Back to patriarchy

Right off the bat, Professor Amneus declares that the American male is "surely the most exploited, even if not the most degraded and impoverished human who ever lived." He proceeds to exhaustively support this in terms of welfare and alimony, both of which are means of forcing men to subsidize the destruction of their families. He even points out that if our divorce laws were reversed and women routinely deprived of their children, homes and most of their incomes, "Legislators who perpetrated such a law would be torn to pieces by mobs of frenzied women." Yes, they would. Prof. Amneus proceeds with material familiar to any reader of antifeminist works. He chronicles feminist irrationality, such as the pseudo-history they indulge in, including that derived from Velikovsky. He suggests that if women are so eager to be "independent", they should be allowed to be: when they leave their husbands, they should also leave their children so that they cannot complain of being burdened with their care and should leave their husbands' paychecks so that they can stand on their own two feet. I can only say, hear hear. He also points out one of the most demoralizing effects of feminism, one which most insist upon glossing over: "If girls are taught that they should compete with boys in football and chess, society will produce some moderately good female football and chess players - none outstanding - and legions of frustrated women who will regard themselves as failures in areas where they have been told they are expected to succeed." You can see the results all around you of women having been ordered to succeed at male pursuits. Only a minority can even do them passably, and an even tinier percentage can excel, but all women have been made to feel like failures because of the pressure to be something very few of them are capable of being. Small wonder eating disorders, which were rare in the bad old days of patriarchy, have become so commonplace. As Amneus points out, "The fact is that in every area of behavior, with but a single exception [sex], society expects and gets more responsible behavior from men than from women." Prof. Amneus offers yet more documentation of the disastrous effect of female-headed households, but with an ominous angle. Most Americans don't fully appreciate just how disastrous World War One was to Europe. We lost many young men in that war, but Europe literally lost an entire generation of young men. Amneus doesn't touch on this, but in fact, that is why women's suffrage occurred at that time: most young women didn't have anyone to marry, and so were denied the usual satisfactions life would have given them and lacked occupation. So after much discussion of the marked increase in delinquency and neurosis of the fatherless, Amneus remarks, "One cannot help thinking of George Kennan's theory that the enormous number of fatherless families created in Germany by the slaughter of World War I was a principal cause of the rise of Naz