The War Against Patriarchy

THE WAR AGAINST PATRIARCHY Dr. Daniel Amneus Feminist Ellen Goodman writes of the Beijing women's conference of 1995, and warms up to her subject by citing Nancy Reagan's advice to girls, Just say no. It's platitudinous, but good advice: obey the rules, be chaste, and you'll have a happier and more stable life, you'll benefit your children and your husband and society. "It sounds like the easiest thing in the world," says Ms. Goodman--which it is. But she tells us take a better look and "you can see just how easy it isn't." If this sounds like Ms. Goodman is getting ready to aggravex the patriarchal system she hates--it may be just that. [Los Angeles Times, 14 Sept. 1995] The international community assembled for the women's conference finally agreed that a woman's human rights included her right to be free of sexual "coercion, discrimination, and violence." Again very platitudinous. Ms. Goodman seems to be looking for something she can call controversial and she finds it in this: In the most controversial provision to come out of the health committee for conference approval, the nations declared that equal sexual relationships between men and women required "mutual respect, consent and shared responsibility." Ms. Goodman interprets this as follows: For the very first time, they asserted that women across this world have the right to say no. She has told us that the simple counsel to girls to "just say no" is not all that simple. This is evidently a preliminary to what we have here, which is advice not to girls who need to be integrated into the patriarchal system by postponing sex until marriage, but to women whose sexuality also needs to be integrated into it by marriage and the creation of families. What is the "shared responsibility" if not the responsibility for the proper procreation and socializing of the offspring resulting from their sexual activity; and what is the "right to say no" if not the right of the woman to deny sexual access to the male with whom she shares the responsibility? Ms. Goodman is a skilled journalist, able to hedge and finesse around direct statements and to imply what she means rather than say it. Let's see whether there may be a hidden message here. When does the woman give her consent? When does she have the right to say no? Each time there is sex? (This is the matriarchal idea, which insists on the Promiscuity Principle, where the woman retains the right to control her own sexuality.) Or, as in the Antioch College rules, at each stage of each sex act? Or may the woman's consent be given once and for all by her marriage vows? This is the patriarchal rule which has until recently been assumed, and in consequence the law until recently was that a husband could not be charged with raping his wife. Ms. Goodman does not regard marriage as giving the woman's consent, for she says: "It's not even 20 years since Oregon changed the common law that said a woman could not be raped by her husband." Perhaps the question is not whether women have the right to say

no, but whether they have the right to say yes to their marriage vows--or if so, what does yes mean? One suspects that Ms. Goodman and her feminist sisters would like to have it both ways, that women should have the right to say yes to their marriage vows and expect as a quid pro quo that the husband's marriage vow to love, honor and protect and provide for her shall be and shall remain binding--even if the marriage is ended by divorce. But the expectation of the new Oregon law and of Ms. Goodman and the sisterhood is that if the man wants sex and the woman doesn't she is privileged to go on a sex strike and he can do nothing about it. This will make the wife the boss--but it will deprive her, and other women, of much of the bargaining power formerly conferred by the institution of marriage. It means that marriage makes no difference in the sexual relationship between a man and a woman, that marriage is nothing but cohabitation plus a piece of paper, that as Brenda Hoggett, former English Law Commissioner, responsible for family law, says, Family law no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union. It has adopted principles for the protection of children and dependent spouses which could be made equally applicable to the unmarried. In other words it will enforce the man's responsibilities to the woman (and the children who will of course remain in her custody) but make no demands on the woman. In such circumstances [continues Ms. Hoggett], the piecemeal erosion of the distinction between marriage and non-married cohabitation may be expected to continue. This is the idea, is it not?--to get rid of marriage, or make it meaningless, marriage being the institution which was formerly supposed to give the man the right to have a family-which feminists wish us to interpret as meaning the right to rape his wife. Getting rid of marriage (in feminese: the right to rape his wife) makes the woman sexually independent--the ghetto pattern, matriarchy. She's clever: She sees how to use the horror over rape as a means not so much to prevent rape as to undermine patriarchy. Logically [continues Ms. Hoggett] we have already reached a point at which, rather than discussing which remedies should now be extended to the unmarried, we should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purpose.1 Ms. Goodman is cleverer than Ms. Hoggett, but they agree on the basic idea: a husband is no more than a boyfriend, since the wife never agrees to share her reproductive life with him, never gives up her privilege of calling it all off. The consequence must be-- indeed is, and is intended to be--the destruction of the patriarchal system and a return to matriarchy. This is what is at stake in the feminist/sexual revolution, one of whose banners reads "Stop the raping of wives." This destruction of patriarchy, we are becoming increasingly aware, has been the grand goal of this revolution all along. Women hate patriarchy and its sexual regulation of them and now are demolishing the whole system which originated only five thousand years ago and made civilization possible by allowing men to share as equals in reproduction, thus creating the two-parent family and allowing children to have fathers. The process by which patriarchy was created has been thus described by feminist Gerda Lerner: The appropriation by men of women's sexual and reproductive capacity occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society....Surpluses from herding were appropriated by men and became private property. Once having acquired such private property, men sought to secure it to themselves and their

heirs; they did this by instituting the monogamous family. By controlling women's sexuality through the requirement of prenuptial chastity and by the establishment of the sexual double standard in marriage, men assured themselves of the legitimacy of their offspring and thus secured their property interest.2 On what better, more socially useful motives could men act? They sought to benefit their children (also their wives) by insisting on the Legitimacy Principle, that children must have fathers, that women should accept sexual regulation and live in families. The feminist/sexual revolution, as indicated, is attempting to reverse this and return to the earlier Stone Age matriarchal arrangement, where the reproductive unit is headed by the female. This is evidently what Ms. Goodman means by "rewriting the sexual script." "In China," continues Ms. Goodman, "the women of the world began to rewrite the sexual script. They asked what sexual relations would look like if women had the permission and felt the power to say yes and no." The women of the world, she says--making no distinction between married and unmarried women. Marriage and the creation of a family make no difference, Ms. Goodman and Ms. Hoggett believe, in the relations of the sexes. (This is of course the reason why they want to be called "Ms.," which obfuscates the difference between married and unmarried women.) The woman does not share her reproductive life with a man. This is the ghetto pattern, the common mammalian pattern of dogs and cats and all other mammals since the dinosaurs were young two hundred million years ago. This is rewriting the sexual script indeed. The male has no importance, no role, once he has performed his minuscule sexual function--except that he must continue to perform forced labor for his former sexual partner, since she owns his offspring. California's Governor Wilson is on their side: "If you abandon your responsibility to your child...you forfeit the freedoms and opportunities that come with being a responsible citizen. We cannot and will not tolerate parents who walk away from their children."3 Also President Clinton: "Any parent who is avoiding his or her child support should listen carefully. We will find you, we will catch you, we will make you pay."4 Men's consenting to this spoliation means the death of the family and civilized life based on the family, the death of patriarchy. This is what is now going on. This development requires the assistance of the legal system, which routinely gives the offspring to Mom if the man and the woman split. It requires the assistance of politicians who must proclaim the sacredness of motherhood and the obligations of fathers to subsidize the "rewriting of the sexual script," the abolishing of patriarchy, of marriage, and of their families. This is why there is so much crime, educational failure, illegitimacy, demoralization, sexual confusion and the rest, all of it highly correlated with female headed families. Feminists and ACLU types regard this as progress. Men see it going on but are bewildered and simply stare at it like deer caught in headlights, not knowing what to do. What makes it difficult to understand and combat is the naturalness of matriarchy:

matriarchy is what happens when the artificial props required for patriarchy are not understood and not put into force. Ms. Goodman's piece is one example of the constant mole-ing and mining and chipping away at patriarchy. Few readers will perceive the seriousness of what is at stake--perhaps Ms. Goodman herself doesn't. She implies that since AIDS is sexually transmitted, a women who rejects sex with her husband is protecting herself against AIDS. She speaks of "a village where wives are infected with AIDS because they cannot even say the word condom to a husband." And this: "AIDS counselors tell us too how many American women feel powerless to protect themselves." Protect themselves against what? Against AIDS or against sex with their husbands? Why bring in AIDS counselors to give this information unless Ms. Goodman wishes to imply that husbands who insist on their "marital rights" are insisting on infecting their wives with AIDS? One is reminded of Ashley Montagu's definition of venereal diseases as those men give to women. Where did the men get them? The most fundamental fact concerning a society is its kinship system. Women prefer the female kinship system, that of the Indian squaw and the ghetto matriarch. They will endure poverty and squalor rather than submit to the sexual regulation which enables men to have families and children to have fathers, the preconditions of civilized society. "The young office worker who earns barely enough to rent her own apartment," say feminists Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs, the married woman who brings in her own share of the family income, even the single mother on welfare, have more sexual options than a "kept" woman, married or not. In fact, one reason for the stigmatization of welfare, and hostility to it, is undoubtedly that it offers women independence from individual men and, hence, a certain measure of potential sexual freedom. Male fears of women's sexual independence are at least partly responsible for the cruelly inadequate level of support available.5 These women, who want "independence from individual men" can achieve it because they are privileged to drag their children into the welfare/matriarchal system and the single-mother/divorce system and, in the latter, the law will make fathers subsidize them and the fathers will suppose that doing so means doing the right thing and the judges will suppose they are doing the right thing in forcing the fathers to perform forced labor for the benefit of another person since the other person is a mother and motherhood is sacred. Welfare is "cruelly inadequate" in comparison with what patriarchy offers mothers, but it offers women what they most want, something better than a high standard of living-sexual de-regulation. The sexual de-regulation of women has as its consequence the demotivation of men, whose realization that they cannot have families is demoralizing and makes men underachievers and more likely to turn to booze or drugs and crime and other social pathology. The ghetto pattern. As George Gilder says: The key problem of the underclass--the crucible of crime, the source of violence, the root of poverty--is the utter failure of socialization of young men through marriage.6

In the ghetto, this is accomplished by welfare, which makes males superfluous. In the larger society, it is accomplished by making marriage meaningless and making divorce a means of liberating women's sexuality by enslaving ex-husbands. Brenda Scott describes how this works in the ghetto: When the speaker asked how their mothers described their fathers, the answers were anything but positive. Without exception the girls had heard their mothers say, "I don't need that man." When asked how that affected their opinions of men, the girls seemed negative as well. They all seemed to want a family, but they were reluctant to ever live with a man. The message this carries to a young inner-city black male growing up in a femaledominated home is clear. They are not needed. If mom doesn't need his father, why would any family need him?7 These roleless men commonly try to blame their miseries on white racism, which, as George Gilder shows, is not to blame at all. He says: If racism explains next to nothing about black poverty and crime, what does explain it? What is the real cause, so unspeakably unwelcome that it drives opinion toward almost any other explanation, however false or unsavory? The chief cause of black poverty is welfare state feminism. Thirty years of affirmative action programs have artificially elevated black women into economic power over black men.8 Gilder points out that black female college graduates outearn black male college graduates, and, in the underclass, welfare endows female headed households with disposable incomes 28 percent higher than typical jobs: It is an unpopular fact of life that in all societies and in all races monogamous marriage is based on patriarchal sex roles, with men the dominant provider. Welfare state feminism destroyed black families by ravaging the male role of provider. Matriarchy, he points out, is not rule by women, but female headed households. The power of the matriarchs of the ghetto ends at their door: "[Y]ou will find the 'matriarchs' cowering in their triple-bolted apartments in fear of...gangs of young men...Men either dominate as providers or as predators." Elsewhere Gilder has this: The belief, pervasive in Washington, that there are hundreds of thousands of ghetto men miserably jobless brings rueful smiles, at least to the faces of men on Clinton Avenue. Washington has already created many alternatives more inviting than work. For example, to most people paid unemployment is obviously preferable to many jobs in America....A job was a last resort, for which one appealed if one's woman, having lost hers, or messed up her welfare, demanded it.9 What Gilder fails to see is that women, though they want the benefits of marriage, hate the institution itself because it regulates their sexuality. Gilder's female friends are civilized--properly socialized ladies who accept the patriarchal system. He thinks all women are like this, but they aren't. Most women, or at least most liberated women, chafe against and resist sexual law-and-order. They do not yearn to impose it on men; they yearn to get rid of it. Take another look at what Ehrenreich, Hess and Jocobs say: women will tolerate ghetto poverty rather than tolerate sexual regulation. Listen to feminist

Madeline Lee complain about "trying to overcome in a single generation the accumulated weight of ages of repression, double standards, and antisex, antiwoman thinking": I'm sure there are women who have truly integrated their feminist understanding with their unruly psyches and successfully sloughed off the remnants of repressed childhoods [read: sloughed off patriarchal socialization, sexual law-and-order], but the women I spoke with were not among them. Nevertheless, what rang clear and consistent through all their individual stories was the determination that they were not going to be responsible for transmitting repression and confusion [read: patriarchal socialization]. Even if it's difficult, they feel they should be open about their own bodies, tolerant of sexual diversity, encouraging of their daughters' explorations....You have a right to your own morality.10 When she speaks of "our [=mothers'] eagerness to free our daughters from old constraints and limitations," she is talking about the same thing Hoggett is talking about: getting rid of the patriarchal system and marriage--the same thing that Ellen Goodman hints at, less directly yet clearly enough. Women hate it--and Gilder thinks they are trying to impose it on men. He says: For in general, civilization evolved through the subordination of male sexual patterns--the short-term cycles of tension and release--to the long-term female patterns.11 Women have had to use all their ingenuity, all their powers of sexual attraction and restraint to induce men to become providers. Society has had to invest marriage with all the ceremonial sanctity of religion and law. This did not happen as a way to promote intimacy and companionship. It happened to ensure civilized society.12 "The problem," says Gilder, "resides in the nexus of men and marriage. Yet nearly all the attention, subsidies, training opportunities and therapies of the welfare state focus on helping women function without marriage. The welfare state attacks the problem of the absence of husbands by rendering husbands entirely superfluous." Women prefer it that way. They will put up with the poverty and squalor of the ghetto in order to have it that way. Feminist literature is filled with laudation for single black mothers: white feminists want the lifestyle of single black mothers for themselves. Hear Debold, Wilson and Malave: Many African-American girls manage to hold on to their voices and their belief in themselves in adolescence, more so than white or latina girls. To do so, they draw on strong family connections and communities, and on the role that women play in those families and communities....13 This is why they live in the ghettos. In order to relieve the pain of the poor, [continues Gilder], our society must come to recognize that their problem is not lack of jobs or lack of money but moral anarchy originating with the establishment and most sorely victimizing blacks.14 OK, but it does not originate with the establishment; it originates with women themselves, motivated by a furious desire to get rid of patriarchal socialization and control and get back to the "natural" mammalian, two-hundred-million-year-old pattern in which the reproductive pattern is headed by the female--who permits the male to be an occasional interloper. The establishment is their willing handmaiden in bringing about this rearrangement. The greatest share of the establishment's guilt belongs not to the

welfare system but to the legal system, whose divorce courts routinely replace father headed families with mother headed ones and then compel the exiled fathers to retroactively subsidize the destruction of their families and the placing of their children in matriarchal households. Most of these female headed households are created by females-for the purpose of getting rid of patriarchal regulation. The welfare and legal systems are accomplices after the fact. Feminist political scientist Jane Mansbridge says she found in interviews with low income welfare mothers that they prefer AFDC over dependence on men, and don't view welfare as dependence because it gives them and their children independence from the control of men who were not good for them.15 This idea, that women are, and ought to be, sexually independent, is central to the feminist/sexual revolution, the major idea of which is to wreck the patriarchal system by denying men the right to have families and denying children the right to have fathers. The more women with these "sexual options," the more illegitimacy, the more divorce, the more messed-up kids there will be. Here are some examples of how this "rewriting of the sexual script" is working: A divorced father by name Thomas Mulder writes Dear Abby as follows: DEAR ABBY: I was so moved, and felt such appreciation for your Father's Day column. I would like to acknowledge what a valuable message it carried. You said: "A 21-gun salute to the divorced father who has never uttered an unkind word about the mother of his children (at least to the children) and who has always been johnny-on-the- spot with the support check." Abby, those words brought tears to my eyes as I sat quietly reflecting on the seventh year I have celebrated Father's Day without my children. It struck me as amazingly sad that in seven years of being there for my children--and always providing child support--I've never received a thank- you. My morale has been worn down over the years by the stereotyping of divorced fathers as "deadbeat dads." Abby, if I never get a "thanks," I'll survive. Reading the public thanks in your column for a principle I've upheld not only for the sake of my children, but for the sake of fathers and children everywhere, is a powerful remedy for the sadness I have carried. For any recipient of support out there who has thought of saying "thanks," but never did-- I'd bet it wouldn't hurt. May I offer a sincere "you're welcome" from a loving, supportive dad? THOMAS MULDER Abby's reply: DEAR THOMAS: You may--and thank you for the thank you. How sad that those unsung heroes--divorced dads who never miss a payment--are all too often

unappreciated. It would be so easy to just walk away and not fulfill the responsibilities to their children. Yet you, and many like you, sacrifice to see that your children are fed, clothed and educated. You are to be commended for loving your children enough to be a responsible father.16 All so magnanimous. Thomas Mulder speaks of "the principle I've upheld." What he has upheld is matriarchy, to which he has contributed his children and his family and his income. All he gets is the joy of imagining himself to be a great guy. He is being masochistic and it is the knowledge on the part of judges that the world is full of beautiful, noble, magnanimous--and masochistic--men like Thomas Mulder that causes them to routinely discriminate against them. If Thomas Mulder is so noble and magnanimous, why didn't the judge place his children in Thomas Mulder's custody? He didn't because he knew he could depend on Thomas Mulder's magnanimity and he couldn't depend on his wife's magnanimity to perform corresponding services for him and the kids if he placed them in his custody. The wife would simply have laughed at the judge. Thomas Mulder asked for what he got, which was injustice in the service of matriarchy. The judge replaced his father headed family with one headed by the mother because he supposed it was natural to do so. Also the easy thing, the thing that all judges do and have done for a century. Patriarchy, like the internal combustion engine, is artificial. But it works. The judge knows that patriarchal families, families headed by fathers, produce better behaved, higher achieving children but he can't see his way through to the conclusion that he ought to keep the father as family head rather than contribute to the expansion of matriarchy. A Georgia judge named Robert Noland invariably places children of divorce in the custody of mothers and justifies what he does with this: "I ain't never seen a calf following a bull. They always follow the cow. So I always give custody to the mamas." The reason Judge Noland never saw a calf following a bull is that cattle don't live in two parent households. If we want to live like cattle Judge Noland has the right idea--it's natural. But mother-headed households generate three-quarters of society's crime and a disproportionate amount of illegitimacy, educational failure and demoralization and drug abuse and the rest of our social pathology. Judges like Robert Noland and sentimental masochists like Thomas Mulder are the primary causes of America's social pathology, doing more damage than the "welfare state feminism" Gilder writes of. The judges can't see the damage they are inflicting because of the time lag. Judge Noland may try a divorce case in the morning and place the children in the mother's custody. He may try a criminal case in the afternoon and send a man to prison for robbing a liquor store. The chances are three out of four that the criminal he sends to prison grew up in a female-headed household just like the one he himself created that morning when he tried the divorce case. He sees no connection between the two cases because the children he placed in the mother's custody were toddlers and the criminal he sends to prison probably belonged in the teen-and-twenty age group where most crime is committed.

In 1980 crime jumped an astonishing 17 percent. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates was flabbergasted. Nothing in the economy, he said, could account for such an increase. What did account for it was the enormous increase in female headed households created by illegitimacy and divorce--by the breakdown of patriarchy--in the mid-1960s--and by divorce court judges like Robert Noland and by sentimental masochists like Thomas Mulder. By 1980 the toddlers placed in female headed households in the mid-1960s had become teenagers--and then the chickens came home to roost and there was a 17 percent increase in crime and a horrendous increase in illegitimacy, which would produce today's messed up kids. Feminists regarded this as progress, meaning that women were becoming increasingly de-regulated. Female de- regulation in one generation means poorly socialized children in the next, troublemaking boys and promiscuous girls and second generation illegitimacy. This is what's going on and accelerating--the present generation is worse than the last. Judges still suppose mothers ought to have custody of children and accordingly still throw men out of their families--and men like Thomas Mulder imagine themselves to be decent chaps for tolerating and subsidizing it. The divorce court judge discriminated against Thomas Mulder because he expected him to behave more responsibly than his ex- wife would have behaved. Thomas Mulder obliged. He agreed to finance the destruction of his family. This is the worst kind of social policy. Daughters say they don't want to live the kind of lives their mothers led. What will Thomas Mulder's sons say? If they have any sense they will say that they don't want to live the kind of life their father led-- played for a sucker and bought off with the right to be sentimental about his own victimization and settling for a pat on the head from Dear Abby. The sons don't want to play the judge's game, Thomas Mulder's wife's game, the feminist game: being willing to subsidize matriarchy, the destruction of their families, the placing of their children in a female headed household where they are far more likely to become delinquent. Thomas Mulder's case is one more victory in the War Against Patriarchy. This is a war partly fought and lost on the battlefield of Thomas Mulder's own mind: he imagined himself to be doing a good thing in paying for the wrecking of his family, much as Indian wives once regarded suttee as meritorious: it was an honor to immolate themselves on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands. The custom ended when the wives woke up to the silliness of what they were doing. When will the Thomas Mulders of America wake up and put a stop to the silliness of paying their ex-wives to drag their children into the female kinship system? In the mid-1960s nobody paid much attention to family breakdown. Feminists assured us that divorce and illegitimacy didn't mean "the family" was breaking down. The family, as Betty Friedan and the sisterhood explained, was merely undergoing development, adapting to social changes such as feminism. There are many forms of "family," the nuclear family "of Western nostalgia" being one, not the best, not adapted to modern changes in society. When President Carter called a White House conference on the

family, the first thing the feminists did was to re-name it the White House Conference on Families. Another victory in the War Against Patriarchy. According to the Los Angeles Times of 15 October, 1995, "President Clinton urged the nation's men Saturday to join him in pledging to "never, never lift a hand against a woman." (There is more domestic violence against husbands than against wives,17 and most child abuse is inflicted by mothers, but it is of course politically incorrect to say this.) In his weekly radio address, Clinton noted that as Americans followed recent news events, issues of domestic violence against women and children have vaulted into public awareness and divided the nation...."For too long, domestic violence has been swept under the rug, treated as a private family matter that was nobody's business but those involved," Clinton said. "Now everyone knows it is cowardly, destructive of families, immoral and criminal to abuse the women in our families."...He praised the Senate for agreeing "with me to fully fund the Violence Against Women Act," a provision in his anti-crime package that calls for longer jail terms for spousal abuse and increased federal funding for police, prosecutors and shelter operators who assist battered victims...."The real solution to this problem starts with us, with our personal responsibility and a simple pledge that we will never, never lift a hand against a woman for as long as we live," Clinton said. What he is saying to wives is that they may be as provocative as they wish, and if their provocation causes the Old Boy to do something about it the government will jump in and side with Mom against Dad. Women like to be told this sort of thing, like to be told that they are blood-drained slaughtered saints victimized by ravening male beasts. This promotes the War Against Patriarchy. "Government policy will not solve the problem," [Clinton] said. No; it will exacerbate it, which feminists think is good since it makes a further contribution to the War Against Patriarchy. Married women, despite feminist propaganda to the contrary, are safer than single women, safer than married or single men. What married women hate is the sexual regulation that goes with marriage; it is to this hatred that Clinton is really making his appeal. The violence, like "marital rape" is code language for this. Another example. Katherine Anthony, niece of Susan B. Anthony, hated sexual regulation and favored unwed motherhood. "The right to motherhood," she wrote, "is another ethical idea freely agitated by the Mutterschutz movement. There would seem to be little need to defend a human right so manifest. Yet popular opinion is still far away from assimilating the idea of motherhood as a right."18 She does not indicate whether the woman's right implies the further right to be supported by the father, who enjoys no comparable "right to fatherhood." Another. William Hetherington's wife deserted him and their children and ran off with a boyfriend. Following her breakup with the boyfriend, and facing the prospect of losing custody of the children and losing the status accompanying such custody, she proposed to Hetherington that they should be reconciled. The reconciliation provided her with the

opportunity of accusing him of marital rape. Hetherington has now languished in prison for ten years for a "crime" of which he is innocent, a crime which is becoming a public scandal comparable to the Dreyfus case of a century ago. The most obvious parallel between the two cases is that the prolongation of Hetherington's incarceration serves only the bad purpose of saving "the system" from exposure for its incompetence and its arrogant contempt for simple justice, and saving the reputation of the judge, Thomas Yeotis, whose weakness of character and wish to play shabby chivalric games created the Hetherington scandal. Judge Yeotis said he wanted to make Hetherington "a symbol to all mankind"--by demonstrating that a wife who accuses her husband of marital rape must be a victim. Before such a politically correct judge all the woman needed to do was dab her eyes with kleenex and wonder what a poor little weak woman like herself would do if she didn't have a big strong judge like Yeotis to protect her. The big strong judge's cheap judicial chivalry didn't cost him a thing. He passed that cost on to Hetherington in the form of a sentence of 15-30 years in prison for the crime of having had sex with a wife who had deserted him and their children to run off with a boyfriend--and then proposed a reconciliation. All that was required for the woman to get what she asked for was the political correctness of Judge Yeotis and the willingness of the legal system to ignore due process of law in the interest of being politically correct. Until recently in rape prosecutions it was customary for the judge to read Sir Matthew Hale's rule that the jury ought to "view the woman's testimony with caution. The accusation is one easily made and hard to refute". No more. Feminists tantrumed at the suggestion that a woman might be untruthful, and the legal system, always their willing hand maiden, removed Sir Matthew Hale's "commonsense admoniton". "Woman", said Sir William Blackstone, "is the favorite of the laws". In 1987, Joseph Gallardo of the state of Washington raped a ten-year-old girl, was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, after which he was deemed to have paid his debt to society and was released. There is a difference between raping a ten-year-old girl and having sex with one's wife on the occasion of a marital reconciliation. There is a difference between a sentence of three years and a sentence of 15-30 years, a difference suggesting that Hetherington's offense is five to ten times more serious than Gallardo's. The marriage contract has always been understood as a sex contract. If it were not a sex contract, marriage would be reduced to meaninglessness--which is perhaps the real intention of the feminists who clamored for the new law, as it is evidently the intention of Ms. Hoggett and Ms. Goodman. It was Hetherington's misfortune that he came to trial at a time when the issue of "marital rape" was being publicized by these feminists as a grievance against the patriarchal family and men in general. One result of this agitation was the passing of the law under which Hetherington was incarcerated, the law which, in effect, declared that marriage gave husbands no right to cohabit with their wives. Black's Law Dictionary, a standard reference work, calls rape "the act of sexual intercourse committed by a man with a woman not his wife and without her consent." The new law has the effect of removing the words "not his wife" from this definition, thus making the

status of the husband identical with that of a non-husband. Truly, a victory for the War Against Patriarchy. This is a logical corollary to the often-stated feminist demand that a woman has the right to control her own sexuality-- in other words that a married woman has the right to cohabit with a non-husband (commit adultery) regardless of the marriage contract and that a married man has no more right to cohabit with his wife than does any other man. Such an interpretation of marriage strikes a deadly blow at the very core of civilized society. The new law is anti-male, of course. It is also anti- marriage, anti-family and anti-woman. The woman's primary contribution to the marriage is her willingness to share her reproductive life with a man and thereby enable him to have a family. The woman's willingness to make this offer and the man's willingness to make the complementary offer to love, honor, protect and provide for the resulting family are what make civilization and social stability possible. The condition of the ghettos shows what happens when the marriage contract becomes meaningless or irrelevant. The new law makes the woman's offer to share her reproductive life meaningless by declaring that she may renege on her offer at any time she chooses. It makes her a moral minor who cannot enter into a stable and enforceable contract upon which a man--and society--can depend. Granting the woman the right to renege on her contract makes the contract worthless and deprives the woman of most of her bargaining power in the marriage marketplace. It is hard to imagine anything more damaging to society--or to women. The contract is worse than useless. If it had not been for the contract Hetherington would be a free man. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that since the passage of this law the most dangerous place for an American husband to be is in the marital bed. (That's a slogan to set alongside the anti-abortion bumper-sticker "The most dangerous place in America is a mother's womb.") An adulterer would never be treated as Hetherington has been treated. The Book of Common Prayer formerly declared that marriage was (among other things) "a remedy against sin." One must wonder whether the lawmakers who hurriedly passed the law under which Hetherington was condemned considered what its consequences would be in terms of family breakdown, divorce, adultery, incest and domestic violence, consequences which include the sins against which marriage was formerly deemed a remedy. The injustice of the treatment given Hetherington is acknowledged by the offer made to him to commute his sentence to time served if only he would admit guilt by pleabargaining--and thus save face for Judge Yeotis and "the system." This is what the case is now all about--covering up the sleaziness of what has been done to Hetherington in hopes that the public will become bored with hearing about it or that it will somehow go away. Another case. Louis Chatroop, a computer consultant living in Des Plaines, Illinois, apparently a decent chap according to his ex-wife, his former father-in-law, his children,

his girlfriend and those who know him, but accused of stalking his ex-girlfriend, to whom he loaned $3,800 and who accused him of stalking her when he asked her to return the money. Her story was later embellished by the further accusations that he had pointed a gun at her and followed her in his car for twelve blocks. He fell into the hands of another chivalrous judge who gave the woman an order of protection and took Chatroop into custody and held him without bond on the strength of her accusation. He has since February 7, 1995 spent his time sleeping on the floor of the overcrowded Cook County jail. "The accusations are lies. I had no contact with her whatsoever. She decided to go after me because of the civil lawsuit [to get back his $3,800] and look how easy it was for her to ruin my life." As Eric Zorn, columnist for the Chicago Tribune, says "A man presumed innocent by law has suffered the privations of conviction without the benefit of a trial or full adversarial hearing, all based on the testimony of a woman with whom he had a major dispute over money."19 Chatroop, self-employed, has lost all his clients and has no money, has drained his retirement funds and stopped paying child support for his three sons. He has no criminal record but the law says he must be held in jail until his trial--because he has been accused. Another victory in the War Against Patriarchy. A similar story is the case of James Anderson, who has languished in an Oregon prison since 1989 because of an obviously false accusation by a disturbed woman named Donna Rowland, a drug addict and alcoholic with whom Anderson had consensual sex. They were in a drug treatment center and became friends, Anderson not knowing that she had a history of falsely accusing men of sexual abuse. She had been discharged from the treatment center and was wandering the streets of Salem alone, homeless and broke when she got the idea of accusing Anderson of rape, as she had accused other men in the past. She testified that she never met Anderson, though it was common knowledge at the treatment center that they had been friendly and dined together. Her accusation was that he had violently broken into her room and violently raped her. She accused the treatment center of Another chivalric judge who places political correctness above his oath of office is Richard Denner of the Los Angeles Superior Court, who got sympathetic with all the women who wandered around his family court division. "So," says the Los Angeles Times of 31 October, 1995, he created a new program that will let victims [read: alleged victims] of domestic violence obtain restraining orders against [allegedly] abusive husbands or [allegedly] battering boyfriends without ever entering the courthouse. Denner has trained 130 advocates from women's shelters and poverty law centers to file petitions by fax, handing down orders designed to stop the abuse [read: alleged abuse]. Faxes also go out to the Los Angeles Police Department and the county Sheriff's Department, alerting officers to restraining orders. No need for due process, no right of the alleged abuser to present his side of the case. Women are victims if they say they are. Men are brutes if women say they are. Another victory in the War Against Patriarchy.

"Females," writes feminist June Stephenson, "brought up in... poverty areas with little education and no jobs commit few crimes, almost none violent, and most related to drugs."20 Quite so. Their contribution to crime is not criminality itself but unchastity, which precludes one generation of males from being fathers and precludes the next generation from having fathers. "There are no studies," says Stephenson, "indicating that families headed by women are more crime-prone than other families."21 God help us. It is common knowledge that the high crime areas of every city (no exceptions--even the judges who create most of these fatherless families know this) are those with the largest numbers of families headed by women. "It is not women's violence that is tearing apart the American family," says feminist Ruth Rosen, implying that it is men's violence. True, it is not women's violence, it is women's unchastity. She continues: In the wake of the Republican assault against welfare, health care, public education and affirmative action, black families justifiably feel endangered and hopeless. And violence is the child of despair.22 The "families" she refers to are mostly not families at all but matrilines, fatherless households, and the programs she mentions are those which subsidize female unchastity and matriarchy, marrying black women to the state and perpetuating the ills of the ghettos. According to a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation there were in 1994, 19 million, or 24%, of children living in mother- only households. The report said children who grow up without fathers are five times more likely to be poor, twice as likely to drop out of high school and much more likely to end up in foster care or juvenile justice facilities. Girls who are raised in single-parent families are three times more likely to become unwed teenage mothers, and boys without fathers at home are much more likely to become incarcerated, unemployed and uninvolved with their own children.23 The debate on how to revamp the welfare system, has, according to Douglas Nelson, executive director of the Foundation, focused too much on creating incentives and sanctions for poor mothers and too little on the role of fathers....The report also urges improved educational opportunities, citing the deterioration in the economic circumstances of young men as an important cause of fatherless families. "Almost no one volunteers for roles and duties they cannot fulfill," the report said. "And the simple truth is that disadvantaged young men who do not have the examples, education or opportunity to succeed in today's economy are not prepared to contribute as providers, protectors and mentors to their children." The emergence of neighborhoods in which fatherless households are the norm creates a setting where many children simply do not see fathers playing a central role in family life, Nelson said. That, he said, becomes a powerful influence over what children grow to believe is a father's role and responsibilities.

It's worth saying again: Male motivation has been undermined by female rejection of sexual regulation: if women refuse to accept regulation, men cannot have families and children will not have fathers and society will revert to matriarchy, the pattern of the ghettos. This is what's happening. Betty Friedan observes the pattern: [A] growing resentment against women threatens our economic and political empowerment....I saw the "angry white male" backlash coming, even before the 1994 election, in new data on the fall-in-income in the last five years of collegeeducated white men....The basis of women's empowerment is economic--that's what is in danger now.24 Says Betty Friedan: "I've wondered how, at this time of global economic insecurity, women could even maintain their gains, much less continue to advance."25 What gains? There are more women in poverty than ever, more caught in the Custody Trap with their fatherless children. These are victims of the success of feminism. And Ms. Friedan's proposals are the same old feminist nostrums: affirmative action, "our right to participate in society, to earn fair pay, to control our own bodies...." She can't see that the problem is the loss of men's motivation, consequent on increasing female sexual de-regulation, whether by breeding illegitimate children or by divorce. According to the California Wellness Foundation, an umbrella group of liberal groups including the National Education Association, Half of all children born in the past decade will spend some portion of their childhood in a single-parent household. Child support--the financial contribution required by law from the parent who does not live with the children--is the key to their financial security.26 It's a poor key. "The parent who does not live with the children" is de-motivated to be a provider for them once they are taken from him. How obvious. Less obvious is the truth that the parent who does not live with the children ought not to be a provider for them. His consenting to be is a primary reason for the ongoing destruction of the family and the return to matriarchy. The Wellness Foundation's report continues: But the current system for collecting child support is obsolete and overloaded. Today, U.S. children are owed more than $34 billion in unpaid child support.27 There is bi-partisan interest in child support reform and proposals to improve the current system. One promising approach would transfer responsibility for child support to the Internal Revenue Service. IRS enforcement of child support would also send a strong message: the abandonment of children will no longer be tolerated. Few of the children are abandoned. Most are the victims of promiscuous mothers whose sexual de-regulation makes it impossible for a man to have a family with them. Or the men are expelled from their homes by divorce court judges. The proposal to have the IRS collect from the fathers would further exacerbate the real problem, weak male motivation, consequent on female sexual de-regulation. Women would feel that, with the IRS on their side to take the man's money from him, they had less reason than ever to accept sexual regulation, more justification in being promiscuous or divorcing their husbands. It would drive men into the underground economy and make marriage yet more unattractive to

them, since the likelihood of marriage resulting in their having families would be reduced. It would break up more families and accelerate society's descent into matriarchy. Aside from which, according to researcher Kathryn Edin,28 the system for enforcing child support payments, which has never worked well, will surely work even less well in the future, and amply rewards welfare mothers who cheat by hiding the identity or location of the missing father. These mothers "pretend to comply, but in fact hide crucial identifying information from the authorities....[T]he average state collects only about half of the money currently owed to even the minority of AFDC mothers who have managed to get [child] support awards." In her study, Edin found that 112 of the 134 mothers who had complied with child-support officials "had not received anything [in child support payments]...in the past year." When fathers of welfare mothers' children do make payments to government officials, the welfare system keeps all but $50 monthly. Such a system, Edin remarks, "discourages men from paying [child support] through formal channels," since they understandably believe that "the money they paid in to the system did nothing to enhance their children's material well-being." For every woman who chooses single motherhood, there are four more who think about it, according to Jane Mattes, founder of the New York based Single Mothers by Choice.29 According to Garfinkel and McLanahan, Many people have noted that the explosion of divorce and decline in marriage that took place in the 60s and 70s followed quite closely the rise in labor force participation of married women with children....The biggest increases in divorce occurred among mothers of young children who also had the largest increases in labor force participation.30 According to Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs, Gay liberation was another contributing factor, no matter how remote it may have seemed from the lives of many who benefited from women's sexual revolution. Gay men and lesbians held out a vision of sex utterly freed from the old reproductive "work ethic" that haunts heterosexuality: sex could be sheer play; it could be a celebration of a temporary affinity or the indulgence of long-standing lovers.31 The "work ethic" means responsible sexuality; they prefer sex to be recreation: no sexual law-and-order, no double standard, easy divorce with mother-custody and father's continuing obligation to subsidize her. The sexual double standard required of women has as its complement a double standard of work formerly expected of men: the woman's acceptance of the sexual double standard gives the man a family and motivates him to provide for it. This double double standard is resented by women because it requires chastity of them --which they believe is discriminatory against them, though its acceptance by them gives them most of their bargaining power--and resented again by making them imagine they were entitled to earnings comparable to men's earnings--and were discriminated against because they earned less.

"Perhaps most of all," say Ehrenreich, Hess and Jocobs, "women's sexual revolution was made possible by women's growing economic independence from men."32 That's it. Women's primary contribution to marriage was formerly their offering to share their reproductive life; man's primary contribution was offering to provide for her and the couple's children. Women now see that they can withdraw from their part of the contract and screw the man for alimony and child support or screw the taxpayer for AFDC. What men have not yet seen is that it is imperative, if the two- parent family is to exist, that they shall--must--withdraw their economic support following the woman's departure, when the legal system still wants the man to continue to support her in matriarchal independence. This withdrawal of male economic support is the best chance for restoring the male kinship system, patriarchy, and with it civilized living. "Male fears of women's sexual independence," these writers say, "are at least partly responsible for the cruelly inadequate level of support available." This is the pitch they make-- patriarchy is cruel to them and (especially) "their" children. They are appealing to the Thomas Mulder in us: the Mutilated Beggar argument that it would be "cruel" not to subsidize her, a mother with children. Since most divorce actions are initiated by wives, these wives must be made to see that the poverty is their own choice. If they prefer to live in poverty as the price of achieving the great goal of feminism, sexual "independence," aka sexual promiscuity, the right to control their own bodies, so be it. But they must not be permitted to drag our children into poverty and matriarchy with them and men must not be made to pay subsidies or be made to carry a load of guilt for fear of being called cruel. "In the 1960s and 1970s," say these writers, "a majority of women entered the work force and gained, if not exactly 'liberation,' at least the financial leverage to imagine being sexual actors in their own right."33 In other words, gained the financial leverage which enabled them to be sexually promiscuous. But they have a sense of danger: Yet, having come this far in our sexual revolution--much further that our mothers and certainly our grandmothers could have imagined--we seem to find cause less for celebration than for ambivalence and anxiety. For what we have achieved, the remaking and reinterpretation of sex, is something that women both deeply want and deeply fear. This fear is less of loss of the male role in reproduction-- something they rather hope for than fear--than loss of the male paycheck and loss of status within the patriarchal system, perhaps loss of the Motherhood Card. "So powerful is the backlash today, and the official new mood of sexual conservatism [this was written in 1986], that we have to remind ourselves of how ancient and deep that desire is." They are speaking of women's desire for the right to be sexually promiscuous, to return to matriarchy, the lifestyle of the Indian squaw and the black matriarch of the ghetto. Sexual de-regulation is the big thing, as is illustrated by what follows: It is expressed not only in the risks taken by a few exceptional women who defied sexual norms in the name of their own freedom--Emma Goldman, Victoria Woodhull, and Frances Wright are among the better-known examples--but by the repressed history of women's most incoherent, apolitical upsurges. Mass female adulation of the male androgynous rock star who represents sex freed from ulterior motive and daily necessity predates Beatlemania by many centuries. In the Dionysian cult of ancient Greece, women abandoned their household

responsibilities for nights of frenzied dancing and worship of the beautiful young god. India has an equivalent god, Shiva. According to Alain Danielou, Whenever it has reappeared, the cult of Shiva or of Dionysus has been banished from the city, where only those cults in which man is given paramount importance are acknowledged, allowing and excusing his depredations and condemning all forms of ecstasy which permit direct contact with the mysterious world of the spirits...Puritanism is totally unknown in the primitive or natural world.34 That's why it is primitive: it hasn't figured out how to put sex to work to create wealth and civilization. The persistence of Dionysian and Shivaite rites and bacchanals and such modern equivalents as rock concerts and gay bathhouses shows the power of unregulated sexuality and its War Against Patriarchy. This is the appeal of such degenerate freaks as Elvis Pressly and John Lennon, their elevation to the status of great culture heroes. But for most women in traditional societies [continue Ehrenreich, Hess and Jocobs], the possibility of noninstrumental sex, sex without the price of lifelong subordination to one man, was something glimpsed only at rare events--village holidays, religious festivals, carnivals. The carnival foreshadowed some of the best features of modern urban life: a public space apart from the hierarchy of the family, and crowds large enough to offer temporary anonymity and the license that went with it. How they hate sexual law-and-order--marriage and family and long-term commitments, and a meaningful contract of marriage. Thus speaks the eternal feminine. "We are drawn," say these writers, "as women have been for ages [emphasis added], to the possibility of celebrating our sexuality without the exclusive intensity of romantic love, without the inevitable disappointment of male-centered sex, and without the punitive consequences." Of course. The Saturday night bash, the Oktoberfest, the New Year's Eve party, the Mardi Gras--escape, escape from responsible sexuality, and the regulation of female sexuality. That's the thing. No male-centered sex. Also no child-centered sex. Sex without reference to reproduction. At the same time, though, women have grounds to fear sexual liberation, even their own. The fear is not irrational or neurotic, for if sex is disconnected from marriage, childbearing and family commitments, women stand to lose their traditional claims on male support. Men should pay attention. They are talking about men's Money Card. No romantic nonsense. Marriage for them is an economic arrangement. If sex is "free," then so, potentially, are men; and women are left to fend for themselves in an economy that still drastically undervalues women's labor. This was a dilemma that the radical feminists of the late sixties and early seventies, who boldly proclaimed the link between sexual liberation and women's liberation, did not always seem to grasp--or if they did, to sympathize with. Fortunately for such women, most men have not yet grasped it either. Too many, like Thomas Mulder, imagine that women's need for men's money obligates men to supply it and therefore permits women to divorce them and to withdraw the man's children and the reciprocal services which during marriage were a quid pro quo for the money.

A homosexual named Hamp Simmons wants to change the narrow close-minded, right-wing definition of the word "family." A family is a group of people who love and support one another. Sometimes there are two parents of two different sexes, sometimes there are two parents of the same sex. Sometimes there is one parent, maybe heterosexual, maybe homosexual. The key words are love and support."35 Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Iphegenia, then, were not a family; Tristan and Isolde were a family. "The homosexual delight in sex as a defiant expression of liberation," say Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs, "was catching on with heterosexual women."36 Very natural that it should, for homosexuals and women are both enemies of patriarchy. "The promiscuous homosexual," says one of them by name John Rechy, "is a sexual revolutionary. Each moment of his outlaw existence he confronts repressive laws, repressive 'morality.' Parks, alleys, subway tunnels, garages, streets--these are the battlefields."37 Sjoo and Mor list as a patriarchal assumption "that autonomous female sexuality poses a wild and lethal threat to these [patriarchal] world orders and therefore must be controlled and repressed."38 Quite so; and the corollary is that female sexuality must be regulated. These authors say on page 200: What would it have been like if patriarchy had never happened? To get an idea, we have to comprehend the first law of matriarchy: Women control our own bodies. This would seem to be a basic premise of any fully evolved human culture; which is why primate patriarchy is based on its denial. Only when women give up our sexual autonomy [say these writers] and our right to be independent and creative, only when we give up ourselves and accept patriarchal male definitions of "femininity" as passive, negative, and receptive-only then will we be treated humanely. Only then will we be treated, with patronizing smiles and door- openings, as something just a little less than the male. It is male fear, hatred, and envy, that has for so long tried to turn our female abilities into incapacities; and despite all suave veneer of "advanced Western culture," it is gut- level male fear, hatred, and envy that women must fight to reverse this field.39 Betty Friedan points to the envy of women by men in backward societies: Because the human body is the same in primitive South Sea tribes and modern cities, an anthropologist, who stars with a psychological theory that reduces human personality and civilization to bodily analogies, can end up advising modern women to live through their bodies in the same way as the women of the South Seas. The trouble is that Margaret Mead could not recreate a South Sea world for us to live in: a world where having a baby is the pinnacle of human achievement.40 Ms. Friedan's purpose in writing her Feminine Mystique was to get women to do the opposite of what Sjoo and Mor want them to do: participate in the wonderful--and artificial--world of male achievement. This world is created by males for the purpose of

enabling them to participate as equals in reproduction. In Ms. Friedan's thinking women should envy men. She quotes Margaret Mead: In Bali, little girls between two and three walk much of the time with purposely thrust-out little bellies, and the older women tap them playfully as they pass. "Pregnant," they tease. So the little girl learns that although the signs of her membership in her own sex are slight, her breasts mere tiny buttons no bigger than her brother's, her genitals a simple inconspicuous fold, some day she will be pregnant, some day she will have a baby, and having a baby, is on the whole, one of the most exciting and conspicuous achievements that can be presented to the eyes of small children in these simple worlds, in some of which the largest buildings are only fifteen feet high, the largest boat some twenty feet long. Furthermore, the little girl learns that she will have a baby not because she is strong or energetic or initiating, not because she works and struggles and tries, and in the end succeeds, but simply because she is s girl and not a boy, and girls turn into women, and in the end--if they protect their femininity--have babies.41 Ms. Friedan's comment on this: To an American woman in the twentieth century competing in a field which demands initiative and energy and work and in which men resent her success, to a woman with less will and ability to compete than Margaret Mead, how tempting is her vision of that South Sea world where a woman succeeds and is envied by man just by being a woman.42 It's not just in the "eyes of small children." Men also envy women's ability to create life; else why are most transvestites and transsexuals men who want to pretend they are women? Why does a man say of a book or a project "That's my baby"? (One would feel very sorry for a woman who said that of a book or a project.) Ms. Friedan cites Mead's comment on male initiation ceremonies where men take boys into the woods and teach them to play wooden flutes and beat on wooden drums: By a great effort man has hit upon a method of compensating himself for his basic inferiority. Equipped with various mysterious noise-making instruments, whose potency rests upon their actual forms being unknown to those who hear the sounds--that is, the women and children must never know that they are really bamboo flutes, or hollow logs...they can get the male children away from the women, brand them as incomplete and themselves turn boys into men. Women, it is true, make human beings, but only men can make men. True [comments Ms. Friedan], this primitive society was a "shaky structure, protected by endless taboos and precautions"--by woman's shame, fluttery fear, indulgence of male vanity--and it survived only as long as everyone kept the rules. "The missionary who shows the flutes to the women has broken the culture successfully." But Margaret Mead, who might have shown American men and women "the flutes" of their own arbitrary and shaky taboos, precautions, shames, fears, and indulgence of male vanity, did not use her knowledge in this way. Out of life the way it was--in Samoa, Bali, where all men envied women--she held up an ideal for American women that gave new reality to the shaky structure of sexual prejudice, the feminine mystique.43 She feels that if social arrangements are shaky they ought to be shaken, which might make sense in the South Seas. But why in America, which has been so good to its

women? And why should men consent to having them shaken? Why consent to subsidize the shaking by allowing ex-wives take custody of their children and paying them alimony and child support so that they can afford to? "The yearning," says Ms. Friedan, "is for a return to the Garden of Eden: a garden where women need only forget the "divine discontent" born of education to return to a world in which male achievement becomes merely a poor substitute for child-bearing."44 The ghetto and AFDC have now replaced the Garden of Eden and women who cannot be motivated to be the overachievers Ms. Friedan wished them to be now are going through the same feminine mystique but with a much lower standard of living, having achieved sexual independence by displacing males, many of whom are seeking through drugs or violence to escape from the mess the feminist/sexual revolution has given us. As Mead says, The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough--whether it be to build gardens or raise cattle, kill game or kill enemies, build bridges or handle bank shares--so that the male may, in the course of his life, reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of child- bearing has given him a glimpse. In the case of women, it is only necessary that they be permitted by the given social arrangements to fulfill their biological role, to attain this sense of irreversible achievement. If women are to be restless and questing, even in the face of childbearing, they must be made so through education.45 Most women don't want to be restless and questing. They want quotas and affirmative action and comparable worth programs and goals and timetables and every unfair advantage they can get--in order to gain the economic independence which will enable them to escape from sexual regulation. If they can't get these they will settle for welfare and a reduced standard of living. Or they will marry temporarily and divorce the man hoping that the bureaucracy will make good on President Clinton's promise to find the displaced father and make him pay Mom. "What is the machine?" ask Sjoo and Mor. The machine has been called man's baby, sometimes man's true lover. It is also patriarchal man's version of the World Mother. The machine is man's transformation ritual, his magic uterus of mass production.46 This haughty scorn comes from women whose program it is to ensure that men have no real children, for allowing men to function as fathers would impair women's reproductive freedom. The machine is a manmade system, device, or theology- philosophy for converting world energy (animal, vegetable, mineral) into human wealth. Under four thousand years of patriarchal religious-economic systems, human wealth has meant the conversion of the energy; of the many into the profit and power of the few. The primary mechanism of this energy conversion has been the control and exploitation of the female reproductive process simultaneous with the repression and punishment of female sexual autonomy. Through the energy-suppression and conversion mechanism of piety and drudgery, female sexual-biological energy has been maintained and controlled in a chronic process of productive repression; and this machine-model for controlling and using female sexual-reproductive energy has also been applied to the control and exploitation of workers' productive labor.

Profit of a few? The whole world is richer because of male achievement. Compare the wealth of America in 1492, when it was matriarchal, and its wealth today. Whites bought Manhattan Island from the matriarchal Indians for $24. (It was a fair price. If the Indians had invested their money at 7 percent interest they could buy Manhattan Island back again today.) But Sjoo and Mor are right: This astonishing wealth-creation has been made possible by women's acceptance of sexual regulation. The arrangement works because it motivates males, which Sjoo and Mor imagine to be a matter of no importance. In matriarchal societies, where women enjoy the sexual autonomy these writers covet for them, men try to win women's cooperation by painting their bodies with woad and ocher, wearing earrings and by performing dances, mimes and ceremonies. But they made the discovery (leading to patriarchy) that women are more cooperative, more willing to let men share in reproduction if men created wealth. The stability of society depends on women's understanding of the secure connection between men's wealth- creation and men's participation in reproduction. "The past four thousand years has been accomplished via the total physical and ideological repression of the female body," say these writers. True, more or less. Patriarchal man has undoubtedly lusted after woman in his heart, as a sexual body. Even more, he has lusted after motherhood. The control of female sex and reproduction through his jealous father Gods and misogynist priesthoods has been his mode of experiencing ersatz motherhood. He has owned the female reproductive machinery, like the factory- owner owns productive machinery. (Like the pastoralist owns cows.) Perhaps a better comparison would be "like Mom owns 'her' children." But patriarchal man has paid through the nose for his ownership and women have been glad for the payment. Much feminist labor is expended in finding ways to get this payment without allowing males to share in reproduction. This is why we have ghettos, where women enjoy the "total sexual and reproductive autonomy" Sjoo and Mor speak of: The process of redefinition begins with women reclaiming total sexual and reproductive autonomy....47 If this is taken literally, it includes the right of not being subsidized by men (and thus being placed under obligation to them). Men, accordingly, not only have the right to refuse to subsidize ex-wives and welfare recipients, but the obligation to refuse, so that the autonomy of these promiscuous women may be total. The corollary would then be that the children, who are, after all what reproduction is all about, ought to be placed in the custody of their fathers. Why do Sjoo and Mor suppose it is advantageous to themselves or to women in general, to increase this male fear and envy? And why do they spurn men's wish to make women "dependent," which is to say pay their bills? Only dependent motherhood [say Sjoo and Mor] is celebrated and recognized as "legitimate" in patriarchy.48 They demand the right to be "independent and creative"; but no feminist demand, except for women's right to be promiscuous, is more insistent than their claim to greater dependence: free child care, alimony, child support, free medical care, free or subsidized housing. If women were denied these freebies, they would

understand that dependence on a husband pays better than dependence on an exhusband or on AFDC. Only dependent motherhood gives women and children the advantages of having husbands and fathers and raises their standard of living 73 percent.49 "Men in patriarchal societies," say Sjoo and Mor, "learn, or reveal, a great jealousy and fear of natural women--of the sexual, mental, and spiritual abilities of fully evolved women living in harmony with the consciousness of our own bodies." This is to say men fear women--not just "natural women" but civilized women who refuse to submit to patriarchal socialization, "natural women" like the Indian squaw and the ghetto matriarch so admired by "civilized women" such as feminists who admire the "natural women." Men fear such women because they sense the shakiness of their own role in civilized society and the shakiness of civilization itself, both of which are dependent on women's acceptance of sexual regulation. Like Betty Friedan, Sjoo and Mor see women's sexual de-regulation (which is what feminism is all about) as an "evolutionary breakthrough," though unlike Ms. Friedan, who places the breakthrough in the present or the immediate future, Sjoo and Mor place the Golden Age in the remote past, prior to the Garden of Eden. The punch line of the Garden of Eden story, written some three thousand years ago, is God's utterance to Eve: "He shall rule over thee." That's patriarchy, father headship of families, stable two-parent households, father custody if the man and woman split. Otherwise Mom is boss, as feminism wishes her to be, thus returning society to the Stone Age matriarchal system. "The asherah," say Sjoo and Mor, was the Neolithic Goddess (Inanna-Ishtar, Astarte-Ashtoreth- Asherah) or the symbol of the Goddess. It was a conventionalized or stylized tree, perceived as she, and planted therefore at all altars and holy places. The asherah represented the Goddess as Urikittu, the green one, the Neolithic mother-daughter of all vegetation, of agricultural knowledge and abundance. Yahweh's absolute hostility to the asherah was the political hostility of the nomadic-pastoral Hebrew people, or their priesthood at least, to the settled matriarchal cultures and their Goddess beliefs. It became a psychological hostility to the entire living earth, doctrinalized in the biblical texts: You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods: on high mountains, on hills, under a spreading tree. You must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles [asherahs], set fire to the carved images of their gods, and wipe their name from that place. (Deuteronomy 16:20) This is to be understood as the warfare between the two kinship systems, male and female--projected into religion and social systems. It is still with us. This is what the feminist/sexual revolution is all about: are women to be sexually regulated so that men can have families and children can have fathers? Or are they to be sexually de-regulated so that they can achieve "equality" and control their own sexuality--and restore the female kinship system (as has already happened in the ghettos)? This sexual independence, as described by Esther Harding, is in marked contrast to the ideal of marriage as exemplified by such deities as Hera. There fidelity to

the given word is the principle which is worshipped. In the case of Ishtar it is loyalty, not to a contract, but to the actual feeling, the reality as it lives in the moment. This is the principle which was worshipped as the woman par excellence--the Magna Dea.50 This is what Fergie, Duchess of York, means by being "true to myself" in discarding her marriage contract. Sexual disloyalty is woman's weapon par excellence. "Adultery is, in fact," writes Dalma Heyn, a revolutionary way for women to rise above the conventional--if they live to do so. The injunction against it--always absolute--is still strong and the stakes are still high, as legions of once-adulterous and now-divorced women whose standard of living has been drastically lowered can attest. Ms. Heyn prefaces her book The Erotic Silence of the American Wife with the following quotation from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter: [Hester] assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relationship between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Meaning, we must suppose, that this surer ground would be supplied by something like the contemporary feminist/sexual revolution and the recognition of the naturalness of sexual promiscuity. Some other basis than the regulation of female sexuality. Matriarchy, in other words, is the bright wave of the future, a brighter period when the world shall have grown ripe for feminism. The era when Hawthorne was writing The Scarlet Letter was the era when Tocqueville was visiting America, In his classic Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote that "In America, a single woman can undertake a long journey is safety," as indeed Hester and Pearl are represented as doing in Hawthorne's narrative. Today, now that feminism and the de-regulation of female sexuality have created the ghetto and the brighter future Hester and Hawthorne yearned for, a single woman cannot jog in Central Park in safety. If she tries, she may find herself beaten and gangraped by a posse of fatherless punks who grew up in matriarchal homes (subsidized by patriarchal taxpayers) resulting from the sexual de-regulation of their mothers. The mothers' sexual de-regulation in the previous generation had led to the punks' de-regulation from all civilized behavior in the next. This is why three-quarters of the men behind prison bars grew up in fatherless homes. It is why the poverty in such homes ought not to be relieved by taxpayers and exhusbands. It explains why homes should be headed by fathers. "What we have here," says Ms. Heyn, is women saying again and again that their sexuality, which had been so disempowering inside the confines of conventional goodness [read: inside the patriarchal system] had, outside it, become empowering. They are saying that their love, inside marriage, had made them feel disconnected and devitalized, while outside it, in relationships they created for pleasure alone, they felt neither idealized nor debased. Their sexuality had "come alive" as surely and inexorably as they themselves had.51 What we have here, once again, is the fact that women hate the sexual regulation patriarchy requires. The women were empowered when they escaped from the

rules prescribed by the patriarchal Sexual Constitution. Ms. Heyn cites Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life as ending women's story after the wedding: But examine the romance plot closely and you will see that after you cut to the chase--marriage--it is Mr. Right's story that continues, not our heroine's. After her implicit goal of becoming a wife is reached, her story is over. Once inside the little cottage, the moment after becoming a wife, as Carolyn Heilbrun point out..."the young women died as a subject, ceased as an entity," was left there languishing on the page, without a voice, hardly a heroine at all, relegated to a plot that cannot thicken. This story that goes nowhere for her is, nevertheless, the only plot written for a woman's life, just as happily ever after (that is, monogamous marriage) is the only ending that certifies her success as a woman in this society.52 Ms. Heyn thinks it's too bad that all adulterous wives in literature come to a tragic end--Anna Karenina, Tess, Hester, Madame Bovary. "Unlike the classic tragic hero, whose pride or folly dictate a suffering which then redeems him, the tragic heroine need not have a fatal flaw to warrant her tragic ending: Tess is neither proud nor foolish; neither is Anna. Their suffering comes from without rather than from within; it arises out of the insistence of a social order rather than from any character defect."53 That's right. The social order is called patriarchy and it makes civilization possible. And these women are violating its rules, which safeguard the family. "How is it," she wants to know, "that a girl's own sexual feelings have not entered into our culture's imagination?" Where in "respectable" mainstream American fiction do we read of a woman's sexual coming of age, described from her point of view? Where does this vital young girl speak about her own sexual desire, not her desirability; what feels erotic, not what she hopes appears erotic to others? Where does Sleeping Beauty tell of her awakening? Where is the female Portnoy? Where does Lolita tell of her own response to Humbert Humbert? Where does Marilyn Monroe tell her own sexual history? How is it we never cared about her silence, connected her "sexy" voice with its little-girlness, tied its very breathy quietness to the fact that it both held back secrets and was so faint it was barely audible?...[F]ew female voices speak out to describe their pleasure, to define precisely what feels good and what does not, to delineate girls' sexual maturation in terms other girls can relate to.54 It is highly advantageous to a woman to be a sex object and for society to have her be, for it is thus that men are motivated to be achievers and to create wealth. But the advantages can only be derived from a husband whose stable motivation (and therefore work performance) is assured. Focusing on what sexual adventures the wife wants and believes herself entitled to weakens the man's motivation. For a woman to seek sexual pleasure marks her as an easy lay. It is too threatening, too disruptive to patriarchy, which operates by channeling male sexuality into marriage, thereby getting society's work done and giving children two parents and the best environment in which to rear them. Society gets no work out of men (or women) by making men into sex objects. A woman cannot be motivated to support a family adequately because she loves a man or by a sexual adventure with one. But society can use the woman as a sex object to motivate a man to support a family, to pay taxes, to buy real estate, create a stock portfolio and so

forth. It is for this reason that female sexuality must be regulated. But this regulation breaks down if the man loses control over his paycheck and custody of his children, as happens in the divorce court or when the woman marries the state and lives off welfare. Women often prefer this, and, as previously indicated on page 5 (but it bears repetition), will accept a drastic lowering of their standard of living to gain this sexual freedom. As Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs say: Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms, still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man.55 As feminists, they view the attaining of this sexual freedom for women as a proper object of social policy. But it would be the death of patriarchy and a disaster for women--as well as men and children. Women need reminders of how they benefit from patriarchy. They need to know that breaking the rules will result in economic suffering and cause them to be de-classed--in spite of which many women will choose to break the rules. Ms. Heyn tells of Amanda: Amanda, living alone and talking about the "mess" she made of her life as a result of her affair, tries to figure out why she is not depressed about it: I'm alone. I'm not seeing either man. I have no money. And what I feel--I feel released. I know I should feel regret, but what I really feel is reborn. Paula says, I did the worst thing in the world, the worst thing for a woman in this entire culture. And you know what? It was the best thing I ever did. It opened my eyes to so much...it opened my heart. The women began seeing everything now "in color" and feeling more "alive."56 This is the way they are. "Explanations for the silence," says Heyn, "suggest that women don't really know what they want, or don't say what they need, or don't say what they mean, or don't mean what they say": Those who have noticed the difficulty women have in speaking about what is most precious to them--love and sex--may also suggest that the silence is not cultural but inherent; that women, even when they know what they want, will not speak of it because they are "secretive" or "manipulative" or "tricky." They not only lack a voice, these explanations imply, they lack much more: a morality; a self; a soul.57 They lack patriarchal morality, civilized morality, morality which can be the basis of family life. Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey tells us "To all intents and purposes the human female is sexually insatiable in the presence of the highest degrees of sexual satiation."58 Sherfey believes, says Barbara Seaman, "that every girl born has the capacity to become a veritable nymphomaniac."59 Even if Sherfey is right, however, continues Seaman, I think that most of the women who opt for marriage and family life will continue, sedately and perhaps a little sadly at times, to "will themselves" satisfied. A mother's attachment to her young is very strong and not easily jeopardized. On the other hand, there is no question that a new life- style is emerging for educated women in civilized countries. The world is pretty well filled up, and the men who rule it are coming to view babies as a threat to their own survival. The pressures on women to marry and reproduce are rapidly diminishing, at the same time as their solo economic position is improving.60

This means that women are coming into position to impose a matriarchal society upon us. If men knew that every woman is, in Dr. Sherfey's words, a potential nymphomaniac and if she could become economically independent with the help of affirmative action policies, he would know that it was improbable that he would be able to be a breadwinner for a family. He would be in danger of becoming a demoralized underachiever and society would be in danger of matriarchy. Large numbers of women would be willing to forfeit the advantages patriarchy has hitherto bestowed on women in exchange for their acceptance of patriarchal regulation. Ms. Heyn speaks of women being thrown into the central dilemma of relationship they had encountered both at adolescence and in marriage: how to speak honestly about their deepest feelings but not be "bad"; how to say what they desired without sounding "wrong" to desire it; how to speak about sex without displeasing me and being punished somehow.61 They would do well to keep quiet about their "deepest feelings" since speaking honestly about them would reveal that they are enemies of the patriarchal system upon which they depend. They are bad by patriarchal definition; and their real, albeit unexpressed, aim is to discredit and reject patriarchy. Their deepest feeling is a yearning to be promiscuous and to employ this promiscuity as a means to undermine patriarchal law- and-order and restore the female kinship system and mother-right. All of which is summed up in the feminist slogan "a woman's right to control her own sexuality." It was formerly understood that an important part of this "control" was the woman's right to contract to share her reproductive life with a man who must depend on the contract and on society's enforcing of it. Today, however, women insist that they also have the right to renege on the contract, to deprive the man of the children procreated under it and to use them as Mutilated Beggars whose sufferings and deprivations will then supply the justification for reducing the man to slavery. They see the corollary of the woman's right to control her own sexuality as her further right to demand the law shall nullify the woman's obligations under the contract while still enforcing the man's economic obligations under it. Ms. Heyn speaks of her adulteresses faltering when trying to describe the men they were sleeping with: These relationships, these men, these feelings were explicitly taboo. And so it became clear once again that adultery is unmentionable--a word itself defined as "immodest," "indecent," "obscene," and "shameful." To mention the unmentionable was very dangerous indeed. It was only when I was able to mock my position as omnipotent arbiter--to joke about having the power to validate or repudiate their feelings--that, together, we began to understand whose role we were really mocking, whose booming voice carried sufficient moral authority to silence their own. They had to know that that role, that voice, do exist--one is the impersonation of society, the other, the voice

of the patriarchy--and both have rendered all women both mute and dumb at some point or other.62 Mute and dumb but still conspiratorial, still mole-ing and mining away at the patriarchal basis of civilized society, still yearning to return to matriarchy. Then [continues Ms. Heyn] they spoke about something so radical, something that men have always had, the right not to exclude themselves from the sexual equation-She lapses into jargon, illustrating the taboo she previously talked about. She isn't talking about an "equation." She is talking about being sexually promiscuous. --even more radically, the right to put themselves first in that equation. They spoke about constructing an emotional and sexual dynamic they had never experienced before and inventing their role in it. "Undazzling" and "gentle" men, "not-so-perfect," "playful: and "confident" sex, and "egalitarian" friendship in which they felt freed from the requirement to be "good enough" to be loved were the hallmarks of this forbidden, unconventional attachment.63 She cites Freud's notion that some women can love "only in an illicit relationship which must be kept secret, and in which she feels certain of being actuated by her own will alone." And comments thus: It is possible that what so appeals to women in these forbidden, secret relations are the extraordinarily different terms of relationship they seek and find in them. When my women found is that within these gentle relationships they felt powerful and equal and freed from having to be pleasing--three aspects of relationship historically missing for women in conventional marriage.64 They enjoy the status of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the fine ladies of the courts of love, where the lover is merely a humble troubadour. They go the Wyf of Bath one better by having power over two men, the lover held by erotic attraction, the husband held by the power of her treachery and the law's complicity in her treachery by assuring her child custody if the husband tries to do anything about her adultery. It's a power game; and, as Secretary Kissenger tells us, power is the great aphrodisiac. More than that, they are exercising power against the hated enemy, the patriarchal system, which made them "Young, White and Miserable" when they were girls, confronted them as a "wall" needing to be surmounted by a "Mother Daughter Revolution."65 Being revenged on "the system" is the great goal. They don't feel merely "equal," as Ms. Heyn says. They are in the driver's seat and they know it and love it. "These same two women couldn't think of any previous relationship focused so entirely on them."66 "Its only goal is mutual pleasure," she says of the activities of one of her adulteresses. Evidently not, since sex within marriage gives her less pleasure. It is the forbiddenness which makes it more pleasurable, the excitement of releasing the "enormous potential counterforce" of which Ms. Rich writes. It is revolutionary. And that confers power on the woman.

According to Debold, Wilson and Malave, "Sixty percent of elementary schoolaged girls and 67 percent of boys felt happy with themselves. In high school, only 29 percent of the girls still felt that way, while nearly half of the boys held themselves in high esteem."67 Boys were down 17 percent, showing that both girls and boys found adolescence and the requirements of accepting socialization difficult. The greater female distress is perhaps owing partly to the earlier maturation of girls. Besides which boys see the acceptance of responsibility to mature as an opening up of the possibility of something desirable, a meaningful role as family head and provider, which will motivate them towards success in the male world of work. Girls see the motherhood role opening up to them as a restriction of their autonomy and resent the sexual regulation it necessitates. Debold, Wilson and Malave quote the AAUW report as saying, "The survey finds that adolescent girls are more likely than are boys to have their declining sense of themselves inhibit their actions and abilities," and they comment: "Adolescent boys have a greater sense of confidence in their ability to do things in their lives than girls do." This is probably true in patriarchal society, but the opposite of the truth in the matriarchal ghetto, where girls are preferred and are higher achievers. The patriarchal system aims to create male achievers and does; but the female chastity is the linchpin of the system, for without it men cannot have families. Earning "all the stuff" enables men to have families and participate equally in reproduction. Girls don't need to earn all the stuff, as boys must. Girls are assured of having families and an essential reproductive role by reason of their biology, which gives them an ascribed status which boys must earn. White men have all the stuff because they earn it, unlike their wives who complain at their consciousnessraising groups that merchants aim three-quarters of their advertising at women. White men earn all the stuff because white women are willing to give up their sexual autonomy which many black women "enjoy." "In the shadow of the wall," say Debold, Wilson and Malave, girls see the injustices in their worlds but have no recourse and few allies. The dawning realization of women's subordinate position within the culture becomes more and more clear to them. In traditional families, they see their mothers pay more attention to and collude with their fathers' authority. Boys and men often get more attention. As girls, as their mothers' daughters, they are asked to be silent, to be helpful, and to be nice so that there isn't trouble. Mothers and women teachers know that they can depend on girls' desire for connection to ask them to bear more than they would ever ask from boys. While asking for girls' cooperation and compliance, mothers and teachers also tell girls that silence, niceness, and kindness are what is expected from them. Middle-class girls are often asked to give up their strong feelings and loud voices in order to get along or to create an artificial harmony in the classroom or family. The unspoken threat is abandonment and exclusion. From this they learn that these aspects of themselves, as well as what they know, are bad, rude and unwelcome. By shutting off what they know and feel, these girls buy continued closeness with their mothers and the

other women in their lives. But as they do so, they know and feel that it is not fully real.68 They gain the benefits patriarchal society bestows on women-- on good women. Of course it's "not fully real" The female role, is, as John Stuart Mill said, an eminently artificial thing. So is the male role. Following the advice mentioned privileges them to belong to the middle class, the upper tier of our two-tiered society. Strong feelings and loud voices can be left to feminists and common scolds. They are not really women's best weapons for getting what they want. A woman who relies on her loud voice is like a crocodile who fights by kicking or a boy gangster who hopes to succeed in life by drive-by shootings. The "real" female is a bitch, just as the "real" male is a boy gangster. Patriarchal socialization is the system which converts female bitchiness into feminine charm and male violence into the constructive labor which generates the wealth of society. Both are artificial; their complementariness makes civilized life possible. "Girls," say Debold, Wilson and Malave, firsthand gain an extraordinarily political knowledge about men and women by observing how women are denied power in patriarchal culture. At eleven, Victoria begins an interview by stating that the way women take men's names when they get married is unfair.69 They gain the power to claim a man's surname, along with his income and status. When a heroine in Victorian melodrama says, "I want my child to have a name," she means a man's name, one showing that she belongs to the male kinship system, which has higher status, rather than the matriarchal system, which has lower status, so conspicuous in the ghettos and Indian reservations. She doesn't want her child to be a bastard, to have no father. Fathers can and do give their children enormous benefits. Would a wife who divorced her husband consider it a victory if the divorce court deprived her of her husband's surname and compelled her to resume the use of her father's surname? The father's income and status are the reason "white men have all the stuff" and share it with their wives and children whom they love and who in return motivate the father to be a good provider and acquire "all the stuff." Many black men lack the stuff because they lack the sexual loyalty of their wives, which deprives them of families or the hope of having families. This is why women and girls "compete for men's attention" so they can enter the upper and middle classes and enjoy the benefits which patriarchy bestows. Debold, Wilson and Malave's naive assumption that women are denied power in patriarchy because men (or rather white men) "have all the stuff." Would they prefer to live in the ghetto where the men don't have much stuff and the women, while enjoying relatively higher status than their men and than white women enjoy vis-a-vis their men, are absolutely less well off and less powerful. Singapore's Prime Minister Goh has noticed America's troubles. He tells us that "America's and Britain's troubles--a growing underclass which is violence-prone, uneducated, drug- taking, sexually promiscuous--are the direct result of their family unit becoming nonfunctional."70 They are a result of the liberation of women and making men subsidize this liberation. Men are blamed for the second generation crime by feminists who wish to remain in the dark about the fact that this crime has its roots in the previous generation's family breakdown. June

Stephenson writes a book titled Men Are Not Cost Effective in which she says this: Females brought up in the same poverty areas with little education and no jobs commit few crimes, almost none violent, and most related to drugs.71 Their main contribution to the crimes she hangs on the males is their sexual behavior, which deprives males of their own generation of families and the resulting children of fathers. And deprives taxpayers of the money needed to pay for the resulting crime, illegitimacy and fatherlessness. This is matriarchy. Stephenson covers this family disintegration with the usual pitch that the family is not disintegrating: it is simply changing. True, there are many more single-mother homes now than ever before in our culture, and that often makes life difficult for both mother and children. Without a man to help support children, there is financial hardship. But financial hardship does not necessarily lead to crime. There are many poor cultures where the crime rete is low. True. Two generations ago Chinese-Americans were the poorest group in our society. There was a common saying "He doesn't have a Chinaman's chance." That meant no chance. Discrimination against Chinese was as bad as discrimination against blacks. But then, as now, Chinese had the lowest crime rate of any group in our society--because they had patriarchal families. What is needed in any good family situation is a good relationship between whichever parent is available and the child. Single mothers are often overworked, fatigued, and worried. So are mothers in two-parent families. (These are the mothers of whom Betty Friedan wrote "Society asks so little of women."72) This is not to minimize the problems of single motherhood but to stress that there are no studies indicating that families headed by women are any more crimeprone than other families. What chutzpah. This is feminist scholarship for you. It is common knowledge that three-quarters of the men behind bars grew up in families headed by women. The high crime areas of every city in America are those with the greatest numbers of families headed by women. In my Garbage Generation I cite twenty pages, 315335, of studies proving what Ms. Stephenson says no study proves. She continues: The absence of a father is not necessarily a crime-inducing factor. Of course not. But to say that many, or most fatherless children don't go to prison says nothing about the proportion of criminals who are fatherless. Most children who grow up in orphanages don't go to prison, but this says nothing about the relative desirability of a family and an orphanage. To say that being a single mother increases her children's chance for crime is to blame a women for having a child out of wedlock or to blame women for getting a divorce, or to blame women in every case in which the man leaves the home for whatever reason.73 We damn well better blame women for having a child out of wedlock. She should be de-classed and shamed and made to wear a scarlet letter on her dress. Most divorces are initiated by wives--about three-quarters--which is blameworthy, though the greater blame rests on the legal system which gives her custody of the

children. And the ex-husband is blameworthy for financing this matriarchal family by support payments, the anticipation of which was a primary motive for the wife's filing of the divorce action. Barbara Katz Rothman writes a book called Recreating Motherhood74 which begins with this: I recently had the interesting experience of trying to put together a very short family photo album for a celebration of the Bar Mitzvah of my son, Dan. A colleague had just done one for his daughter, and it seemed to be a lovely idea to copy. My colleague began his with a family tree. I started but it got complicated, messy: we had divorces, deaths, remarriages, too many convoluted branches somehow. And besides, those flat generational lines in no way represented family to me: I have first cousins I haven't seen in twenty- five years, but great-aunts, second cousins twice removed, and close friends that feel very much like part of my family. So I scratched the tree idea, and went straight to the photos.75 She describes the photos in her album and says this: They were nurturing pictures, one after another. It wasn't by lineage that I saw Dan's first thirteen years, but by nurturance: people holding, greeting, caring, tending, teaching. For me, the idea of nurturance as mattering more than genetics, loving more than lineage, care more than kinship, is not just an intellectual fancy. It's really there, in my heart. The writing of this book, the attempt to carve out a new definition of motherhood, of relationships, of parents and of children, is not just an intellectual exercise. This is halfway through my life and halfway through the active years of mothering, I choose to live my life. I am not alone in this. More and more of us are choosing to live our lives this way, putting together families by choice and not by obligation. Parlor intellectuals are always re-discovering the female kinship system and imagining it to be a wonderful and new discovery. Ms. Rothman's problem in putting together the photo album reflects the regression to what anthropologists call the "classificatory system," thus defined in Webster's New International, second edition: classificatory system. Anthropol. A primitive system of reckoning kinship, found among American Indians, Australasians, etc., according to which all the members of any single generation in a given line of descent (as in a clan) are reckoned as of the same degree of kinship to all the members of any other generation. The system is contrasted with the descriptive system, in vogue among civilized peoples, which discriminates degrees of individual kinship in each generation. What Ms.Rothman describes is the female kinship system which results from female unchastity: and which accordingly excludes males from meaningful sharing of reproduction. This the system of the ghettos, of Indian reservations and the Australian bush. It is rapidly becoming the system of American society as women become liberated from sexual law-and-order and divorce court judges like Robert Noland automatically give child custody to mothers. It's all so natural. Paying the bills, maintaining sexual law-and-order, and ensuring children their place within a stable patriarchal social order, however, are no part of the female

kinship system, though they are "nurturance" also, though forms of nurturance seldom found in matriarchy, though the female kinship system provides the biological base on which patriarchal system is built as a second-story structure. Feminists imagine this "new definition of motherhood" and the sexual revolution which brought it about are something new, a breakthrough achieved only in recent decades, something which finally liberates women to the attainment of equality and justice. "I choose to live my life this way," says Ms. Rothman. Men are not to be given a choice. Not if women are going to reject sexual law-and-order. The genealogies Ms. Rothman rejects have no significance in ghettos, where most children carry their mother's surnames, and in clans and on Indian reservations. The social system based on "nurturance" is one in which fathers play no essential role. They are allowed to hang around if they behave themselves. If Mom gets tired of them, they must leave and find themselves another girlfriend. "Putting together families by choice and not by obligation," she says. She chose to marry, as her husband did. But only she can make the choice to get rid of him and take his kids. She and her feminist sisters want the right to repudiate the marriage contract and its obligations on women while riveting the marital obligations on the man who is denied the kind of choice they demand for themselves. The choice she really refers to is "putting together" a family by dissolving it. The chief problem with this matriarchal pattern is paying the bills. "In a mother-based system," says Ms. Rothman, a person is what mothers grow-people are made of the care and nurturance that bring a baby forth into the world, and turn the baby into a member of society."76 In a mother-based system, what mothers grow is a crop in which criminals and delinquents are greatly overrepresented. I believe it is time to move beyond the patriarchal concern with genetic relationships...[W]e need to value nurturance and caring relationships more than genetic ties....Stripped of all the social supports, is that genetic tie sufficient to define a person?"77 Nobody would ever claim this. What is claimed is the social desirability (proved by the resulting social stability and productivity) of maximizing the importance of the tie to the father. The more tenuous and artificial the tie, the more important it is to emphasize its significance by titles, patrilineal surnames, ancestor worship, the patrimony, the landed estate, etc.--and the more important the father's money card is. The father's role is the weak link and therefore the one which society must guard most carefully. This is the way patriarchy works. This is why the wife takes the husband's name, why it is transmitted to the children. Ms. Rothman discusses the Baby M Case, once notorious, now largely forgotten. Bill Stern wanted a child of his own and, his wife Betsy being in poor health and unwilling to conceive for him, contracted with Mary Beth Whitehead to be inseminated with Bill Stern's sperm and, for $10,000 to bear Bill's child. But, being a moral minor who didn't think contracts amounted to much, she changed her mind and refused to give up the kid. She not only reneged on her contract with

Bill Stern, she evidently reneged on her contract with her own husband in agreeing to bear another man's child. Was Mr. Whitehead a consenting party to Mary Beth's contract with Bill Stern? Was he a consenting party to his wife's revocation of this contract? (The newspapers never bothered to say.) Then, after becoming a celebrity, publishing a best selling book and doing the talk-show circuit, she tossed Mr. Whitehead out and took his other children from him. "Ultimately," says Ms. Rothman, Bill Stern won. Even though the contract was declared illegal, the socially weighted fact of his paternity made the child his in the eyes of the law. Based on his genetic connection, based on that vial of semen, he alone had a legal right to challenge and ultimately to win custody of the child. And now, in the eyes of the law, Betsy Stern is the surrogate mother, raising his child for him. Is that genetic tie, that chromosomal connection, strong enough to bear the weight we place on it?78 Bill's claim was based not just on a vial of semen, but on a contract. His genetic tie to his daughter is strong enough only if society makes it strong. Fatherhood, says Margaret Mead is a social invention. If we want two-parent families, society must provide the props which will create and sustain them, as mere biology won't. But once society commits itself to maintaining the tie of the child to the father, then the undermining of that tie is the undermining of society. This is what is happening because the legal system refuses to guarantee the father's role and imagines there is some other way of legitimizing, socializing, subsidizing and educating children and giving them a place in civilized patriarchal society. The law's refusal to make this guarantee to fathers creates a social and economic crisis which irresponsible lawmakers and judges wish to blame the displaced fathers for and which they seek to remedy by reducing these fathers to slavery, forced labor for the benefit of another person. "Babies," says Ms. Rothman, at least healthy white babies, are very precious products these days. Mothers, rather like South African diamond miners, are cheap, expendable, not-too-trustworthy labor necessary to produce the precious product. And she adds in a footnote: I want to express my appreciation to the Texas midwife who found it so hard to understand how babies could be valued and mothers not. To value mothers would be to return to the feminine mystique, which Betty Friedan and other feminists worked so hard and successfully to undermine in order to glorify career-elitism for women. "In a better world," says Ms. Rothman, in the world I would want us to have, there would be virtually no women giving up babies: contraception, abortion, and the resources to raise her own children would be available to every woman.79 She is saying the same thing liberals were saying a century ago. Hear George Bernard Shaw, saying "Even if every woman bearing and rearing a valuable child received a handsome series of payments, thereby making motherhood a real profession as it ought to be."80- Shaw proposes an AFDC program, but with more generous payments to the women who breed fatherless children. Shaw knew of women's hatred of the patriarchal system:

My own experience of discussing this question leads me to believe that the one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.81 As a black woman said on the Donahue show a few years ago, "We want the right to have children without having husbands." They wish the right to reduce men to the status of studs--though they also condemn them for being poor providers. Men have no similar right, though the male taxpayer has the obligation to subsidize this female sexual independence. Another black woman, an unwed mother, is quoted by Rickie Solinger82 as saying, "If your old man has been like my old man, you wouldn't think not having him around was any great loss." Women really do feel this way. They really do hate patriarchy. They really want to get back to the matriarchal female kinship system. And they are succeeding. _______________________________ 1John Campion and Pamela Leeson, Facing Reality: The Case for the Reconstruction of Legal Marriage (London: The Family Law Action Group, 1994), p. 5. 2Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 8, 22. 3Los Angeles Times, 29 September, 1995. 4Los Angeles Times, 28 February, 1995. 5Re-Making Love, p. 197; emphasis added. 6Wall Street Journal, 30 October, 1995. 7Brenda Scott, Children No More: How We Lost a Generation (Lafayette, LA, 1995), p. 158. 8Ibid. 9George Gilder, Visible Man (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 107. 10Ms. May, 1982. 11George Gilder, Sexual Suicide, p. 86. 12P. 78. 13Mother Daughter Revolution, p. 14. The subtitle of their book is From Betrayal to Power. That's code language for "from accepting patriarchal socialization, marriage and the family to rejecting these good things and reverting to matriarchy." 14WSJ, 30 Oct 95. 15The Liberator, October, 1995, citing as source WOMEN/POLITICS Newsletter of the Organized Section for Women and Politics Research of the American Political Science Association, Vol. 7, No. 2, August, 1995, p. 3. 16Los Angeles Times, 15 August, 1995. 17I document this in my Garbage Generation, p. 92. 18Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia, pp. 97f. 19Chicago Tribune, 5 October, 1995. 20Men are Not Cost-Effective, p. 324. 21Ibid. 22Los Angeles Times, 12 October, 1995. 23Los Angeles Times, 24 April, 1995.

24Newsweek, 4 September, 1995. 25Ibid. 26Los Angeles Times, 3 May, 1995. 27This tiresomely repeated statistic is untrue. According to Jerry Lester, "An Open Letter to 'Deadbeat Dad' Journalists, The Liberator, October, 1995, The data related to child support payments reported by the Bureau of the Census (Current Population Reports, Series P- 23, No 173, 1989), show that 75 percent of all child support is paid. Total amount of child support owed--$14,800,000,000. (NOT $34 billion!) Amount received--$11,100,000,000. Composed of paid in full--$7,600,000,000. Paid in part--$3,500,000,000. 28Her research is epitomized in The Family in America: New Research, November, 1995. 29Los Angeles Times, 12 June, 1992. 30Single Mothers and Their Children, p. 64. 31Re-making Love, p. 196. 32Re-Making Love, p. 196. 33Pp. 197f. 34Alain Danielou, Gods of Love and Ecstasy: the Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992), p. 17. 35Los Angeles Times, 9 April, 1995. 36Re-making Love, p. 97. 37John Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1977), p. 28. 38The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 6. 39Great Cosmic Mother, p. 196. 40The Feminine Mystique, pp. 140f. 41Mead's Male and Female, pp. 72ff.; quoted in Friedan, p. 141. 42Ibid. 43P. 142. 44P. 142. 45Quoted in Friedan, p. 142. 46Sjoo and Mor, p. 382. 47P. 384. 48Ibid. 49This is Dr. Lenore Weitzman's celebrated statistic, frequently cited in feminist literature. I discuss it in my Garbage Generation, Chapter 8. 50Esther Harding, Women's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern (Los Angeles: Pantheon, 1955), p. 162. 51P. 191. 52P. 11. 53P. 14. 54P. 17. 55Re-Making Love, p. 196. 56P. 269.

57P. 18. 58Quoted in Barbara Seaman, Free and Female: The Sex Life of the Contemporary Woman (New York: Coward, MaCann and Geoghegan, 1972), p. 44. 59Seaman, p. 45. 60Seaman, p. 45. 61Heyn, pp. 173f. 62P. 174. 63P. 174. 64P. 175. 65Book titles by Wini Breines and Debold, Wilson and Malave respectively. 66P. 164. 67Mother Daughter Revolution, p. 9. 68P. 44. 69P. 45. 70Cited in The Free American, October, 1994. 71(New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), p. 324. 72Feminine Mystique, p. 338. 73Ibid. 74New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. 75P. 17. 76P. 35. 77P. 40. 78P. 47. 79P. 133. 80Preface to Getting Married; Prefaces by Bernard Shaw (London: Constable and Company, 1934), p. 15. 81Ibid. 82Rickie Solinger, Wake Up, Little Susie, p. 79.