I apologize to all, for the word count in this post but not for it's content.

There is a problem with the women in
this culture.

Yes, I know, there are problems with men, too. Believe me, I have heard about them for the last forty years. Some of it true and fair, much of it neither. It was a necessary dialogue just the same. So is this.

To understand this we need a brief look at history. Women, in the past, were denied voting rights, couldn’t own land and didn’t have much access to employment that would give them the freedom to make it on their own.

This needed to change, and of course, did, as can be confirmed with a cursory glance at the world around you. I laud those changes. But the problem was in how we got here.

The reality is that the gender roles of our history were traps for both men and women. Women were relegated to home and children; men to sacrificial roles as protectors and providers. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just a matter of survival, and for many thousands of years it worked quite well to that end.

But once men made the environment safe enough for women to metaphorically "leave the cave," it was only natural and right that men change and allow that to happen.

And ladies, we did.

This is the simple but accurate truth of the matter. Men and women developed gender roles that facilitated the survival of the species. And once those roles were not necessary, they did begin the often complicated path to change.

The problem here is that your knowledge of these historical events is largely shaped, convoluted rather, by feminism. Feminists taught you that your history with men was of unremitting evil; that you were chattel, slaves to men who held all power and shut you out with extreme intent. They even gave it a name.

Patriarchy.

It is a word that has become synonymous with oppression. But feminists were loathe to remind you that “Women and children first,” was the patriarchal mantra, and that much of the social norms, even when misguided, were a product of a code adopted for the sole purpose of preserving your life. It wasn't always fair, but the unfairness wasn't always yours. Men died by that code, and trained their sons to do the same.

The fact that we still do is the subject for another essay.

So what happened? As feminist distortions were increasingly embraced, and intertwined with the legitimate need for change, men did what they usually do. They reacted to the message and not the messenger and unblocked the entrance to that cave.

Many of you spit on us on the way out. Many of you still do.

It has to stop.

This isn’t just about decency. And it is not just about the chasm of mistrust that separates us from each other, or the legions of the walking wounded from this godforsaken gender war. It is about our future. The vilification of men that you have accepted as appropriate now translates to catastrophe for our sons, for your sons.

The problem is that what we say, think and feel about people invariably translates into what we actually do to them. Nowhere is this more evident than with our sons, in the here and now.

If you take an honest look at the academic environment to which our boys are subjected, you will see that their masculinity itself is under attack with ideology that teaches them they are inherently flawed.

Christina Hoff Sommers documented this in her highly recommended book "The War Against Boys." She writes, "The pedagogy is designed to valorize females, such as teaching history in a woman-centered way. Boys are to be inspired to revere Anita Hill and to “enjoy” quilting. At the same time, schools discourage activities that are natural and traditional to boys, such as playing ball together."

She goes on to say, with sad accuracy, "Most parents have no idea what their children are facing in the gender-charged atmosphere of the public schools.”

What Sommers didn't add to that but I will is the fact that most parents have no idea about this because they choose not to.
As girls and girls programs increasingly flourish, boys are falling to the sidelines in ever growing numbers.

The results of that are chilling.

Boys are more likely than ever to drop out of school and engage in delinquency and other problems. They are representing less college graduates every year. With this diminishing education and wholesale marginalization, they are on a fast track to being the “second sex,” that position that so many feminists touted as the greatest evil of human history when they claimed it applied to women.

This is the lasting legacy of spitting on men. Your sons will not be the exception.

Young men now grow up to be destroyed in corrupt family court systems where women are encouraged to and even praised for using children, their children, like pawns in order to drain the father of assets. And those same children also have their badly needed connection to their fathers severed in the process. When those exploited, abused children start quite naturally to act out and get in trouble, we blame the father who was removed against his will, for of all things, being absent.

And the "freedom" women gained on this frenzied path of vengeance and victimization? It doesn't appear to have settled well. Women are growing increasingly violent. They are matching men in domestic violence, blow for blow, and they are causing the lions share of injury and death to children in the home.

But we don’t speak of these things. We are not supposed to. In your position as the identified victim, and mine as the identified perpetrator, there is supposed to be an indelible silence on these matters. For the most part, there is.

That silence is destroying us.
And it is a silence that is maintained with the collusion of shallow, weak men and misguided, self-serving women, which is to say most of the culture. The only answer I can think of is for men, and for women, to change.

Perhaps you will consider this before concluding that men's rights activists are whiners or woman haters or products of bad mothers. You might actually decide that most men's rights activists are men who above all else, seek justice. For their children, for themselves, and ultimately for you.

I hope that a few of you will read this and consider it the next time you hear someone say “men are pigs,” or when you hear a woman refer to her first born child as “the insurance policy,” or before you nod your head in unconsidered agreement with whatever negatives about men happen to be making the rounds. All of this will be visited on your sons, and their sons.

I hope too, that some of you look at your sons and think, and ask yourself what kind of world in which you really want them to live.

When your sons choose wives and marry, I hope you consider the agony they will go through when “taken to the cleaners” and robbed of their children in the family courts. You will be forced to stand by powerlessly and watch them have their hearts ripped out. As always, it will look much different to you when the system you help maintain with your silence crushes your son, and not just some obscure, unknown male whom you quietly think is getting what he deserves.
It will happen to more than half of them.

The best prevention for this last one is to teach our sons to choose carefully; to scrutinize a woman before committing his life and work to her; to evaluate her morals and values as a woman prior to putting a ring on her finger. or even whether it is wise any more to marry in the first place. But how can we do this if we keep teaching them that such evaluations are the stuff of misogyny? Indeed, how can we do this if scrutinizing women at all is such a taboo?

And therein lies the rub, ladies. It is indeed time, just as it was for men, for women to be held to scrutiny, and to account. More importantly, it is time for women to do this on their own.

I’ll do my best to provide a fair and compassionate mirror in my writings. It is always up to you whether that mirror is a place you want to look.

http://www.avoiceformen.com/

A video version, for the lets keep posts under 300 word crowd, can be found at.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_tCVSJ_6ko

Someone should write a thesis on the lines of "Low Industrial Base Policies = Places of Higher Teaching Suffering 25 Years Later, true or false", or something similar.

This is completely true and many of us know it but are too afraid of losing our jobs to say it. Behind closed doors we whisper the unthinkable--that we secretly hope that research funding to the humanities will disappear altogether. Teaching and students would matter again. Decent books would still be written. There might even be time to think...

I'm not British, so perhaps the matter doesn't concern me. But I am a philosophy professor working in a country where the humanities have been under attack for some time. What strikes me as odd with the argument, besides the point already made that it seems equally applicable to the sciences, is that it contains no reflection on where the content of higher education and public scholarship comes from. Isn't it exactly the sort of highly esoteric writings of interest to only a selected few when it is published that is held out as less worthy in this article? Yes it is, from the presocratics and onward, I'd say. The fact that there has been no journals throughout most of the history of philosophy is of no consequence for that. So I wonder what the idea is here - is it that philosophy stopped at year X, and that from then on we need only go on telling the tales about what came before us?

Missing from this piece is a direct challenge to, let's call it, the technocratic view of education on its own terrain. A look at the extent to which the world of work has changed in recent decades makes an assault on the humanities right now seem perverse.

Let's put to one side many of the functions of universities and engage directly with those who see just one function: to serve industry. When these people argue for the abandonment of the humanities and the promotion of science and technology, they betray their lack of knowledge of the extent to which and the way in which the workplace has been changed by ITCs.

I've expanded on this here: http://colummccaffery.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/increased-emphasis-on-voc...

and here: http://colummccaffery.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/the-smart-economy-and-tec...