March 07, 2003The misery of being a French man
By Charles Bremner
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,174-602312,00.html
FOUR decades of feminism have turned middle-class French men into miserable creatures
who are intimidated by women and losing their way in an increasingly matriarchal society,
a study says.
Men aged 20 to 45 believe that they have paid a heavy price for the social, legal and
professional empowerment of women since the onset of the Pill and women's liberation in
the 1960s, according to the analysis for Elle, an up-market women's magazine.
"Men of all generations are suffering," it said. "They feel diminished,
devalued in a society where things feminine are perceived as positive and all-powerful
values."
Men under 35 in particular felt that they were being treated as sexual objects by
predatory young women.
Elle was surprised by the sense of victimisation and the anger of men towards women -
especially among the younger generation - revealed by the Centre de Communication Avancée
study. "They think women have gone too far, too quickly, without setting any limit to
their demands or ever questioning themselves," Elle said.
Modern men see women as "castrating, vengeful, power-hungry and obsessed by men's
sexual performance".
The study, based on interviews with four 12-man focus groups of urban professionals,
was commissioned to mark International Women's Day tomorrow.
The findings echoed the refrain of male grievance familiar over the past decade in
France and across the Westernised world.
While sounding a concerned tone for men, Elle noted that French women were still paid
30 per cent less than men, still performed 80 per cent of household chores and remained
the main victims of domestic violence. It might have added that France still has fewer
women in senior executive roles or high positions in the professions or politics than most
EU states.
Men, the survey said, were driven to distraction by the conflicting demands of modern
women. They were paradoxically being encouraged to adopt feminine traits while women still
expected them to be virile. "Masculinity is in crisis . . . there is no longer a
model for building a masculine identity.
Man no longer exists," the magazine said.
"Being a male today is a nightmare. The male identity feels battered by the
paradoxical demands of women . . . and a society that is going their way, from law,
morality to advertising and techniques of reproduction . . . One gets the impression that
a new war of the sexes is emerging, with the former dominated becoming the
dominatrixes".
Men blamed advertising and the media for treating them as useless or sexual objects.
They had suffered various phases of "destabilisation". In the Sixties and
Seventies they had experienced the moral revolution and the doctrine of female equality.
In the Eighties they had faced "implosion" through an explosion of models,
from Golden Boys to gays and the Rambo type. In the Nineties they had been stressed by
unemployment, aids, globalisation and the failure of the "masculine"
technocratic model of society that had prevailed in France.
Younger men were said to be more unhappy than their elders. The 25-35 group felt that
women "consume men and abuse them sexually". The saddest group seemed to be
those aged 20-25, who the magazine defined as "subjugated and feminised".
"It is not rare that they cultivate a gay image in which they find a model for
acceding to femininity. Behind the abandonment of their virility there lies another odd
ideal: that of 'homosexual fusion' with the woman, a loss of differentiation between
sexes."
Commentary by Fathers for Life
The
article is right on the button, with one notable exception. It would be great to see the
source of the data for the claim that women still lag behind in the job market with
respect to being paid 30 percent less than men, and that they still are under-represented
in executive and leadership positions. The latter thought was apparently not mentioned in
the original French article and was a comment added by Charles Bremner.
Feminists have an odious reputation for misrepresenting statistics. They are prone to
distort things by quoting them out of context. However, incessant feminist propaganda more
than compensates for that serious feminist handicap of not telling the truth, all of the
truth and nothing but the truth, proving Hitler right. If you tell lies, tell big ones,
tailor them to the capacity of the masses to comprehend, and tell them all-pervasively and
incessantly. In short order the lies will then be accepted as the truth. Most
importantly, as Hitler said further, never underestimate the enormous capacity of the
masses to forget. Few subjects of interest illustrate that better than the feminist focus
on pay equity.
It would truly surprise me if French women were being discriminated against as claimed
with respect to being paid 30 percent less for equal pay and equal hours worked.
Firstly, it is probably against the law to do that in France, just as it is in other
developed nations. Secondly, the feminists rationalize that their claim of women being
underpaid is valid because women's annual incomes are on average less than corresponding
incomes by men. However, upon closer examination it is found that any differences in pay
between men and women are entirely due to the choices
made by women.
Women in the work force work on average fewer hours per week than men (about 10% fewer
hours). They also limit their careers somewhat by choosing jobs that provide convenient
hours, convenient job locations and convenient types of work. Studies that controlled for
level of experience, hours worked, level of education attained, tenure on the job as well
as for job choices made found that women earn as much as men for identical quality and
quantity of work. If anything, if both men and women worked more than about 44 hours per
week in identical jobs, then it was found that women earn more
than men do.
As the authors of one of those studies (commissioned by Statistics Canada) stated, if
anything, discrimination in pay is in favour of women. A
similar study done in the US found that women's pay is, at 95 to 98 percent of men's pay,
most definitely not disastrously differentiated. Moreover, that study, too, found that if
the aspects relating to women's choices are being controlled for, then the "glass
ceiling" vanishes. (For details see Pay Equity - Is
there discrimination against women?)
Not too surprisingly, feminist-controlled Statistics Canada never publicized the
objective and thorough study they had commissioned, and they subsequently still promoted
on several occasions the feminist myth of unequal pay for women, although negative public
reactions to those claims eventually forced them to somewhat correct their biased
editorializing.
As to the claim that women still do 80 percent of all household chores, the short
answer to that was provided by Laura Schlesinger on her talk show to a woman who called in
to complain about that very issue. The woman was a stay-at-home mom. Her husband was
working 12-hour shifts and worked overtime on weekends. Laura Schlesinger asked the women
how much of her husband's work she does.
The woman didn't understand Dr. Laura's point, and is doubtful that either the author
of the article in Elle or Charles Bremner will.
The long answer is contained in objective studies that consider all
contributions that both men and women make to their families, and that then normalize
those contributions before making any comparisons. It is found in books like Women
can't hear what men don't say, by Warren Farrell.
Warren Farrell illustrates, with a questionnaire containing an objective and
comprehensive list of about 50 activities that both men and women routinely perform to
operate a family, that feminists conveniently forget about many of the things done by men.
There is an obvious aspect of men's work that is not taken into account when feminists
cart out their somewhat shabby and threadbare household-chores statistics. The performance
of household chores does not involve long hours of commuting to the job.
Moreover, many of the household chores that men do: fixing things, changing the oil on-
and washing or repairing the family car, cutting the lawn, cleaning the gutters,
unplugging sinks, etc., are not counted in the hours of household chores the feminists
love to harp on, because such "men's work" is routinely and even deliberately
ignored, even by men themselves. Interestingly, as Warren Farrell points out as well, even
at home, the odious, dirty and dangerous jobs, just as in working-life elsewhere, are
being performed almost exclusively by men. It is no accident that men comprise 19 out of
20 job-accident casualties. Men are disposable, and why waste precious women's lives on
things that are much better relegated to men.
Lastly, as to women's under-representation in political and executive positions, that
is primarily a matter of women's choices. There has never been a problem with getting
women into those positions, from Cleopatra's times, through those of Queen Elizabeth I,
Katherine the Great and Margaret Thatcher, to the present ones, where women now, qualified
or not, receive preferential treatment to get them there. If women are not equally present
in those positions, then that is not because men prevent them from getting there. It is
largely because women don't want to be there in spite of all and anything men and all of
society do for women. It is ludicrous to blame men for women not getting what women don't
want.
...And this is what has actually happened at
Sparta; the legislator wanted to make the whole state hardy and temperate, and he has
carried out his intention in the case of the men, but he has neglected the women, who live
in every sort of intemperance and luxury. The consequence is that in such a state wealth
is too highly valued, especially if the citizens fall under the dominion of their wives,
....But what difference does it make whether women rule, or the rulers are ruled by women?
The result is the same.
—Aristotle, in Politics, (350 B.C.)
(see annotated full text of that part of Aristotle's Politics)
The difference is now that women don't just rule the rulers, they are
the rulers, to boot. It is not a question of women having exchanged one position for the
other. The enormous power that women already had got expanded to the point where it is now
overwhelming and smothers men. But there is far more to Aristotle's observation than meets
the eye.
The elites of today are not the ostensible
leaders of government, church, commerce and industry. They centre themselves instead in
three areas of society: the interest groups, the media and the bureaucracy. The interest
groups propose, the media endorse, and the bureaucracy enact. The politicians and the
leaders of business, cowed by the media, acquiesce.
— Ted Byfield, in the Alberta Report , March 9,
1998, page 44
(for a consenting opinion, see A Conspiracy For Fred, 2001
11 26)
That is a sobering thought, but it appears to be much worse than that. We must not
forget that the interest groups in power have so much power because they comprise
many of the leaders of church, commerce and industry, comprise and control
much of the media, and, for all intents and purposes, comprise, totally
dominate and control practically all of the bureaucracy. Of course, one of
the most powerful interest groups of all is feminism in all of its manifestations. The
bureaucracy is a feminist power structure that operates according to feminist standards.
Most of the rules pertaining to behaviour of personnel in the bureaucracy were wrought by
fashioning them through the feminist gender-lens. They are rules favoring women, not equal
rights within the bureaucracy.
Consider that today's decisions are hardly made by politicians but by the bureaucracy.
The power of the bureaucracy is far greater than that of politicians. That was true in
Hitler's times and is even more true now. If even a government office for the examination
and promotion of the Status of Men is staffed predominantly with women, then women's power
is indeed far greater than we thought all along.
Can you imagine what the women's groups would say if any office for the Status of Women
were to be staffed by men, any men? In Canada, for example, when Hedy Fry was still
Minister for the Status of Women, her department had a staff of about 120, that is, 119
women and one man, a homosexual and naturally pro-feminist man. In comparison to efforts
of that magnitude to promote the Status of Women, the Austrian allocation of a staff of
half a dozen, of whom only two are men, seems quite pitifully inadequate for the promotion
of the Status of Men.
Furthermore, aside from the fact that men and women in families are violent against one
another anywhere in about equal proportions, and that there are close to 500 women's
shelters in Canada but no battered men's shelters at all except for the local jails (where
the presence of female guards is now all-pervasive), there is not a single women's shelter
in Canada where men -- police officers or even transsexuals who are pro-feminist activists
-- are permitted to enter, with one exception: men who are plumbers.
Plumbers, especially because they are men, are good enough to unplug the drains on sinks
and toilets in women's shelters. It is not that women can't do that themselves, but as
long as there are men to do it, why should any woman stoop so low as to clean up her own
mess, right? That is the new reality of "equality", where women are "more
equal" than men. That is not equitable equality! It is a sham and a human rights
disaster.
Women's power is now absolute and totalitarian, and men are second class citizens,
nothing more than beasts of burden, and, come to think of it, that is the way it has been
since antiquity:
Feminism four hundred years ago — Oppression
of Women?
"It is an amazing thing to see in our city the wife of a
shoemaker, or a butcher, or a porter dressed in silk with chains of
gold at the throat, with pearls and rings of good value....and then in
contrast to see her husband cutting the meat, all smeared with cow's
blood, poorly dressed.... but whosoever considers this carefully will
find it reasonable, because it is necessary that the lady, even if low
born and humble, be draped with such clothes for her natural
excellence and dignity, and the man [be] less adorned as if a slave,
or a little ass, born to her service."
— Lucrezia Marinella, Venice,
Italy, 1600
The Nobility and Excellence of Women Together
With the Defects and Deficiencies of Men
Quoted on page 22 of
If Men Have All the Power
How Come Women Make the Rules
(Translation into
French)
More of Lucrezia Marinella's writings
There you have it, some women, and most of the feminists love to go along with them on
that and even promote the idea, feel that men are nothing more than little asses,
born to be servants to women.
Don't get me wrong about any of what I said here. It does not bother me that I do any
of the onerous and dangerous work around the house. I don't mind doing it because I love
my wife and she loves me in return, especially for the things we do for one another
without even dreaming that these could or should be entitlements.
The big difference between my wife on the one hand and Charles Bremner, the editors of
Elle and feminists anywhere on the other, is that my wife, just as countless women
anywhere who wish for nothing better than that the feminists would just go away, it is
that my wife appreciates the work being done for her and that I appreciate what she does
for me.
My wife feels that the feminists robbed society of far too many niceties and civilities
already, such as the mutual respect that the sexes once had for one another. She does not
think that it is her right to have me or any man as her servant. She thinks that she is
privileged to have someone who extends niceties of life to her and loves me for doing it.
Besides, I am much better than she is in doing roof repairs, if for no other reason than
that she is seriously afraid of heights. She is the one who coined the expression:
"If women want to be truly equal to men, then they will die like men, just as often
for the same reasons and just as early." Most of all, having been a part of the job
market for many, many years and having made the deliberate choice of the better of two
worlds, she is well qualified to make a well-informed comparison between the two and to
make the right choice.
What the Austrian bureaucracy intends to do to alleviate the problems with the
Status of Men in Austria.
