Why have any men at all?

"`Why have any men at all?' wrote Sally Miller Gearhart in a 1982 manifesto titled `The Future–If There Is One–Is Female.' Gearhart is an advocate of ovular merging, a process that involves the mating of two eggs, which has been successfully accomplished with mice. Only female offspring are produced. I've always worried that one day women would figure out how to get along without us and they would be able to reproduce unilaterally, like sponges. It's not genocide, exactly. It's more like job attrition, the way employers cut back positions without actually firing anyone. `A 75 per cent female to 25 percent male ratio could be achieved in one generation if one half of a population reproduced heterosexually and one half by ovular merging.' according to Gearhart. `Such a prospect is attractive to women who feel that if they bear sons, no amount of love and care and non-sexist training will save those sons from culture where male violence is institutionalized.'" Footnote60

Footnote 60: Lawrence Wright, "Women & Men," Utne Reader (January/February 1993), p. 55.
[http://www.xenos.org/ministries/c&c/menwomn.htm]

Mary Daly

No Man's Land
Excerpts from an Interview by Susan Bridle

[http://www.wie.org/j16/daly2.html]
WIE: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article "The Future—If There Is One—Is Female" writes: "At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world.

1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future.

2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture.

3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race."

What do you think about this statement?

MD: I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

WIE: Yes. I find myself now thinking that’s a bit shocking.

MD: Well, it’s shocking that it would be shocking.

WIE: So it doesn’t sound like your vision of a separate nation for women is something you see as an interim stage that would eventually lead to men and women living together in true equality.

MD: No. That’s a very old question. I answered that to audiences twenty-five, thirty years ago. I just don’t think that way. See, right now, I would be totally joyous to have a great community of women—whether men are somewhere out on the periphery or not. I don’t have this goal of: "Oh, then we can all get together again!" That doesn’t seem to be a very promising future. So why would I think about it? I think it’s pretty evident that men are not central to my thought. [Note]

[http://www.wie.org/j16/daly2.html]

It seems that John Wyndham got it quite right when he described a society that is exactly like that, a society comprised of harpies like Mary Daly.
Check: Consider Her Ways

Mind you, it is not the act of persuading that is so bad but the intent to do so. That is the criminalization of thoughts, no less. Not even George Orwell could have dreamed of it all. My, my, what progress 30 years of feminization have brought us.

The opinions for the marginalization and eradication of men, if not merely the nature of men, that are expressed in the various quotation shown on this page are not isolated at all. They are part of a deliberate agenda.

Those two quotes are from the excerpt shown below, from the EuroPRO-Fem european menprofeminist network. Pro-feminist men are disproportionately homosexual activists or homosexualist men (men who promote homosexualism although they may not even be homosexual) who for a variety of reasons hate their own maleness and that of other men.

It cannot be stressed enough that these people believe that the attributes of men and women are not biological consequences but social constructs, and that what has been constructed can be deconstructed. Of course the most thorough method of deconstruction is total eradication: the abolition of men. The write-up calls for men to develop and be subject to new agendas. Is there any doubt that one of these agendas is not merely to change men but to eliminate at least 80 percent of them?

Why not? Mary Daly says: "I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth." And that is why there are men and homsexualist men who sidle up to feminists. They know that all this rhetoric of men having the power in society is nothing more than a polemic. They know it's not true. They know that women (or more correctly, redfems) have the power. They want no more and nothing less than to be amongst the 20 percent of men who'll survive and thereby get a chance to vie for a place in the sun that shines in the feminist paradise.

A CRISIS IN MASCULINITY
OR NEW AGENDAS FOR MEN?

[Excerpt]

CONCLUSION: POLITICS AND PRACTICE

Men’s societal dominance continues; yet at the same time certain groups of men are facing considerable change from previous social patterns and arrangements - at home, work and elsewhere. Despite the extent of the changes and challenges outlined, it is premature to talk of a widespread ‘crisis of masculinity’. Individual men and certain groups of men may be facing, even confronting, change, like it or not, and they may indeed be changing, but this has to be put in the context of the stubborn stability of men’s structural power. For some relatively less powerful groups of men, the combination of lack of educational success, reduction in traditional jobs, avoidance of ‘women’s’ work, and their own more damaging actions (to both themselves and others) may indeed constitute a material crisis for them and others around them. But this generally may not (yet) match closely with an ideological crisis in how men are assumed to be. The contradictions between the material and the ideological state of men and masculinities may be growing but are not yet at crisis point for most men, and certainly not for men in general.

All of the issues that I have discussed here are important for what it means to be a ‘man’ in this society. They have, however, all often remain neglected in what is generally defined as ‘politics’. Transforming what is understood by politics is part of transforming men. All of these issues are also both profoundly structural and intensely personal. Each can also prompt great depths of negativity - feelings of hopelessness, terribleness, desperation - as well as being arenas of possible positive change and hope. Each is a way of unifying men as a class, with different interests to women and dividing men from each other - old from young, heterosexual from gay, healthy from unwell, and so on. Each is a way of oppressing women, children and young people, and a way of relating to other men. And each represents an avenue for men opposing oppression, supporting feminist initiatives, and changing men.

Policies and practices are needed that address these issues in all policy arenas; they need to name men and the persistence of men’s powers, without stereotyping men. In doing this, there are dangers that an increased focus on men may divert attention from women and women’s agendas by arguing that men should have even more resources for solving these problems. So vigilance is necessary in this respect.

However, it is useful to bear in mind that a critical focus on men is not in men’s general interest, just as it is not in the interests of other dominant groups to focus critically on them. This will involve debate, clear policy statements, publications and other materials, education and teaching, professional interventions, pro-feminist ’menswork’ and ’boyswork’, and research. It is time that government had a strategy on changing men away from power and oppression as part of its strategy for women and gender justice. In particular a distinction needs to be drawn between support between and for men that encourages domination and support between and for men that diminishes domination. The latter kind on initiatives are necessary not only in the state but throughout all areas of social life society, in business, community, media, religion, sport and other public and indeed private forums.

Finally, one further likely and paradoxical implication of the naming of men is that the deconstruction of men may be opened up more fully. Changing future agendas for women involves changing men; changing men involves deconstructing men and reducing men’s power; and, in the longer term still, this may even involve the abolition of ’men’ as such a ubiquitously important social category. Is it time at last for men to change, and both to develop and be subject to new agendas?