kowalski…unless you’re writing for an ethnic niche of the romance market.

It is improbable but not impossible for a man to write under his own name.  Consider the case of Nicholas Sparks, who wrote Nights in Rodanthe, which was filmed in 2008 with Richard Gere and Diane Lane.  A male pen name is not out of the question either.  One such author is Damon Suede.  Great pen name, but he specializes in male-on-male relationships.  If you’re lived experience doesn’t include same, probably best to pass on this market.

Truth to tell, there appears to be something of a homosexual subtext in the covers of romance novels.  Look at how many covers include a chiseled, bare-chested (but oddly hairless) male.  I suppose you could say this is to compensate for all the male-oriented publications that feature chesty females on the cover – “Tit for tat,” as Hardy used to say to Laurel.  But could it be that such covers are made to appeal to a secondary market – the closeted gay male?  (“Oh, I’m just buying them for my sister…she can’t get enough of these things.”)

So if you’re interested in penning a romance novel and, more importantly, getting it published, where to start?  Well, you could buy a copy of Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies, by Leslie Wainger, an Executive Editor at Harlequin Books.  (I assume the author means the dummy is the aspiring author, and is not implying that romance novels are for dummies, but you could read it either way.)

At any rate, here are the five fundamentals:

Just so we’re clear, we’re not talking rape culture.  it’s ravish culture.  Not ravage!  Ravish!  If you don’t understand the difference, you, sir, are no candidate for romance novel author.  Ironically enough, romance novels used to be called bodice rippers, but I wouldn’t utter that phrase today.

So don’t let all that lived experience go to waste when you could profit from it financially while fighting the good fight for equity in the world of romance novel authorship.

Or you could just sit at home and brood about it.

Gyneolatry [Gr.  woman + -(o)latry.] refers to an excessive adoration or worship of women or femininity. Gyneolatry is sometimes referred to by alternative terms such as chivalry, romantic love, benevolent sexism, pussy worship, simping, gynocentrism, woman worship, autogynephilia or pro-feminism.

Earliest use of the term pairs it with chivalry/chivalrous behaviors by men, as in the following examples:

“The sentimental gyniolatry of chivalry, which was at best but skin-deep, is lifted in Beatrice to an ideal and universal plane.”

[1876 Lowell Among my Bks. Ser. ii. 36]

“Looked at with the scientific eye it is sheer gyneolatry – the chivalrous sentiment inflated with poetic wind, like a bubble, to the utmost possible degree of iridescent tenuity.” [The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller (H. Holt, 1901)]

Also: gynolatry, gyniolatry, gynaeolatry, gynecolatry, gynaecolatry

* * *

The following are examples of gyneolatry from historical literature:

Gyneolatry:

Book Chat, Volumes 3-4 (Brentano Bros., 1888)

The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller (H. Holt, 1901)

The Athenæum, vol 2 (British Periodicals Limited, 1909)

Zones of the spirit: a book of thoughts (G.P. Putnam, 1913)

The Collected Works, Volume 1 (Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1924)

Oxford Dictionary entry for Gyniolatry

The following are excerpts from Vilar’s Das Ende der Dressur: Modell für eine neue Männlichkeit (The End Of Manipulation: A Model for a New Masculinity). The book, the third in her trilogy on the manipulation of men, has not yet been translated to English and the following excerpts, translated via Google Translate, are rough and likely carry inaccurate translations in parts.  Many of her ideas below can be considered outlandish work of fiction today, however nobody can argue that Vilar wasn’t passionate about men’s welfare, and she took considerable risk to stand up in public and speak her mind.

____________________________________________

The man must become useless

As long as masculinity is equated with utility, “real” men will always be those that make themselves useful. The introduction of a new rating system for masculinity would therefore assume that men are not more useful to women than the reverse is the case.

Only when marriage means something other than the man doing almost everything for the woman, and the woman doing almost nothing for the man, could men become male in a new way – in a way that has to do with your gender and not with your usability as before. So, if men wanted a less embarrassing existence for themselves or other men, something would have to change the current social fabric.

As has already been said, such changes should not be enforced against the will of the powerful nor against the needs of the human psyche. In the search for a viable alternative, one would have to take into account, on the one hand, that our western industrial society is a matriarchy, and, on the other hand, that couples want to live in communities and raise children. Reform efforts that do not take into account female power or the human need for lasting ties – marriage, family – are condemned to failure from the outset.

A solution of the problem described so far would therefore assume the following advantages:

1. It would make the man uninteresting as an economic factor for the woman (without, however, jeopardizing the economic structure).
2. It should be a collective action. (Men who want to change their situation in one-on-one actions quickly become united and soon become useful again.)
3. It would have to defend not only the interests of men, but also those of children and the elderly against women. (You can not solve a weak person’s situation on the back of other weak people.)
4. It would have to guarantee the maintenance of gender-typical behaviors. (Without male and female role behavior, most people would be bored with the world.)
5. She would have to please the women. (The status envisaged for them would at least seem equivalent to them.)

One solution that would meet these requirements would be a general working time cut to five hours a day (introduction of the twenty-five-hour work week), accompanied by the following measures:

• a. Salary reduction, which corresponds to the reduction of working hours.
• b. Increase in social security contributions.
• c. Pupil salary, which, regardless of the income of the parents and relatives, covers all basic material needs of those preparing for a profession. (This would affect toddlers, students, apprentices, and anyone who wants to change jobs.)
• d. One-year leave for a mother or father after the birth of a child, Special leave for illness of a child.
• e. Abolition of nurseries, hoarding and all – day schools in favor of Five-hour kindergartens for children from one year and five-hour Teaching in all schools and universities.
• f. Abolition of the obligation to retire in favor of self-elected pension limits.
• G. Abolish the right to work of equal value in favour of a right to retraining.
• H. Prohibition of overtime.

Through this model the most important requirement for a new masculinity would be given, for as we shall see, women would work after such a reform. And as soon as she does that they would choose their partners in a different way than they do today. They would no longer judge men by their usefulness, but by their suitability for love.

But let’s first examine the economic viability of all these proposals, because everything else depends on that.

The workforce has doubled

The prerequisite for any reduction of working hours is the assurance of economic stability. All historical working time cuts were therefore always more the consequence of economic calculation than humanitarian considerations. One factor remained practically constant: the workforce potential. Because One could only count on one half of the adult population, the men. The Women were often pregnant, had to breastfeed for a long time, had many children and had to have one supply complicated household. Working time cuts were therefore either through the use of Machines or by improving the performance of the available Workers reachable. When you replace men with machines, wherever possible, and with them In addition, granted longer breaks, they consumed more slowly. Your overall performance but remained constant or even increased, the economic structure remained intact.

Since the invention of artificial breast milk, since the birth control by pill and Abortion and since the partial automation of housework, however, we are in A new era: There are twice as many workers as before, because women can now too work. This creates three new opportunities for the economy:

• a. You can let women work instead of men.
• b. You can let a part of the women work and thus the general one Shorten working hours.
• c. You can let both sexes work the same and thus the Shorten working hours significantly.

Why the first alternative is utopian has already been discussed. The second is already realized We owe her and the automation to the forty or forty-five-hour week and the extension of annual leave. The third and really sensational option, however – drastic reduction of working hours through equal participation of both sexes in the work process – is not even discussed seriously. It would be in highly industrialized countries since at least ten years. But apparently no one dares, from the duplication of the Workforce potential – probably the biggest social change in our history – the practical one To draw consequences.

The five-hour model is realistic

For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that the western ones Industrialized countries are satisfied with their economic performance. Let us further assume that in full employment, ie. the total number of hours worked Need of the economy covers and that the number of the unemployed to the vacancies in the desired Relation stands. Of course that does not correspond to reality, because in every country there is recession and Boom, periods of unemployment and over-employment. But for our calculation At the moment, these economic aspects are of no concern.

The condition for the reform proposed here would be the preservation of the economic status quo Country in which it is performed. Because although it is a reduction in working hours from humanitarian considerations, the functioning of the economy should not be up for discussion. Reforms that the preservation or enhancement of the economic performance of a country not as one of its The most important basic conditions always end up at the expense of those whose position they are should improve originally. The question is therefore: how much could working time be spent in Industrialized countries reduce and / or how could the living conditions of their inhabitants be humanizing without such a measure endangering the economy?

Let’s base our calculations on data from those western industrial countries – USA, Canada, Australia, West Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark Finland, Norway, Austria, Switzerland – where the forty-hour week more or less in which about every second working woman is already employed. If so Instead of every second, all employable women would work in these countries – and not just that one-third, but half of the female active population would be – so would the total number of active workers will increase by one third and, consequently, the total number of reduce the number of hours worked by each employee by one quarter. If you are in If these countries have to work eight hours a day today, then one would have to look for an optimal one Exhausting the female workforce only six hours a day.

This number is obviously inaccurate and also too optimistic: it does not take into account that in the of the working women about one-third only work by the hour they work does not take into account that in most of these countries women average two to five years earlier retired as men, they do not take into account the one to three years men because of their Military service as a workforce, it does not take into account the industries in which the Hour-week still belongs to the realm of Utopia (Freelance, Farmers), she takes into account not the overtime and the “moonlighting” of men, it does not take into account the unreported number of only for tax reasons in family businesses declared as gainfully employed women and not those of the for the same reasons in private households undeclared “Zugehfrauen”. If you have all these Data, as far as they appear in the statistics of the various countries in the calculation involves an average daily working time of more than six hours.

However, it is not the six or seven but the five-hour day that is up for debate here. This would be possible because a drastic reduction in daily workload impacts Quantity and quality of performance would certainly allow further reductions in working time would:

1. 1: Increase the quantity of work

• a. Less sick leave due to illness: Both the real and fake diseases would go back. By longer Rest breaks kept workers healthier, by shortening the working hours they would maybe even prefer to work and therefore less often report sick.
• b. Less work loss due to retirement: The Eight-hour day is for most older People too exhausting. At five hours Working hours would take many of them up practically want to end their lives, because they would become as a full member of society feel. The proposed reform would not be mobilize only the female workforce, but also the retirees. (What positive consequences an introduction of self-imposed pension limits for The care for the elderly would be in a later Chapter explains.)
• c. Loss of work due to premature death: By reducing the power pressure would come it leads to an increase in men Life expectancy, sooner or later the female would adapt, in turn, only would decrease slightly or not at all.

1. 2: Increase the quality of work performance

• a. Because the quality of work in rested people correspondingly larger, would become larger Rest breaks the effectiveness of the work, the Job offer (= offer of working hours per Time unit). That’s exactly what it was always the most important argument for the previous ones Working time reductions. The performance low after the Lunch break would be canceled as well as the last hours.
• b. The quality of female work would to adapt to the male, because women would become more ambitious and stronger than before Participate in the competition. Because they work all their lives would need a career advancement for Women are just as worthwhile as men. These Increase in female labor supply would come benefit the economy as a whole.

Only in cooperation with economists, rationalization technicians, sociologists and Behavioral researchers could calculate exactly how strong the factors mentioned on the Work and how much working time could be saved in addition. Already however, according to an initial preliminary calculation, it is fair to say that the five-hour working day in the Range of possibilities and that the conditions for the reform proposed here are are realistic.

Half a day of freedom

The situation looks even more favorable, if one does not calculate the working time, but the Time of absence of home based. Most professionals have a lunch break from one to two hours, so if you go out of an hour’s commute, average separated from their families for ten to eleven hours. The proposed model would eliminate the Lunch break. Rest breaks of fifteen to thirty minutes would take five hours. Working hours are sufficient, with lighter activities one could perhaps completely do without it.

The employee would therefore, with breaks and commute, on average, only six to six and a half instead of ten to eleven hours away from home. That is, he wins through the five-hour rhythm practically half a day. Other than the five-hour rhythm, z. B. a week, month or Annual rhythm (three days of work, four days of free time, seven months of work, five months of free time, etc.) would be – with the exception of those professions, which bring a greater distance from the place of residence (Aviation, shipping and railway personnel, truck drivers, agents) – not for the following reasons recommended.

1. All the benefits just mentioned, which work hours from six to five hours would have to be eliminated.
2. And because then no one alone would be responsible for a particular task, would create an economic chaos, because of a flourishing economy essential competition between workers would be disturbed.
3. Children would be in institutions for about three days, four days for their parents or seven months in institutions and five months in her parents However, it has been proven that children need a certain degree of regularity Continuity in the caregiver if they develop optimally should. In addition, hoards and schools would be for full-time child care would have to be set up, although they would only be needed on a temporary basis, economically not profitable.
4. Virtually all adult males are from their mothers and theirs Religion educated to masochists. You first have to do something before you become can have fun. They want to enjoy themselves, and they want to be allowed to pay.

You can not do reforms against the needs of the human psyche: men need the rhythm of performance and relaxation. Long rest breaks in one go with them to emotional disorders, as one can see in times of unemployment. Maybe that could someday overcome this educational damage. Until then, you would have to join them possible reforms.

You earn half and still live better

Work is a service that you pay for. Unpaid services are provided Coercion, masochism, the need for validity, stupidity, personal affection, or Pleasure seeking. In general, every person who does something that others may need, too and usually there is nobody who would make something useful for free. Also housewives receive salaries, but they are rather unbureaucratically handed over by their husbands. Which manipulations they owe their overpayment has already been described elsewhere.

The fact that you need money and that you usually only work for money, allows The wages and salaries of the company largely control the living conditions of the society Individual – it influences its safety, comfort and freedom. But there the Society consists of all individuals, this is harmless in democratically governed countries. If the majority were unpleasantly affected by a particular measure, they will not accept it from the outset. The general public can therefore by general measures – by Laws – improve the social situation of individuals, they can not worsen them.

One of the opportunities for social improvement is the diversity of wages and benefits Salaries. Because in general you will only quantity and quality of his work increase if a wage increase beckons, and only then the effort of a longer study if you get into a better salary level right from the start. Eulogies and other awards are an incentive for permanent performance increases without effect. There people, Those who try for nothing, who are considered stupid by most others, can be immaterial Rewards basically harm the reputation of a worker. To economic progress In a country, it only happens when every single person is fully committed to their work. One Such personal commitment can only be achieved through personal benefits.

So, even if all work were the same, it would be unequal in the interests of all the same work pay. But work is not the same, and they also require different levels of knowledge. The The general public therefore has a double interest in unequal pay. Only if you have difficult, Dangerous, exhausting, boring or repulsive works better rewarded than others, is always a sufficient number of services available, and only if you are manufacturers and Allow brand representatives to reward their efforts more than a platonic reward Enjoying the increase in sales, the supply of consumer and luxury goods is always slightly larger than demand.

Moreover, it is only by “unfair” pay that citizens have some freedom to guarantee. Since pleasant work is rare and, of course, all at the same price In this case, the majority would have to be compelled by a minority will take over the unpleasant duties also necessary. Apart from the loss of As a result of the dynamic economic potential that this would entail, it would de facto be abolished Mean freedom of expression. Because if you force the majority to do something they do not want, then sooner or later you have to prevent it from agitating against it.

In other words, unequal pay is unfair, because people have different talents and have different favorable starting positions for their lives, but equal pay would be even more. Because with unequal pay the economy works better, you can on this Gradually giving everyone at least some extra time, freedom and prosperity. at Equal pay would have no right to one’s own time or one’s own opinion – and money. You would have as much as everyone else, but less than that. If social, what is that Benefiting less privileged sections of the population, then it is social, workers different pay.

But let’s go back to the working time cut. Of course, such a reform would have to be through corresponding law to be secured. Only benefits that work within the five-hour work period should be rewarded by employers. Since one does not work without wages, would to stick to this rule and be free for the rest of the day.

New laws, as we said, are accepted in democracies only if they are majority guarantee the population an advantage. A reduction in working hours would not only bring the Advantage that the free time for everyone is almost twice as long, but they would also have the disadvantage that the Salaries are cut almost in half. So if, for example, someone turns eighty in eight hours If he earns a dollar, he could only spend fifty dollars after five hours of working hours otherwise, it would not be economically viable. And here is the biggest difficulty Reform: Without proper preparation, workers would be cut short Income disagree. You would like the reduction in working time proposed here Short-time working – a measure practiced by individual companies in times of crisis Wage savings – and reject the project.

The first step towards a new legal regulation would therefore be an awareness-raising campaign widest level. Working people would have to realize that they have more time through the reform, but despite the necessary pay cut would not have less money. Because in the current situation one may be his.

Do not keep the wage. In general, it not only finances your own life, but also finances it that of the so-called “dependent” persons. After the reform, everyone would be able to financially self-supply. Nobody would have to share their money with housewives, children and other needy, because such needy would no longer exist. Only if all this were clear, one could to the Dare to draft a law.

The moral principle of the wage reform proposed here would be the following: Human Communities are built to protect against a hostile environment and operate on the Basis of division of labor. Anyone who voluntarily lives in the company of others, therefore, does not just have one The right to protection by them, but also the duty to protect them – he is from social position not only legal entity, but also manpower. Who only of his Makes use of rights, but seeks to avoid the obligations, lives at the expense of others and is responsible for a community a parasite.

As already said, this parasitism is in Western societies most successful of women and most spectacularly practiced by criminals. Both express themselves before their obligations and indirectly impose them on others. By the reform one could make female parasitism largely impossible. And there work, as soon as women work so much like men, would lose much of their terror – because of the stamina and responsibility of the individual would be considerably smaller – there would also be a consequence of female equality less crime. Because in today’s situation remains for a man who is not on women Crimes often the only way to relinquish the depressing destiny of his sex to escape (and only because of this are offenders in western industrialized countries also to 80 percent male). After humanization of working hours and cancellation of price maintenance for use The risk of a criminal act would be too great for some of the female vagina. Right now It does not really matter if a man founds a family or if he leaves without this detour goes to his walls. But after the reform, there would be a bit of freedom outside, and the company of On the one hand women would be cheaper and on the other hand more interesting than now.

Higher social contributions initially inevitable

However, since all these savings do not cover high social benefits (at least would be enough to cover the deficit in the first decades after the transition) Balancing tax increases. That means you would not only have salaries proportional to Reduce working time reduction, but also with higher social security contributions strain. So, if somebody earned eighty dollars in working hours before the reform, If he worked five hours a day, he would not be fifty, but forty-five or even forty Refer to dollars. Of course you could not cut all salaries so drastically. Because even if you only have to feed yourself with it, many workers would be already below the Subsistence level. It would therefore have minimum wages to be set, the amount of about the Full scholarship of a student would correspond.

The progression of salaries would still be left to the free play of the forces. Because it would be in the general interest to set salaries down – poverty leads to social unrest and therefore harms everyone – but upwards they should never, also in the general interest be limited. The maximum performance of the clever is vital to the welfare of the less Refined: Who brakes the élan of the top earners, acts anti-social, as much as he morally in the May be right. The difference to today’s situation would therefore lie in the fact that after the reform everyone would bring home just over half of their current net salary.

One engineer, for example, who now enters a company with an annual salary of twenty thousand dollars and that ten-year salary increases to forty thousand dollars, then ten thousand start and come to twenty thousand after ten years. But that would not hurt him, because if he had gotten married in the meantime – and according to statistics this would almost always be the case – then yes also earn his wife, and his children would be secured by their own income anyway. Of the Standard of living of the family would be – provided that the wife would be with her salary approximately in the same group – even slightly higher. Unlike today, however, this engineer could not do more be exploited to the limit of his physical and mental capacity by his company, while his wife was lamenting or bored in her suburban bungalow. And unlike Today, after the reform, there would be neither husband and wife nor children and parents material dependency relationships. A separation would not for any of the family members financial ruin mean: After a remarriage, the man would be neither with alimony for the First family charged, nor would his wife have to pursue him with payment claims. The kids could stay with the parent they felt most comfortable with – time for them both.

Similarly favorable it would look at the lowest level of the social ladder. Because the financial situation A helper would not be as brilliant as an engineer, but he too would become a life which he can not even dream of now. He would have twice as much time and his job It would not be a consequence of discrimination but your own decision – and there is a lot Respectable reasons for choosing a five-hour job without responsibility can. And suppose he only received the legally guaranteed minimum salary and would do so modest as today a state-subsidized student living in a furnished room, so could He still founds a family. Because his wife would have one in the worst case Minimum salary available – so you could join instead of two furnished rooms together One-room apartment afford. With the birth of the first child, the first day salary would increase the family budget again. You could already do that a modest two-room apartment, and for the minimum need for food and clothing would be also taken care of.

Still, this family life could never be for either the laborer or his wife to be a straitjacket. With a separation, the relationship could easily be unraveled. What Today, for a poor person who was wrong in choosing his life partner, in the realm of utopia – a new love and the founding of a second family – would be realizable for him as well. And for his children who are now after such a tragedy mostly in homes or with their grandparents land, the separation of the parents would have only emotional meaning.

Each for himself and everyone for everyone, would be the common denominator of the economic side of the reform. You might be as selfish as you wanted, and nobody could hurt you. It must be in one In any case, all citizens will be provided with care: why – as it is obviously possible – it is not set up so that no personal dependency relationships can arise from it? It is hard enough to maintain happy relationships with other people over a long period of time. If material interests are involved, as is the case today in almost every relationship between man and woman Woman or parents and child is the case, it becomes impossible. At least this one difficulty would be through The new wage policy has been eradicated once and for all.

Consequences of a new masculinity: Voluntary equal obligation

Salary reduction plus reduced working hours would be the ideal technique for infiltrating the female Supremacy, because after such a measure, the women would have to work and want.

It is obvious that women would be forced to work due to massive salary cuts. It is an economic law that automatically reduces the female wage level Workforce potential is mobilized: In the fewest families would be the merit of a Adults are enough to feed two, three or more people. But you can, like said, women in a democratic society do not force anything. Against the will of women could not enforce a general salary reduction. Indirectly exercising political power, would be a government that by such a measure the female part of the population too Wanted to force work in a few days. Of course, the men would for the To overthrow it. Women do not make revolutions, it is enough that they wish them. The women So you want to work. Since you can not force them to equal obligation, you have to do it allure. For a temptation, however, the five-hour model would offer the ideal conditions because it could thus both the disadvantages of housewife status as well as the all-day and Remedy part-time employment. Since a five-hour day does not represent unbearable stress and at the same time solve their other problems – boredom, loneliness, economic and social dependency, sexual and mental frustration – housewives would after here proposed reform is not reluctant to work. Those left over, because their established men too If you earned enough in less hours you would be amazed like fossils, that is, you would be pushed into outsider roles and would sooner or later want to adapt. Boy Girls would no longer opt for this “profession” from the outset.

In the real professions, however, there would be neither full-time nor part-time work with »female Discrimination “, but only five-hour work, in which no sex preferred or disadvantaged. Because when male and female workers by and large alike would be reliable, you would each prefer the applicant with the better qualifications – one could not afford another attitude in a free economy. The three disadvantages of Half-day work – hard to find, hard to maintain and difficult to build – would that there was only such work left in the world. What remained the generally accepted Benefits of part-time employment.

That women would really work under changed conditions is already possible to prove. In all Western industrialized countries, the vast majority of teachers are female Even up to ninety percent of elementary schools – though the teacher’s job is longer Training time and a certain intellectual inclination. But teachers have one Special status: Your free time – if you include school holidays – is at least twice as long as the the other professionals. Depending on the country and type of school, teachers from western industrialized countries complete weekly 18 to 32 lessons of 45 minutes, that is 13.5 to 24 hours. The time she otherwise invest in their profession depends largely on their goodwill and their routine. Most teachers are therefore neither by their children nor by their household of the To hold a professional practice, there is the lowest turnover of all women’s occupations. And since this is so, there is no “female discrimination” either at state or private schools male teachers are preferred. That then the school directors are usually male again, is due to the fact that a temporal commitment is required at this level, to which only a few Teachers are ready.

Men, “the legislators,” could therefore afford it without danger, a general, legal established working time reduction – the majority of women would not mind objection. After an appropriate education campaign, they could detail the reform to prepare.

Bad times for the trained

But maybe the resistance would come from another side? Maybe he came from the men?

After the reform, they would be as independent as possible in today’s circumstances, because outside their short working hours, they would be completely free and could do and say what they wanted.

Even at the workplace, they could risk more. Because of their servility no more The economic and social position of an entire family, they would have in professional life even less humble. That would make working men in this relationship finite working women and could be just as self-confident with their superiors to act like her colleagues.

But although this independence would clearly improve their situation, it would not be of in the beginning all men welcome. They are trained by their education, their whole time to hang the work and all her money to her family. Suddenly, one would ask them to that they should keep both and that they should live for themselves rather than for others. You can imagine that especially the particularly expertly manipulated men by the prospect of so much independence would panic. After being brainwashed from earliest childhood, they are only satisfied with themselves if they make themselves useful. To have time for yourself and being economically independent is the only thing they really fear.

The greater opposition to the proposals made here is therefore less appreciated by women expect as the product of their education, the trained man. The man who always pleads for that the woman absolutely has to “remain a wife” and wants to say that she absolutely must continue to do so He wants to play a child, because he wants to continue to play his father with her. Because for this Role he was trained, it is the meaning of his existence.

Well, there is probably no one who can exist without a program – any “sense” for that, what you do, you will always look for. Happy people are never free people. who is always bound to a fixed idea, that is, it is acting according to a political, moral, aesthetic, religious or other value scale or is at least by love depending on foreign standards. People who we call “free” differ of us others only by clinging to a contrary system. All ties we the free will systematically avoid. We therefore determine indirectly through our behavior also his. A “free” man is more likely to renounce his lover than to marry her, and even though he is doing exactly the opposite of what he wants right now, this is followed his religious principles – he believes in freedom – make him more contented than if he were his Longing gives way. He would be truly free if he did not find an ideology to which he voluntarily bowed would like to. If he could believe in anything, not even personal freedom.

It would therefore be unwise to promise men liberty. First, you could make that promise not redeem them, and secondly, they would just scare them with such a slogan. If in this The book is about liberty, therefore, is always meant only the possibility to tie oneself where one The biggest advantage of change would be that men become closer, More often and more permanently could compromise than before, because their involuntary and usually only material ties – for example to unloved wives, unprovided children, exploitative ones Employers – would be much rarer then today.

Of course, if men had more time and financial independence, men would become even more dependent. They would be even more convinced to pursue their political goals, still Dedicate dedicated life tasks, even more uncompromising against each other Compete and of course they fall in love more passionately than before. But unlike now, these dependencies would be freely chosen and terminable at any time. In difference for now they would only be prisoners of a “task” or of a human being for as long as they themselves were wanted. And in that difference – the freedom to give up one’s faith as soon as one does no longer believes in him – is the whole often cited human dignity. This is exactly where the border runs between happiness and misfortune.

In his present situation, the man can decide only once to whom to give his freedom wants, and even that is not really a “free” choice. The profession to which he is due due to his education and his milieu at fifteen decides, and the woman he decides to ten years later assigned – who then lets himself be “conquered” – determine his whole life. As very much he may change over the years – no matter what profession or woman she is at forty, fallen fifty or sixty – his fate is sealed. Only the most successful men can save themselves from this system and get at least in the choice of the partner a second chance. But usually they have already consumed in the fight for just this chance so that it is actually not worth it anymore. And also men who are always for the same woman In today’s situation the pleasure is denied. Since they would have to stay anyway, takes Give them every opportunity to make their stay a symbol of their affection. Outwardly they live like the others in a forced community. That they can stay voluntarily, can actually only wealthy men prove. The man with median income can be his Do not honor lover by his presence in the house, because he could not leave anyway.

And yet many men would resist the reform. The new independence would especially those anxious, who by their education particularly thoroughly on the role of the Command Recipients have been prepared or have been used to it for so long can not imagine anything else. They know that then there would be no one left for them day after day Day and hour after hour dictates what they should do with their lives. Not just for the small employees, but also and especially for the manager with the busy schedule the prospect of more time – time for yourself – a real specter. He can because of his Position over others, but about himself is always disposed. At least during In a transitional phase, such a man would feel “abandoned” and therefore completely lost.

It is therefore advisable to consider in what way the psychological trauma that the psychic trauma may cause should be mitigated Reform for better or worse for most men. The thing would be irreversible: if once the prison gates had opened, there would be no return to the security of today Lifestyle. Only the rich would have the privilege to try out the new freedom and possibly to to return to its old role: since the return is particularly high, there would always be a woman who admires his slavery and again plays the baby for him. The rest of the men would join willy-nilly have to set up in their independence. Her wives would not ask her how long they can cope with the new situation. When they do not need them anymore, they will give them all of them Freedoms that you have lost in the course of a lifetime with the most subtle methods return in a single day.

Because one thing is certain: if women no longer have any use for the trained man, you will stop the dressage immediately. And that would be today’s standards for Masculinity itself lapses: good-natured husbands would not tell how brutal theirs was Suppress partners. Desperate marriage candidates would no longer be certified as erotic they affect women. Well-meaning elderly gentlemen would not know how to salvage young girl feels in her arms. Average lovers would not do more above-average skills and above-average would no longer be sexual Accused of abuse. All this was necessary to help men become better and better Animate them to elicit more and more concessions from them and get as much out of themselves as possible To keep body. After the reform, not even the most tumultuous newspaper would write, that women live enslaved in a “men’s society” and that sex is the rape of one Be weaker. Because with the intimidation of the men from now on nobody would be served, and therefore it would not take place anymore.

The painful symptoms of dressage withdrawal – insecurity and fear of life – would therefore come yet another trauma, and this would probably be the hardest to bear for the man: the knowledge an infinite embarrassment. Because the whole extent of the manipulation that he is subjected to today, is He will probably only become aware of it when it fails. Only then will he really know how he acted in his parade role, with how much sovereignty one held the threads, on which he his With how much cynicism his partner applauded, he managed to do tricks with how much acting ability they played the role of the helpless. And he will know that he himself – similar to the bull you drive into the arena – never from the hour of his birth had the slightest chance. Even if it temporarily seemed as if he was the winner – even if sometimes a torero remained on the track – then appeared again and again on another, the red Tuch waving in front of him and at the end under the applause of the audience the coup de grace offset.

After the reform, the weaned would have to admit that all his previous ones Efforts were free. For example, he had thought he had a home with his diligence created, but if he finally had time to live there, he would have to realize that he was in this Home only disturbs – that actually no place is provided for him, there homes for their inhabitants but he himself is considered a visitor. He had believed that there were people who were too belong to him, but if he was finally with them, he would have to accept that at least his children have long grown together with their mother and their mothers shared friends for ages has been hit by others. Above all, he had believed he was at least a man through all his efforts, but that too would be an illusion prove, because everything that was once considered male, now no longer male, and because you are now completely obviously expect something different from him.

But what would you expect? At least on this point – in the search for a new role – would the women help the men.

The excerpt below is from The Manipulated Man  by Esther Vilar, available at Amazon.

American Man – the Most Successfully Manipulated Male on Earth

THE EXPLOITATION OF THE AMERICAN MALE by the American female would be a purely American affair were it not a model for women all over the world. Unfortunately, the economic hegemony of the U.S.A. influences not just the politics, science, research, and culture of all other capitalist countries but, to a great extent, the social behavior of their populations. Through the mass media, which have been relentlessly perfected, this influence spreads to all areas of life more and more rapidly.

The old maxim about American consciousness becoming the consciousness of the world after a five year lag no longer holds true. Modern techniques of communication have flooded over the boundaries separating place and time. If the United States develops a new treatment for heart attacks, hospitals in Latin America will be using that very treatment a few weeks later. If the performance of American schoolchildren is improved by teaching machines, these same machines will be hooked up within a short time in the classrooms of Japan. The moment a hit like Jesus Christ Superstar opens on Broadway, students in West Germany start praying. As soon as the American female compares her situation with that of American blacks, women in England, France, and Scandinavia scream, “We are the Niggers of the Nation.”

While American influence has its benefits in other spheres (for example, in research), in the social sphere, as far as the social position of men in these countries is concerned, surely there is none. There is no country in which men are worse off than they are in the United States. They are worse off by comparison with their female partners – and this is what we are dis- cussing here: the differing living conditions of man and woman within one and the same social class of a given country, within one and the same family.

Nobody will deny that the struggle of a poor white-collar worker to survive is more difficult in Portugal than in Sweden and that in the same country a factory worker’s wife has a harder life than the wife of an engineer. These injustices are the subject of many other books; here we can discard them entirely. By comparison with her husband – not by comparison with the engineer’s wife – the factory worker’s wife leads a luxurious life.

America’s high standard of living, combined with its permanent threat of unemployment, is enough to make any man’s life miserable. In no country with a comparable standard of living are jobs so tenuous; in no other country with a comparable rate of unemployment are the demands made by the standard of living as high. The difference between a “success” and a “failure” is nowhere so clearly defined as in the U.S.A. Added to these external difficulties is the fact that no other man is so thoroughly manipulated as the American male. The adult American male is manipulated so expertly that there appears to be nothing he would not willingly endure. And, indeed, he is exploited without scruple. In no other country do mothers so pitilessly train the male infant to perform. No other society exists where the male sexual drive is exploited for money so unscrupulously. Nobody except the American woman so shamelessly professes a creed of profit under the guise of love.

This does not mean that American women are cruel. Women are never cruel to their men; men are usually not important enough to be tortured. Only in movies do women ruin their men intentionally. This simply means that American women, more than other women, fail to consider men as fellow human beings. Perhaps the many dangers of pioneering days caused American men to be evaluated by their usefulness to women. After all, that period in history is not that far gone.

And American men prefer to see themselves in this role: a man’s salary is the yardstick of his worth. America is the only place where a badly paid professor is a bad professor, and an unsuccessful writer a bad writer. For the Latin American male, masculinity is still associated with sexual potency. For the American male, however, the association is directly with money. American literature, from Edward Albee to Jacqueline Susann, re- volves around this question: whether or not a male is a man if he cannot provide appropriately for the woman in his life. Of course he is not.

The American man knows: happiness comes only through women, and women are expensive. He is ready to pay that price. As a young adult he pays in advance, as a grownup he pays in installments, and as a corpse he is cashed in for a fortune. A man from another country realizes this as soon as he sees a flourishing divorce paradise like Reno, or the thousands of his fellow men sitting in jail for overdue alimony payments. On the other hand, the American man views this as confirmation of his superiority. Is he not the privileged one, as he has enough money to pay for it all? Is he not the competent one, since he goes to work? Would his wife have taken on his family and surname were he not the master? Only recently a poll showed that more American men than women believe that women are suppressed, and fifty-one percent of American men believe that the situation of the American white woman is as bad as that of the American black man.

The American man is grateful to his wife for letting him go to work, be- cause work to him is a male privilege. The woman for whom he provides has made sure that he never doubts it, and he feels sorry for her in spite of the unequivocal difference between his situation and hers. She has made sure that he sees a sacrifice in her waiver of work. He, more than any other man, mistakes his wife’s lack of intellectual ambition for modesty, her stupidity for exceptional femininity, her giving up responsibilities for love. More than any other man, he is able to close his eyes to the clear evidence of his own exploitation.

In this country man is manipulated with much less inhibition than in other countries: hence women should be even easier to unmask. But the American man does not want to see or know. It seems appropriate to him that in the TV show his children are watching, the father is portrayed as a fool, the mother as a star. Wasn’t his own mother superb? That a Mafia of women’s groups controls all cultural life seems unavoidable to him. Some- body has to take care of culture. That American women (and no other women in the rest of the world) run around in public with curlers in their hair is charming American folklore to him. The fact that a majority of psychiatric patients are women, while men have a higher rate of suicide, is his evidence for the value of psychoanalysis. He thinks it fair that for generations men have become crippled war veterans, while generations of women do not even know what a hand grenade looks like. Man is stronger and the stronger one goes to war.

Though the slavery of the American man is humiliating and nerve-racking, he does not want to see, of course, that his is the worst bargain: he has ended up with the most made-up, constantly recolored, the most conspicuously masked woman of all, in short, with the most unreal woman. But to this he closes his eyes.

Since the American woman is the highest paid wife, she, of course, wants something in return for her money. She is the leading consumer of cosmetics: she uses more lipstick, more cream, more powder, more color than a woman of any other nationality. Although she has a reputation for being especially dowdy, she needs more money for her clothes and other masquerades.

Of all women, she leads the most comfortable life. More often than her sisters of other nationalities, she lives in her own house, drives her own car, goes on vacation, does her work with the help of machines, and uses ready-to-cook food. She has a fully automated household, a bus takes her children to school, and they are gone almost all day, so that she has every opportunity to go to work; and yet the percentage of married women working in America is considerably lower than in other industrialized countries. Although the American woman has a better chance at a higher education than women of other countries, and although she is spared two years of military service, only thirteen percent of American coeds get their university degrees.

America has the highest divorce rate, and the chance that an infant will grow up with both a mother and a father is slimmer than in any other country. But that does not seem to disturb the American woman, for out of all women of highly industrialized nations, she has the highest birth rate. No wonder; children are a guarantee of income. American fathers pay the highest alimonies, and since non-payment can be punished by imprisonment, he pays promptly.

Even his old-age insurance rates are the highest. The average American husband is four years older than his wife, and his average life expectancy is seven years less than hers. The eleven years by which she will probably survive him do not represent a risk, and if she clings to her husband for life, she will be respected and well treated because of her money, so that the years will be even more comfortable without him. She plays bridge, is active in sports, has visits from her children and grandchildren, and works in her women’s groups for law and order. In flowery hats, her withered lips painted Stoplight Red (look, here comes an American woman!), she takes off once in a while for a tour around the world and makes sure that she is not forgotten abroad. And she is not; on the contrary – when an aging Rose Kennedy (having already sacrificed to her nation three male heirs while daughters and daughters-in-law are getting rich and old in the process) flirts in front of TV cameras, hoping to promote her last living son’s campaign for the presidency, she is celebrated as a heroine. What a brave mother!

One might assume that a prerequisite for the high profit achieved by American woman’s femininity would be top performance in other areas. But for the connoisseur, she is neither a good cook nor an experienced lover. Despite her good salary, the demands on her art of seduction are minimal. Her husband, trained by Hollywood to appreciate the coarsest of sex symbols (large breasts and big behinds), can no longer make fine dis- tinctions. All she really needs are a few good curves and the nerve to say no long enough. And she is a true master of that art. Necking and petting are an American invention. To lure men, like the women of other countries they wear false breasts, but only in America are false bottoms worn.

The logical result of such business tactics, steadily perfected through the generations, is frigidity, and the American woman has succeeded in persuading the nation that her frigidity is an illness to be taken seriously. After all, there is a difference: a prostitute would be willing to give up her orgasm, a wife would not. Instead of asking what a frigid woman is doing in the bed of a man, a man she does not even desire, an attempt is made to free her from her suffering through costly procedures and with ever-changing prescriptions (it goes without saying: only if she is properly married. Be- fore marriage, she would have had neither the money for therapy nor the interest in getting better).

The American woman is no worse than other women. She is only ahead of them all. Her unscrupulous tactics for exploitation would not be so dangerous if they were not constantly idealized by a powerful TV and film industry. As the latter creates the image of Western woman, her behavior is being copied, and as her standard of living is constantly raised, the fate of her husband automatically becomes the fate of men in other countries. Yet there is another reason to deal specifically with the American woman, and that is Women’s Liberation. American women are better off than other women around the world: but not all of the American women. The same system that brings so many advantages to most American women turns by necessity against a minority within their own ranks: the women who are unattractive by male standards.

Until recently, this condition went unnoticed by all save that minority. But one day this minority decided not to put up with that condition any longer and began to organize, like their predecessors, the suffragettes. Since the American public is accustomed to listening to women when they talk, their problems were soon much discussed. Not only in America but in the rest of the world, this new movement was taken up immediately. Why, one might ask, did this uprising of women start in America, of all places, where women are obviously better off? The explanation is simple: exactly for that reason. Because the American woman is better off, because social differences between married women and women who earn their own living are so enormous. Because in America more than any other country the working woman is treated as a traitor, an outcast, by the masses of female exploiters who see their own interests betrayed. This is why this movement had to start in the U.S.A. and no other place. Used to endless power over man and to the highest social prestige, American women will find the renunciation of power and prestige much more painful. And if the direct approach will not work, she will procure her insignia of feminine power in a roundabout way: Women’s Liberation.

Furthermore, a strained labor market has put this minority of women, forced or willing to work, into a somewhat more difficult position than their European sisters when they apply for higher positions. Many of them will see their difficulties from a particular perspective and interpret the unpleasantness of professional life as discrimination against their sex. But if an American employer were to fill an open position and to choose between an unattractive woman who did not appeal to his sexual instinct and a man, his choice would undoubtedly be the man. And he can even justify that decision: when a woman marries, she will give up her job as soon as she be- comes a mother. A man who marries and becomes a father turns into an even more reliable employee. If the applicant is already married, then the employer’s choice is even easier, since he knows that the man’s paycheck will almost certainly support more than one person, hence be twice as necessary. The single woman supports, at most, herself. From the employer’s

point of view, it is more humane to give the job to the man. The “woman with a family” – the woman who supports a healthy man and his children all her life – is practically unknown in the professional world. Who should be held responsible for this situation: employer or woman?

It is at once sad and comic to see how the women of the American Women’s Liberation movement, who indeed have reason to fight, direct all their time and energy against the wrong enemy. With constant defamations, they hold their only allies, men, at bay, while spoiling the really guilty party with immoderate compliments. Like all women’s liberating movements in history, Women’s Liberation started from the wrong premise and has missed its aim. But no force on earth will convince its members of that. The responsibility lies with the intellectuals. It is understandable and perhaps even forgivable that, as a result of all the manipulation from earliest childhood, men have come to the conclusion that (a) they have the power, and (b) they will use it to suppress women.

But it is inexcusable that intellectual women, who might have seen matters from a very different (female) angle, have uncritically adopted this line of thought. Instead of saying, “It is very nice of you to think so highly of us, but in reality we are quite different from the way you see us, we do not deserve your pity and your compliments at all,” they say, “With all due respect to your insight, we are much more pitiable, suppressed, and exploited than your male brains could ever imagine!” These intellectual women have claimed a rather dubious fame for their sex: instead of being unmasked as the most cunning slave traders in history, they have undersold women and made them the object of male charity: man the tyrant, woman the victim. Men are flattered, of course. Part of their manipulation has trained them to interpret the word “tyrant” as a compliment. And they accept this female definition of woman happily. It very closely matches their own.

Even Simone de Beauvoir let this opportunity pass when she wrote her book The Second Sex (1949), which could have been the first book on the subject of women. Instead she created a handbook of Freud’s, Marx’s, Kant’s, etc., ideas about women. Rather than looking for once at woman, she researched the books men had written and found, of course, signs of woman’s disadvantage everywhere. The novelty of her work lay in the fact that for the first time, men’s opinion of women carried the signature of a woman. But now the way was clear: Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer … each a repetition of the last; they went head over heels in their effort to come up with evidence of male infamy. But they wrote nothing really worth mentioning on their subject: women. They copied the male idea about women, without being aware that this idea can only be the result of female manipulation, and thus they became, by imitating men, the victims of their own (female) system.

Nothing has changed since, although women today, more than ever be- fore, have every opportunity to make statements about themselves on their own radio or TV programs, in newspaper columns or magazines. But they do nothing except repeat and chew over the old mothballed ideas men have about women, adding new details here and there. Instead of pointing out to their following what a miserable lot they really are, the peak of female dignity is achieved by rejecting advertising for bras or vaginal sprays. The peak of female originality is reached the moment a women’s magazine carries a male nude centerfold à la Playboy.

These are the reasons why yet another Women’s Liberation movement has failed: the enemies they fought were really friends, and the real enemy remained undetected. Once again the fixed idea of sexual solidarity (under the circumstances a solidarity with a syndicate at best) misled women to the wrong strategy. And they were not aware of it. Their struggle was aided almost exclusively by men. But since they live under the delusion that they are persecuted by men, they mistook the flexibility of men for a sign of fe- male strength and screamed that much louder. And nobody got offended. From The New York Times to The Christian Science Monitor, from Playboy to Newsweek, from Kissinger to McGovern, everybody was for Women’s Liberation. No marches of men were organized against them, nobody prevented their demonstrations. And none of them were taken to task for their unending defamation of men, a Senator Joe McCarthy oppressing Women’s Liberation was missing, the F.B.I. did not lift a finger against them.

Just as their predecessors, the suffragettes, secured the right to vote for women within a short period (a right they left unused by not electing women to political power and by not stopping war), Women’s Liberation saw most of their demands fulfilled immediately. The outrageous inequities in the law had, after all, been established by men for women’s protection. But the ladies themselves did not see it that way, and, when they insisted on change, within months they succeeded. The right of a waitress to work night shifts, the right of a woman mechanic to carry heavy-duty equipment, the right to mount telephone poles, the right to pay alimony to men, the right to use her own surname and with that the right for a wife to act as a solely responsible legal person, the right to military service, the right to fight in war, etc. – they have them all. Infected by this wave of general generosity, even the government did not want to be left behind: In the future, it proclaimed, government contracts will be given out to only those companies who do not discriminate against women willing to work.

But the army of suppressed women eagerly awaiting that moment of liberation simply never materialized. As soon as the first American woman had climbed a telephone pole; the first female. plumber, construction worker, and furniture mover had been photographed and the photos printed in newspapers all over the world; the uproar died down. Why should it  have gone any further? After all, it is not much fun to repair water pipes, to lay bricks, or to lug furniture. Unlike men, women can choose whether they want to do drudgery or not. It is logical that most of them decide against it.

And given a choice, they will also avoid military service and going to war. Women think of themselves as pacifists: wars are started by men, despite women’s right to vote.

Left in the lurch by their own sex, the theorists among Women’s Liberationists further entangled themselves in details: can every sexual inter- course with a man be considered an assault? Should a vaginal orgasm be accepted at all? Is the lesbian the only truly emancipated woman? Is the woman question more urgent than the racial question? And so on. Enticed by the extensive publicity awaiting them, a number of attractive “emanci- pated” women joined the movement. (Where else does a pretty woman at- tract more attention than among ugly ones?) And although these attractive women could not possibly imagine themselves having the problems they were discussing (discrimination against an attractive woman does not exist, either in her profession or in her private life), they soon took on leading roles within the movement and turned it more and more into a branch of American show business, and – as defined in the previous chapter – into a “genuine” movement for emancipation.

Meanwhile, the exploiters living in the suburbs started to organize. The Liberationists’ loud demands for work, and the men who were willing to gratify these demands, unintentionally put the suburban ladies into a most embarrassing situation. In organizations such as Man Our Masters and Pussycat League, they assured the world how wrong the aims of Women’s Liberation really are and how much happiness a woman can find in the service of her husband and children.

The most curious of all countermovements came from a faction within Women’s Liberation itself: “We don’t want men’s jobs,” these women pro- tested. “If all women start to work now, we will soon have an economic crisis. What we want is not to be degraded as eunuchs any longer, we want to evolve freely, and we don’t want man to suppress our intellectual development and our sexual drive anymore.”

This argument is curious not only because woman now holds man responsible also for her crippled sexual drive (he who likes nothing better than a woman who thinks sex is fun). It also makes obvious for the first time how foreign it is to a woman to think that she could support her family. It would never occur to her that women do not necessarily cause an economic crisis when they enter a profession. Working women would not necessarily increase the absolute number of employed persons within their community. Whether women can work does not have to depend on the existence of day-care centers, since the quality of child care does not depend on the sex of the person administering it. Fathers could manage that work as well.

But for a woman work has to be fun, and to make sure it is, the employed wife needs a working husband. If she goes to work, she might as well make some demands, and one of these demands will be that she can choose her

work and quit any time she feels like it. So she brings her newborn child to a day-care center rather than lose her working partner, and before her profession can turn into an obligation and responsibility, she quits, rather than allow her husband to stay home in her place.

Women’s Liberation has failed. The story of the underprivileged woman was an invention – and against an invention one cannot stage a rebellion. Once again, men are the mourners. In a country where man is exploited as unscrupulously by women as in the U.S.A., a movement that fights for yet more of women’s rights is reactionary, and, as long as the screaming for female equality does not stop, man will never get the idea that he is actually the victim.

Even the emancipation of women has not been attained. “Liberation of women” would mean her abdication from the privileges she now has. It was Women’s Liberation that made sure that this would never happen.

“It’s better to let them think they are king of the castle,” a female reader of Psychology Today wrote, “lean and depend on them, and continue to control and manipulate them as we always have.”

____________________________________________________________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (from the book)

ESTHER VILAR was born in 1935 of German parents in Buenos Ai- res, Argentina. She was trained as a physician and in 1960 went to West Germany to continue her Studies in psychology and sociology. She worked as a staff doctor in a Bavarian hospital for a year, and has also been a translator, a saleswoman, an assembly-line worker in a ther- mometer factory, a shoe model, and a secretary. She was married to German author Klaus Wagn for two years with whom she had a son.

SEE ALSO: USA, champion of extreme gynocentrism

By Robert Franklin

On reading my last post, I realized that I’d glossed over an issue that I should have addressed.  So, dear reader, mea culpa.

I too hastily said that feminism, from its origins in the mid-19^th century to today, has urged the abandonment of sex roles.  That’s not completely accurate.  Feminism has always urged society to grant women the freedom to step outside of their traditional role, but has been less enthusiastic about men’s doing so.  At least until recently.

Feminism has been astonishing successful; it’s achieved far, far beyond anything its intellectual underpinnings merited.  Feminist analysis of society, power and male/female relationships has always been at odds with basic facts and should long ago have been laughed out of serious public discourse.  But that hasn’t happened and, to the contrary, basic articles of feminist faith have been incorporated into everything from statute law to our “understanding” of sex, the workplace, much of history and more.

So how did something so intellectually bankrupt come to have such a powerful influence on our society?

The answer is traditional sex roles.  Metaphorically, when women screamed “Help!”, men came running to their rescue. Feminism has always relied on men, particularly members of dominant male hierarchies, a.k.a. power elites, to play the role of the knight on the white charger, St. George versus the dragon.  So feminists have always played the maiden in distress, the better to recruit male power to their cause.  That explains why feminists so often describe women as helpless victims of the most minor, everyday events and practices, a phenomenon remarked on by countless commentators.  Why appear strong, when the appearance of weakness works so well?

Why has it worked?

Females have always been the protected sex.  That was appropriate as long as human survival was in question, as it was for countless millennia.  So men took on that role and do so to this day; evolved biology powerfully shapes behavior, so the mere fact that we no longer live in a world fraught with the perils faced by hunter-gatherer societies doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned the behaviors on which we relied for so long to survive.  Remember the YouTube videos from several years ago showing a man in a public place loudly berating his female companion?  Complete strangers – all of them men – intervened to make sure the woman wasn’t hurt.  But when the same couple, both of them actors, switched roles and it was the woman not only shouting at the man, but hitting him, no one lifted a finger.  Passersby barely glanced at the scene.

The journalist Dorothy Dix understood the dynamic perfectly.  She agitated for women to be allowed to serve on juries.  Her reason?  Because all-male juries, when faced with a lachrymose female defendant accused of murdering her husband, too often voted to acquit.  Dix understood that female jurors wouldn’t be so easily manipulated, so justice for male victims demanded that women participate in judging female defendants.

Feminism’s dark genius was and is to harness that male protective instinct for its own goals.  So the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 was, among other things, one long cry for help – help with rights, marriage, divorce, property, etc.  So was the demand for the vote and later the Tender Years Doctrine, obtaining credit in a woman’s name, and the like.

Needless to say, many of the goals of feminism were, certainly by the standards of today, perfectly legitimate.  Male-dominated power structures were right to accede to many of their demands.  But, whether the demands were legitimate (e.g. the vote) or not (exemption from military conscription, the Tender Years Doctrine), the dynamic was the same.  Women cried “Help!” and men “rode to their rescue.”

More recent events make that dynamic painfully clear.  Indeed, it’s informative to view today’s feminism as simply testing the limits of the male inclination to protect. Perhaps air-conditioning in office buildings constitutes patriarchal oppression that “the Patriarchy” needs to change.  That garnered ridicule, but little traction.  What about “free bleeding,” i.e. abandoning tampons as more masculine oppression?  A non-starter.

Those “issues” may seem trivial, but nevertheless illustrate that the dynamic, i.e. testing to see if male power will respond to a cry for help with corrective action, continues.  Non-trivial issues demonstrate the same.

For example, we’ve known for decades that women are at least as likely as men to commit domestic violence and, since the 1970s, the male powers that be have lavished attention and money on female victims.  But that same male power has always turned a blind eye to male suffering and female perpetration.

Likewise, due process of law has been gravely compromised in response to feminists’ demand that more men go to prison when women cry “Rape!”  Every acquittal of a man accused of sexual wrongdoing is greeted with feminist outrage, regardless of the weakness of the case against him (see, e.g. the case of Gian Ghomeshi).  And academic institutions and male-dominated businesses rush to fire powerful men on the mere accusation by a woman of even minor sexual impropriety.  When writer Stephen Galloway was hounded out of his tenured position at the University of British Columbia, women levelled the accusations and men in the university’s power structure kicked him off campus and shunned him socially long before it was revealed that he’d done nothing wrong.

In short, the helpless woman/knight on the white horse dynamic is alive and well and feminists know it.  Feminist success depends on it and always has.

Therefore, the fight to turn back the worst depredations of feminism is simultaneously a fight to turn men from their traditional ways of thinking about and acting toward women.  As long as men in power respond to feminist complaints like chivalrous knights, feminists will continue to push for more and more and more.  Why wouldn’t they?

Until then, intellectual distortions blight the landscape of public discourse. When feminists don the mask of the helpless, victimized woman in order to stimulate the savior response in men, while also arguing that gender is a societal construct that must be abolished, cognitive dissonance is born.  I strongly suspect that the former cannot beget the latter, that using sex roles to abolish sex roles will never succeed.  Perhaps it’s not intended to.   Perhaps Little Nell and her rescuer are perfectly happy with their roles.

After all, as I established several posts back, feminism has always been about “more for us,” i.e. more power, more money, more rights, more privileges for women.  If traditional sex roles provide that “more,” and they do, then feminists would be foolish to do anything but continue the drama that pays so well, until someone mercifully brings the curtain down.

In the meantime, the ironies pour on us like a biblical flood.

The following is an attractiveness rating scale based on the two factors of 1. sexual attractiveness and 2. pairbonding attractiveness, instead of the popular single rating factor of sexual attractiveness.

Preamble

Freud/psychoanalysis: “What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle.” (romantic & sexual gratification)

Object relations psychology: “The primary motivational factors in one’s life are based on human relationships, rather than sexual or aggressive triggers.” (pairbonding)

The above quotes imply two different kinds of male attractiveness, for women, and a need for two separate rating scales: 1. sexual attractiveness, and 2. pairbonding attractiveness. Sexual attractiveness is based purely on romantic attraction: a man’s status, power, looks, wealth, confidence, his overt sexual desirability & unpredictable excitement. Pairbonding attractiveness  implies the guy-next-door stereotype, more attractive for company, stability, ability to commit, pair bonding and if desired, his ability to invest in building a family.

Rating a man as  9/10 in sexual attractiveness is misleading as the only qualifier of a high quality partner, as he may score only 1/10 in the pairbonding attractiveness (or it may be the converse scores). Not that I’m into rating men, but for those who are I recommend using the dual scales mentioned here and adding the scores together to gain a more accurate, overall rating.

Two-Factor Attractiveness Scale

A two-factor attractiveness scale would work like this, and examples are arbitrary, e.g.

(Example male – who?):
5/10 for sexual attractiveness
0/10 for pairbonding attractiveness.
Score: 5|0 = total 5 

(Example male – who?):
5/10 for sexual attractiveness
1/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 5|1 = total 6

(Example male – who?):
5/10 for sexual attractiveness
7/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 5|7 = total 12

(Example male – who?):
7/10 for sexual attractiveness
5/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 7|5 = total 12

(Example male – who?):
7/10 for sexual attractiveness
6/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 7|6 = total 13

(Example male – who?):
9/10 for sexual attractiveness
-5/10 for pairbonding attractiveness
Score: 9|-5 = total 4

* Highest possible score is +20… Lowest possible score is -10.
 

 

SEE ALSO: TWO-FACTOR ATTRACTIVENESS SCALE FOR MEN

Some readers will have read or viewed the piece on superstimuli titled Chasing The Dragon, co-authored by myself and Paul Elam. The following piece written in 1959 by Joseph Campbell, scholar of religion and mythology, proposes Supernormal Stimuli as the functional purpose mythological imagery as it plays out in the lives of individuals and civilizations. – PW

_____________________

 

The Supernormal Sign Stimulus

by Joseph Campbell

One further lesson may be taken from animals. There is a phenomenon known to the students of animal behavior as the “supernormal sign stimulus,” which has never been considered, as far as I know, in relation either to art and poetry or to myth; yet which, in the end, may be our surest guide to the seat of their force, and to an appreciation of their function in the quickening of the human dream of life.

“The Innate Releasing Mechanism (IRM),” Tinbergen declares, “usually seems to correspond more or less with the properties of the environmental object or situation at which the reaction is aimed. . . . However, close study of IRMs reveals the remarkable fact that it is sometimes possible to offer stimulus situations that are even more effective than the natural situation. In other words, the natural situation is not always optimal.” ¹¹

It was found, for instance, that the male of a certain butterfly known as the grayling (Eumenis semele), which assumes the initiative in mating by pursuing a passing female in flight, generally prefers females of darker hue to those of lighter—and to such a degree that if a model of even darker hue than anything known in nature is presented, the sexually motivated male will pursue it in preference even to the darkest female of the species.

“Here we find,” writes Professor Portmann, in comment, “an ‘inclination’ that is not satisfied in nature, but which perhaps, one day, if inheritable darker mutations should appear, would play a role in the selection of mating partners. Who knows whether such anticipations of particular sign stimuli may not play their part in the support and furthering of new variants, inasmuch as they may represent one of the factors in the process of selection that determines the direction of evolution?” ¹²

Obviously the human female, with her talent for play, recognized many millenniums ago the power of the supernormal sign stimulus: cosmetics for the heightening of the lines of her eyes have been found among the earliest remains of the Neolithic Age. And from there to an appreciation of the force of ritualization, hieratic art, masks, gladiatorial vestments, kingly robes, and every other humanly conceived and realized improvement of nature, is but a step—or a natural series of steps.

Evidence will appear, in the course of our natural history of the gods, of the gods themselves as supernormal sign stimuli; of the ritual forms deriving from their supernatural inspiration acting as catalysts to convert men into gods; and of civilization—this new environment of man that has grown from his own interior and has pressed back the bounds of nature as far as the moon—as a distillate of ritual, and consequently of the gods: that is to say, as an organization of supernormal sign stimuli playing on a set of IRMs never met by nature and yet most properly nature’s own, inasmuch as man is her son.

But for the present, it suffices to remark that one cannot assume out of hand that simply because a certain culturally developed sign stimulus appeared late in the course of history, man’s response to it must represent a learned reaction. The reaction may be, in fact, spontaneous, though never shown before. For the creative imagination may have released precisely here one of those innate “inclinations” of the human organism that have nowhere been fully matched by nature. Hence, not only the ritual arts and the development from them of the archaic civilizations, but also—and even more richly—the later shattering of those arts by the modern arrows of man’s flight beyond his own highest dream, would perhaps best be interpreted psychologically, as a history of the supernormal sign stimuli that have released—to our own fright, joy, and amazement—the deepest secrets of our being. Indeed, the depths of the mystery of our subject—which are the depths not only of man but of the living world—have not been plumbed.

In sum, then: Within the field of the study of animal behavior— which is the only area in which controlled experiments have made it possible to arrive at dependable conclusions in the observation of instinct—two orders of innate releasing mechanisms have been identified, namely, the stereotyped, and the open, subject to imprint. In the case of the first, a precise lock-key relationship exists between the inner readiness of the nervous system and the external sign stimulus triggering response; so that, if there exist in the human inheritance many—or even any—IRMs of this order, we may justly speak of “inherited images” in the psyche. The mere fact that no one can yet explain how such lock-key relationships are established does not invalidate the observation of their existence: no one knows how the hawk got into the nervous system of our barnyard fowl, yet numerous tests have shown it to be, de facto, there. However, the human psyche has not yet been, to any great extent, satisfactorily tested for such stereotypes, and so, I am afraid, pending further study, we must simply admit that we do not know how far the principle of the inherited image can be carried when interpreting mythological universals. It is no less premature to deny its possibility than to announce it as anything more than a considered opinion.

Nor are we ready, yet, to say whether the obvious, and sometimes very striking, physical differences of the human races represent significant variations of their innate releasing mechanisms. Among the animals such differences do exist—in fact, changes in the IRMs of the major instincts appear to be among the first things affected by mutation.

For example, as Tinbergen observes:

The herring gull (Larus argentatus) and the lesser black-backed gull (L. fuscus) in north-western Europe are considered to be extremely diverged geographical races of one species, which, having developed by geographical isolation, have come into contact again by expansion of their ranges. The two forms show many differences in behavior; L. fuscus is a definite migrant, traveling to south-westem Europe in autumn, whereas L. argentatus is of a much more resident habit. L. fuscus is much more a bird of the open sea than L. argentatus. The breeding-seasons are different. One behavior difference is specially interesting. Both forms have two alarm calls, one expressing alarm of relatively low intensity, the other indicative of extreme alarm. L. argentatus gives the high-intensity alarm call much more rarely than L. fuscus. The result is that most disturbances are reacted to differently by the two forms. When a human intruder enters a mixed colony, the herring gulls will almost always utter the low-intensity call, while L. fuscus utters the high-intensity call. This difference, based upon a shift of degree in the threshold of alarm calls, gives the impression of a qualitative difference in the alarm calls of the two forms, such as might well lead to the total disappearance of one call in one species, of the other in the second species, and thus result in a qualitative difference in the motor-equipment. Apart from this difference in threshold, there is a difference in the pitch of each call.¹³

Between the various human races differences have been noted that suggest psychological as well as merely physiological variation; differences, for example, in their rates of maturing, as Géza Róheim has indicated in his vigorous work on Psychoanalysis and Anthropology.¹* However, it is still far from legitimate, on the

basis of the mere scraps of controlled observation that have been recorded, to make any such broad generalizations about intellectual ability and moral character as are common in discussions of this subject. Furthermore, within the human species there is such broad variation of innate capacity from individual to individual that generalizations on a racial basis lose much of their point.

In other words, the whole question of the innate stereotypes of the species Homo sapiens is still wide open. Objective and promising studies have been commenced, but they have not yet progressed very far. An interesting series of experiments by E. Kaila,¹⁵ and R. A. Spitz and K. M. Wolf,¹⁶ has shown that between the ages of three and six months the infant reacts with a smile to the appearance of a human face; and by fashioning masks omitting certain of the details of the normal human countenance, the observers were able to establish the fact that in order to evoke response the face had to have two eyes (one-eyed, asymmetrical masks did not work), a smooth forehead (wrinkled foreheads produced no smile), and a nose. Curiously, the mouth could be omitted; the smile, therefore, was not an imitation. The face had to be in some movement and seen from the front. Moreover, nothing else—not even a toy—would evoke this early infant smile. Following the sixth month, a distinction began to be made between familiar and unfamiliar, friendly and unfriendly faces. The richness of the child’s experience of its social environment having already increased, the innate releasing mechanism had been altered by impressions from the outer world, and the situation had changed.

It has been remarked that in certain primitive Australian rock paintings of ancestral figures the mouths are omitted, and that a significant number of very early, paleolithic female figurines also lack the mouth. How far one can presume to carry these suggestions toward the conclusion that there is a “parental image” in the central nervous structure of the human infant, however, we cannot say. As Professor Portmann has pointed out: “Since the effect of this form on the infant can be demonstrated with certainty only from the third month, the question remains open as to whether the central nervous structure that makes possible the recognition of the human countenance and the social response of the smile is of the open, i.e. imprinted, type, or entirely innate. All of the indices available to us speak for a largely inherited configuration; and yet, the question remains open.”¹⁷

How much more open, then, the question broached by Professor Lorenz in his paper on “The Innate Forms of Human Experience”: ¹⁸ the question of the parental response evoked in the adult by the sign stimuli provided by the human baby! The figure tells the story—as far as it goes.

And finally, it must be noted that there is no consensus among students of the subject even as to what categories of appetite may be regarded as instinctive in the human species. Professor Tinbergen, speaking for the animal world, has named sleep and food-seeking; so also, in many species, flight from danger, fighting in self-defense, and a number of activities functionally related to the reproductive urge, as, for example, sexual fighting and rivalry, courtship, mating, and parental behavior (nest-building, protection of the young, etc.). The list greatly varies, however, from species to species; and how much of it can be carried over into the human sphere is not yet known. Tentatively, it might reasonably be supposed that food-seeking, sleep, self-protection, courtship and mating, and some of the activities of parenthood should be instinctive. But the question—as we have seen—remains open as to what precisely are the sign stimuli that generally trigger these activities in man, or whether any of the stimuli can be said to be as immediately known to the human interior as the hawk to the chick. We do not, therefore, speak of inherited images in the following pages.

The concept of the sign stimulus as an energy-releasing and -directing image clarifies, however, the difference between literary metaphor, which is addressed to the intellect, and mythology, which is aimed primarily at the central excitatory mechanisms (CEMs) and innate releasing mechanisms (IRMs) of the whole person. According to this view, a functioning mythology can be defined as a corpus of culturally maintained sign stimuli fostering the development and activation of a specific type, or constellation of types, of human life. Furthermore, since we now know that no images have been established unquestionably as innate and that our IRMs are not stereotyped but open, whatever “universals” we may find in our comparative study must be assigned rather to common experience than to endowment; while, on the other hand, even where sign stimuli may differ, it need not follow that the responding IRMs differ too. Our science is to be simultaneously biological and historical throughout, with no distinction between “culturally conditioned” and “instinctive” behavior, since all instinctive human behavior is culturally conditioned, and what is culturally conditioned in us all is instinct: specifically, the CEMs and IRMs of this single species.

Therefore, though respecting the possibility—perhaps the probability—of such a psychologically inspired parallel development of mythological imagery as that suggested by Adolf Bastian’s theory of elementary ideas and C. G. Jung’s of the collective unconscious, we cannot attempt to interpret in such terms any of the remarkable correspondences that will everywhere confront us. On the other hand, however, we must ignore as biologically untenable such sociological theorizing as that represented, for example, by the anthropologist Ralph Linton when he wrote that “a society is a group of biologically distinct and self-contained individuals,” ¹⁹ since, indeed, we are a species and not biologically distinct. Our approach is to be, as far as possible, skeptical, historical, and descriptive—and where history fails and something else appears, as in a mirror, darkly, we indicate the considered guesses of the chief authorities in the field and leave the rest to silence, recognizing that in that silence there may be sleeping not only the jungle cry of Dryopithecus, but also a supernormal melody not to be heard for perhaps another million years.

11. Tinbergen, op. cit., p. 44.
12. Adolf Portmann, “Die Bedeutung der Bilder in der lebendigen Energiewandlung,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 1952 (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1953), pp. 333-34.
13. Tinbergen, op. cit., p. 197.
14. Gaza Róheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (New York: International Universities Press, 1950), pp. 403-404.
15. E. Kaila, “Die Reaktionen des Säuglings auf das menschliche Gesicht,” Annales Universitatis Aboensis, Turku, Vol. 17 (1932).
16. R. A. Spitz and K. M. Wolf, “The Smiling Response,” Genetic Psychology Monographs, Vol. 34 (1946).
17. Adolf Portmann, “Das Problem der Urbilder in biologischer Sicht,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 1949 (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1950), p. 426.
18. Konrad Lorenz, “Die angeborenen Formen möglicher Erfahrung,” Zeitschrift der Tierpsychologie, Bd. 5 (1943), pp. 235-409.
19. Ralph Linton, The Study of Man (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century
Company, 1936), p. 108.

[Excerpt from ‘Masks Of God: Volume 4,’ by Joseph Campbell]