On the other hand, most people today also reject many of the tenets of contemporary feminism.  In our judgement, the kind of feminism that arose in the 1960s and '70s was, overall, genuinely egalitarian.  Even those who disagree with its particular doctrines may grant that much.  Over time, however, extremist attitudes from the fringes have become more and more dominant within the movement.  Many who label themselves feminists are still fair-minded and caring people; nevertheless, we maintain that feminism has paradoxically become a major source of sexist intolerance and injustice in today's society.

By our lights, then, neither of the foregoing two positions on gender interrelations constitutes real equality, and, once more, neither of them is the view of the majority in this society.  Yet a genuinely balanced approach to gender issues -- the position most often held intuitively by most people -- is not usually presented and defended in public discussions.  Instead, it is very often assumed that the only two alternatives are embracing the standard feminist positions and going back to the old ways.  Stated simply, our purpose is to promote another alternative, what we see as real equality between men and women.  We aim to do so by presenting information and insights not now being made at all adequately available.

In regard to most of the average differences between the sexes, the jury is still out on the question of just how much of the difference is natural and how much is the product of culture.  For that reason, among others, our organization supports the elimination of externally imposed sex roles and rules, in favor of letting individual men and women make their own choices based on their own interests and abilities.  This means letting the statistics on female-male participation in each given domain fall where they will, rather than attempting to enforce either a role-based asymmetry or "equality of outcome."  Given the complexity of the many issues involved, however, there is very often room for reasoned disagreement over such matters.  We respect a wide range of views, provided that they maintain the fundamental principles of intellectual honesty and equal caring for all persons.  And we intend to be critical of all claims, be they politically left, right or center, which do not maintain those principles.  De facto, however, we will have to focus most of our attention on the claims that dominate the public discussion.  These days, that mostly (not always) means opposing the many near-monolithic dogmas of sexist feminism.

The vital issues in need of discussion cannot be addressed adequately in the short space of one article.  Listing a representative few of them, however, will give the reader a more concrete picture of the concerns that we intend to explore here.  Consider, then, the following general areas of gender equality.

Economic Equality

Everyone today should be aware of the injustice of past economic discrimination against women: the undervaluing of "women's work," the social and even legal barriers to rewarding careers for women, etc.  Moreover, women's economic dependency has been the source of various other vulnerabilities from which they have suffered.  Justice is not to be achieved, however, by distorting the facts.  The degree of that past discrimination is sometimes falsely portrayed (also its direction; it has not always gone one way), and -- much more importantly -- the situation even today is frequently misrepresented in ways that have serious consequences.  Notably, allegations of contemporary discrimination against women are constantly being made where no real evidence for such exists -- where often, indeed, the evidence is powerfully against there being such discrimination but is being suppressed.

For example, it is often charged that the roughly 30 percent pay gap between average men and women workers is entirely the result of deliberate unfair treatment of women; it is sometimes even alleged that women are still being paid less for exactly the same work.  Only occasionally do accounts in the news media correct those claims.  Yet the actual facts on this subject are fairly well understood: that on average, men work for greater amounts of time (15 or 20 percent more), have had more experience on the job, perform more demanding or dangerous labor, etc.  The fact that average women and men continue to do different kinds of paid work, it is true, is an important part of the reason for the pay gap.  That, however, is not so much the result of employer prejudice existing today as of encultured male and female choices -- hence of attitudes that can be changed only by education and time.

Having distorted the facts in such ways, activists have gone on to demand -- and get -- a huge variety of corrective measures.  Some of them are very reasonable; but most of them create serious discrimination where there was none before, discrimination against males.  This topic of "reverse discrimination" ("employment equity", etc.) is a complex one.  A point that must be stressed now, however, is that any form of gender discrimination is seldom a simple matter of one sex vs. the other.  The myriad of familial connections between men and women (as husbands and wives, parents and offspring, etc.) mean that whatever unfairly treats members of one sex inevitably hurts members of the other as well.  One of the major failings of contemporary feminism is the separatist men-versus-women mentality running through it that causes this basic fact to be lost sight of.

Of fundamental importance in discussing economic disparities between men and women are the different roles they have played in the family.  Traditionally, it was believed that the best interests of the children required mothers to be at home with them and fathers to be working hard in paid employment to support them.  This led to societal training and pressures, and even legal measures, designed to enforce both roles.  Of course, the development of effective means of birth control partially removed the major source of this asymmetry.  Even today, however, the traditional attitudes have a great influence.  One result is the difference between men's and women's career choices alluded to above.  Women still tend to pursue jobs and career tracks which allow greater time for rearing children, and men still tend to pursue working options that provide more money for supporting a wife and children.  (Hence never-married men and women have incomes which are nearly equal, and which fall midway between those of married women and married men.  Not many see the large pay gap between married and never-married men as evidence for employer discrimination -- much less as grounds for demanding "equality of outcome" between the two categories of men.)  Only to the degree that those choices change, consequently, does it make sense to expect male and female career patterns or average incomes to be the same.

Equality in Parenting

These facts about familial roles lead us to a second major kind of gender discrimination, this one directed against men.  To repeat, the same socioeconomic forces which have tied mothers down to children have also pushed fathers away from them, to the great detriment of both men and their children.  Historically, one major causal factor was the rise of industry a century or two ago, which made employment away from home the norm; before then, children usually grew up in day-long contact with their fathers.  (Also, it was then seen as a benefit to women and children to keep them at home, out of the wretched and dangerous factory work of the time -- even though doing so seriously increased women's economic dependency.)

The "cult of motherhood" that grew up at that time has resulted in the stereotypes -- which often turn themselves into self-fulfilling prophecies -- that only mothers really care about or are competent to nurture their children, and that children don't really need their fathers emotionally.  (The former is the complement of the stereotype that only men care about and are competent to pursue careers outside the home.)  The power of cultural conditioning being what it is, many have automatically assumed that our inherited behavior-patterns in this regard are the "natural" ones.  However, there are good reasons for believing that the distant-father family of the last century or so is far from being the most healthy one, for men, women or children.  Worse than that, however, has been the massive increase in father-absent families in recent decades, spawned by the huge increase in divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth and by the attitude that fathers are dispensable as long as their paycheques keep arriving.

In the last few years more and more people, from all parts of the political spectrum, have begun to realize the great emotional harm to children that father loss and absence can produce, with its consequent effect on crime rates and other social problems.  (To report this is not to blame mothers who find themselves in such a situation involuntarily, any more than reporting the harms of auto accidents is blaming their innocent victims.)  So far, however, precious little has been done by governnents except for actions reinforcing the idea that all fathers are good for is paying the bills.  The same governments that have poured out billions of dollars, and required business to spend even more, on a large variety of initiatives aimed at getting women into paid employment, have virtually ignored all the societal conditioning and socio-legal structures keeping fathers out of full parenting -- fathers are simply supposed to "shape up" on their own.  Arguably, this is the most massive piece of blind inconsistency of the past thirty years of government social reform.

Some Specific Problems

Those who have lived through certain horrible problems personally will already understand the significance of what is being said here; others will have to learn of all the horrors in our other articles or elsewhere.  We can, however, take note of the most destructive type of discrimination against fathers in the legal system: their treatment in cases of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth.  The attitude in this century has been, and largely still is, that the children belong to the mother -- unless she is demonstrably "unfit" to care for them, that is; his unfitness has been widely taken for granted.  Consequently, fathers get "custody" of children in only 10 or 15 percent of divorces and in a minuscule percentage of noncohabitational cases.  This is largely the result of both parents simply having accepted the inherited roles and attitudes; but it is partly because of systematic judicial bias against fathers.  True, noncustodial parents are usually allowed to "visit" their children -- typically, for lengths of time which caring fathers say is totally inadequate for maintaining a satisfactory relationship, and which hence results, in many cases, in gradual deterioration of the bonds between them.  Worse yet, in the acrimony of divorce custodial parents not infrequently use their power to deny what little mutual contact has been awarded to the children and the noncustodial parents -- and very rarely will law courts do anything about it.  The US and Canada are blanketed by massive maintenance enforcement programs with sweeping legal powers.  But almost nothing is being done to defend the nonfinancial needs of children and their fathers.

This issue, too, is not a simple one of men vs. women.  Many women feel they have to demand custody or even sole custody ("what kind of mother would give up her children?"), and the winner-take-all tradition of sole custody deprives some mothers who love and want to be with their children.  Second families, grandparents, and other extended-family members also suffer greatly.  And usually, the children suffer most of all.  To be sure, doing all the parenting alone can be a trial by ordeal for the custodial parent as well.  Even so, in legal respects, the woman has most of the rights and power in this area of life -- just as the man once had most of the legal rights and power in the economic sphere of life.

Because of all the pain so many fathers have suffered under this system, in the last 25 years they have formed thousands of local fathers' rights groups in Canada and the US.  They have worked for various legal reforms aimed at facilitating adequate and ensured contact with the children after divorce -- for both parents, and for extended family members as well.  Their overriding principle is that no one should ever lose a child, even in divorce, unless genuinely found to be unfit.  However, these egalitarian efforts have mostly run into a brick wall -- a wall of traditionalism and sexist chivalry and plain inertia among legislators and judges, abetted by massive opposition from the taxpayer-funded feminist establishment.

Opposition to Reform

One would think that people who profess to oppose gender injustice would want to eliminate all of its manifestations.  Indeed, given the causal link between the economic inequality of women and men's inequality in parenting, it would seem imperative to correct the two sets of inequities together.  For example, those who endorse the strong approach of using "affirmative action" to enhance women's collective employment situation might be expected to promote preferential treatment for fathers in divorce.  (Say, promoting the goal of giving them custody 50 percent of the time.)  It would be a vain expectation.  So far from advocating affirmative action for fathers, today's feminist organizations (in contrast to those of the 1970s, it should be noted) have vociferously opposed even changes to create equal opportunity.  No reactionary male chauvinist could have been any more adamant in defending his traditional turf.

Various attempts are made to rationalize this opposition, but let us here look briefly at a response which many might have toward the prospect of equality for parents after divorce.  "But if the mother has been the primary caregiver to the children," it may be asked, "is she not the one entitled to custody?"  Consider a parallel claim, however.  When a traditional breadwinner/childcarer marriage breaks up, it is often reasoned, she has an equal right to the financial assets his paid labor has contributed to the family.  After all, the time she spent caring for the children left him free to pursue economic success.  There is much to be said for this; raising children is unavoidably an economic partnership.  But similarly, the time he spent earning a living left her free to care for the children.  By parity of reasoning, then, the results of her efforts belong equally to him.  That is, if the marriage should break up, he has an equal right to the children.  Children are not simply property, of course, but that is precisely why the "primary parent" doctrine is so offensive: its winner-take-all attitude toward something as emotionally vital to both parent and child as one's own flesh and blood.

The opposition of some feminist activists to equality in parenting has gone to the point of trying to eliminate even the weak existing rights of children and fathers to each other.  To do this they engage in stereotyping of fathers as uncaring and of children as not needing their fathers (except monetarily).  They grotesquely distort statistics about the numbers of absent fathers who fail to make child support payments, promoting the image of the uncaring "deadbeat dad" and refuse to acknowledge, in regard to those who genuinely don't pay, that destruction of the father-child bond is the primary reason for their loss of motivation.  (For the record: on average, noncustodial mothers are ordered to pay much less in child support, relative to their incomes, and also pay less of what is ordered, than is the case for noncustodial fathers.)  Children do need adequate financial support; that is not at issue.  But they also need their fathers.

Victimization and Gender

Another broad set of problems involving equality between the sexes stems from a closely related pair of societal mindsets: that harm to a woman is more worthy of concern than equal harm to a man, and that harm by a woman is less blameworthy than equal harm by a man.  These attitudes have long been entrenched in our culture, and constitute a source of very serious injustices.  Our discussion of this topic, too, must be very brief, but it will give the reader a glimpse of another large range of topics to be discussed on this website over time.

Let us begin with the first of the pair: this society's greater level of concern, felt by both men and women, for the welfare of women.  This attitude is manifested from the earliest years of life, when little girls are sheltered from rough-and-tumble play while little boys are expected to learn to "take it like a man" -- and the disparity increases through life.  Now, concern must not be confused with awareness.  Notoriously, men have in the past failed to realize the amount of trauma women have suffered from sexual assault and fear of sexual assault.  But whenever the degree of harm is realized, the greater solicitude toward women clearly manifests itself.  (Similarly, women are sometimes unaware of the special sorrows and horrors men have to face; to the degree that each sex's experience differs from that of the other, each is bound to have difficulty appreciating the pains unique to the other side.)

Degree of concern must also not be confused with degree of vulnerability.  On average, women are smaller and weaker than men and hence, on average, need greater physical protection.  Greater protection for those individuals (of either sex) who are more at risk, in order to prevent them from suffering more than others, is just what morality requires.  But the idea that it is somehow more tragic if they should suffer the same as others is a very different one; it is simply unjust.  Finally, the degree to which women in our particular culture are less physically robust than men is unnaturally high.  Egalitarian feminists have long pointed this out, and the situation is gradually changing.  Evidently, however, the degree to which women have seemed to be emotionally less robust is entirely a creation or fiction of our culture.  These facts represent one of the ways in which this kind of discrimination is harmful to women and girls as well: it is the excessive protectiveness toward them that has kept them physically and emotionally more vulnerable than biology alone would dictate.

Opposition to Reform, Once Again

Unfortunately, contemporary feminist efforts in these respects are highly regressive.  Not only do they support the traditional double standard of concern toward the wellbeing of women and men; on a massive scale, in a broad range of ways, they promote efforts that intensify that form of sexism.  On the one hand, they are teaching women to regard themselves as perpetual victims.  Playing the victim is an effective source of power in a society with a tradition of chivalry, and that is evidently one reason why they are encouraging it.  But it is not a role for strong, competent people.  On the other hand, today's feminists are constantly promoting the idea that male pain isn't even worth noticing.

Consider some familiar examples.  For years, feminists have campaigned against the presence of violence toward women -- but only against that toward women -- in the entertainment media.  Now, certain forms that portrayed violence takes are indeed objectionable and sexist when the victims are women.  But the obvious fact is that there is much more violence against men depicted in all the entertainment media; and surveys have found that the victims of really brutal, vicious violence therein are overwhelmingly male.  Yet that is not good enough for these ideologues; they evidently want it all to be directed against men.  What would we call it if certain people were to object only to the portrayed violence against whites in some medium where the great bulk of violence was directed against non-whites?  ("After all," it might be rationalized, "those people are toughened to violence by growing up in their mean neighborhoods.")  You know what we'd call it.

Far more important, of course, is the matter of real violence.  Yet the standard publicity in that regard is basically the same as in the case of fictional violence.  To be sure, certain kinds of violence are experienced much more often by females, notably sexual assault.  That problem demands our continuing special concern.  Yet at every age, males suffer more physical violence than females.  The more severe the violence is, moreover, the greater is the difference between the numbers of men and women suffering it.  Nor are males all that much more able to protect themselves: the average man is about as vulnerable to a weapon or a surprise attack as is a woman.  In spite of all such facts, a powerful alliance of sexist feminists and sexist chivalrists from all parts of the political spectrum is constantly promoting the idea that only "violence against women" deserves public attention.  To return to the earlier analogy, what would we think of people who campaigned year in and year out in opposition to "violence against whites"?  Would we believe them if they responded to challenges by saying, "It just happens that this is the kind of violence we're now focusing on"?  Especially revealing is the following fact: in contexts where they perceive it as being in women's self-interest to do so, many of these same campaigners insist that the discussion always use terminology that is neutral in regard to gender.  For example, they want everyone to say "firefighter" instead of "fireman" even though there are very few female firefighters.  Surely, the use of gender-inclusive terms is even more important in regard to situations that involve the two sexes much more equally.

Indeed, given the tradition of greater solicitude toward female suffering, the desire to promote equality arguably should lead to putting more emphasis on the hitherto more neglected victims than on the others -- i.e., on men.  Instead, the attempt is clearly to reinforce this inherited inequality.  Ironically, the complete lack of caring shown toward men is being manifested by women who profess that women are the singularly caring sex (see next section).  But the fact that so many promote the "oppose violence against women" campaign is evidence of the great psychological power of the sexist tradition of unequal concern.

Seriously Distorted Thinking

What is especially troubling about many who publicly oppose only violence against women, however, is the fact that they appear to have lost touch with reality on the subject.  In spite of the obvious facts of daily experience and the revelations of numerous societal surveys, they seem actually to believe that there is far more violence against women, and that there is less concern over harm to women, in this society.  Given the massive suppression and outright fabrication of evidence that characterize this campaign, some are no doubt honestly misled regarding at least the former point.  But the power of ideological conviction to distort perception of reality is also very much in evidence in this case.

Also disturbing, moreover, is what appears to be a major reason, on the part of even the less extreme, for their one-sided concern for female victims of violence.  At least, it is the reason commonly given when the sexism of that one-sidedness is pointed out.  "But after all," it is explained, "the great bulk of the violence, against women and in society overall, is by men!"  In other words, if you are the same sex as your attacker, you deserve less sympathy than you would otherwise; perhaps you are even somehow to blame for your own victimization.  This is the attitude that has all too often produced a feeling of white indifference as long as only nonwhites are attacked by nonwhite criminals, which turns to offended rage when the same criminals start attacking whites.  "After all, they're all alike.  If they harm one another it's not our concern."  This is 'groupthink,' the cognitive core of sexist and racist bigotry.  (It is discussed in depth in our article "The Amy Biehl Violation", also on this site.)  Like all the other rationalizations given in the "stop violence against women" campaigns, it is not only fallacious but morally twisted as well.

Aggression and Gender

What this last argument also does, however, is to lead us to the second focus of the subject at hand: not the victim, this time, but the aggressor.  The other half of the pair of traditional attitudes mentioned above amounts to the belief that males are morally inferior.  The tendency is to think things like this: "A woman wouldn't do a terrible thing like that.  If she did, she must've been under terrible duress -- and that was probably male-caused."  But the scientific evidence available does not indicate that men in general are any more inclined to harm others than women in general are.

It is true that a tiny minority of men commit the large bulk of serious crimes in society.  But to allow that statistical fact to influence judgments about men in general is to engage in the same kind of stereotyping we have long deplored in connection with certain ethnic groups which, for sociological reasons, have higher rates of criminals among them.  Together with groupthink, the black-and-white thinking that turns statistical differences into sweeping stereotypes is a major source of bigotry in the world.  In the case of the present statistic, moreover, it may be that the sole reason for it is women's much lower levels of ability and opportunity to commit the crimes.  (The fact that half or more of the battering of children is committed by women is related to the latter point, as is the fact that female crime rates have risen much faster than those of males as women have achieved greater social freedom.)  It is also true that males are on average more physically aggressive than females.  But that is evidently the result of greater male strength and energy, not of a greater willingness to harm others.  (Men perform the vast majority of physically heroic actions as well.)  Women's tendencies to aggress against others often have to take non-physical forms, or else the indirect form of getting men to do their dirty work for them.  Finally, even if there should remain a difference between overall levels of male and female willingness to do harm, various kinds of systemic discriminination against boys as they grow up would be involved in producing it.  These discriminations have to be discussed at a later time; the one most relevant here is this society's lower concern for male suffering.  Less able to get sympathy for their pain, young males learn to react to it with anger rather than with sorrow; expected to be "tough" themselves, they lose some sensitivity to the pain of others.  Those who are determined that only female victimization shall be publicly deplored should consider how counterproductive their efforts are.

The other important point here, however, is that even in individual cases where a male and female are equally guilty of wrongdoing, the female is apt to be seen as less blameworthy.  Consider a very serious example.  Many studies of criminal justice indicate that under the same conditions, men are more likely to be arrested and prosecuted, and likely to be more severely punished if found guilty.  (Together with the serious bias against fathers in divorce cases, that information begins to reveal the gross dishonesty of the current flow of claims that only women are discriminated against in the judicial system.  This is an especially important general topic for future articles.)

Opposition to Reform

The last thirty years of feminist consciousness-raising have made all caring people aware of the harms done to women by certain kinds of stereotype -- as being less competent to work outside the home, too emotional to handle serious responsibilities, etc.  This has been associated with a parallel raising of awareness in regard to the stereotyping of various ethnic groups.  Though there is yet much progress to be made, most to some degree realize the power of distorted images -- in the news, advertising, the entertainment media, or wherever -- to cause harm through the messages they send about a given category of people.  Given the monumental importance of this particular bit of human progress, it is tragic that in the last decade or so, the willingness to engage in serious stereotyping has returned on a large scale.  And the major player in this highly regressive development has been neo-feminism.  A movement that began, with so much promise, to help liberate the society from groupthink regarding gender has become a major purveyor of stereotypes, notably, of the evil-male/innocent-female-victim iconography.  It is doing so, indeed, in ways that go far beyond the traditional asymmetrical attitudes toward women and men, not merely supporting but greatly intensifying them.

This phenomenon is manifested in almost countless ways.  In Canada, the most blatant single example was the "all men are Marc Lepine in some degree" rhetoric that flooded the country following his heinous hate-crime.  But the stage had already been set for that outpouring by years of similar preaching in universities, the news media, and elsewhere.  One form this propaganda has taken is the falsehood that there are large amounts of male hostility toward females in society.  (See our article "The mother of all Big Lies".) The techniques used for promoting this claim include suppression of important information and other dishonest devices.

Some Special Examples

Other areas in which the anti-male stereotypes are promoted are genuine and serious societal problems, notably child abuse, spouse abuse and sexual assault.  Now, one must be very careful not to discount in any way the pain of the victims of these violations.  Historically, they were all largely invisible for too long, and one of the major accomplishments of feminism has been to bring them out of the closet.  Human nature being what it is, however, there is a strong tendency in many to swing from one extreme to another, which simply leads to a new set of tragedies.  That has been happening on a massive scale in regard to these three societal problems -- there currently exists a desperate need to achieve a balance.

The message that is constantly being sent is not just that only females are the victims, but that only men are guilty of the abusive behavior.  This is flatly, brutally false.  It is certainly true that the great bulk of sexual attacks are committed by (a very small minority of) men.  But those that are being committed by women -- over 20 percent of child sexual abuse, and up to half of the sexual abuse of boys, by some responsible estimates -- are being seriously neglected.  Worse yet, the false claim is being promoted that fathers and husbands commit nearly all of the physical and emotional abuse of children and spouses.  The statistical reality in regard to the physical and emotional abuse of children was mentioned earlier; it is also consistently found by careful studies that women initiate at least half of all partner abuse.

In the cases of spouse assault where serious physical harm is done, the bulk of studies indicate that a third to a fourth of it is suffered by the man; the disparity in size and strength between the sexes evidently makes a big difference.  This fact about the serious cases certainly justifies greater emphasis (not the sole concern we've been seeing) on female victims of spousal assault.  But when the issue is the victimizer, the important statistic is not that regarding who is harmed but that about who is willing to do harm to another person.  Nevertheless, the public campaigns on these subjects paint males alone as evil.  Half of the serious problem of violent persons in the family is being ignored -- and in an age when women are supposed to be seen as fully competent adults, they are being told they bear no responsibility for their behavior.  It is again ironic, then, that these anti-violence campaigns are spearheaded by feminists.  But the sexist feminists are joined by sexist chivalrists of both genders and of a wide range of other political beliefs.

Certain people in our society focus heavily on the interracial aspects of crime (often pointing out -- which is correct as far as it goes -- that in the US, blacks rape and murder whites at far higher rates than those at which whites rape and murder blacks), rather than focusing either on individual responsibility for wrongdoing or on societal causes of crime.  In doing so, they promote harmful stereotypes and risk making the problems worse rather than better.  This unwise behavior by some becomes blatant racism in certain others, who talk as if only non-whites -- or indeed as if all non-whites -- were violent criminals.  These days, that kind of propaganda is harshly criticized and even prosecuted in our society.  And yet exactly, precisely the same kind of propaganda is continually being promoted against males.  Would any government body or agency in the US or Canada dare to produce documents with titles like "The War Against Whites"?  Not only would it imply that only white suffering matters; it would also send the message that only non-whites are evil enough to engage in such behavior, and that they are deliberately targeting whites.  This is in fact the intent of some in the anti-male campaign: many of them actually believe that "men are taught it's all right to hurt women."  In the wake of the Lepine massacre, large numbers of both sexes proclaimed, "women are seen as legitimate targets in this society," i.e., so seen by the men in it.  Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.

Evils Caused by Stereotyping

The atrocities that have in fact grown out of this kind of stereotyping are already well known: its effect on various racial minorities is a tragic fact of history.  And the evidence of its effect on men (such as in the criminal justice system, once again) is massive even if not well known.  Moreover, that effect has been greatly increased in recent years, as the anti-male campaign has grown in strength.  In earlier decades of this century, an accusation by a white woman against a black man was very likely to be dealt with unjustly because of the existing stereotypes and other prejudices; though those other prejudices are not present in the case of men in general, the grotesque stereotyping of men and women over the past ten years or so has had a similar result.  There has been a virtual presumption of guilt on his part whenever a woman accuses a man (including cases in which she does so ostensibly on behalf of a child).  "A woman wouldn't do anything evil, such as lying to harm another person, but a man would" is the attitude that stereotyping promotes.

And it has resulted in vast numbers of actual injustices.  In cases of spousal violence, an arrest-the-man policy is almost automatic in many places; we will be posting individual examples of serious injustices of this kind.  Similarly for false accusations of child sexual abuse, which for several years have been epidemic in the acrimony of divorce -- some of these stories also need to be told.  As always, moreover, the victims of these perversions of justice are not just men.  Women and children in their lives -- and especially children used as weapons of war -- suffer from them as well.

Even normally decent people will, in emotionally charged situations, employ loaded weapons if they are left lying around; and not all individuals, of either sex, are even normally decent.  So another effect of the bigoted stereotypes is to encourage the use of false accusations -- which, when joined with the guns and prisons of the state, can do as much harm as any other loaded weapon.  Those who have large amounts of money can often (not always) successfully defend themselves against false charges, though even then having to do so may be a passage through hell.  But most victims of such things cannot afford the defense; they are often simply smashed into the ground by the power of the state.  The good news is that the problem of false accusations has become so bad in recent years that more and more people are publicizing it.  The bad news -- aside from the fact that female malicious accusers are almost never penalized, much less penalized proportionally to the horror they caused -- is that the massive stereotyping that encourages the false charges is still being opposed only by a few voices crying in the wilderness.

The Overall Pattern

In other aspects of life as well, only half of the historical disadvantages based on gender are being addressed, and often the other half are being reinforced by the efforts that are being made.  An example publicized in recent years concerns the education of children.  Without a doubt, our inherited sex roles and their associated expectations continue to influence instructional institutions in ways that are disadvantageous to girls, and efforts to discover and ameliorate their problems must continue.  But it is likewise true that in other ways, boys are being disadvantaged in those same institutions.  Little boys severely lack same-sex teachers as role models in the early grades -- role models who may seriously influence the perceived value of learning in developing minds.  With their higher levels of physical energy, little boys are less well suited than girls for standard classroom sedentariness.  (The "extra attention" the boys are said to get has much to do with the disciplining and control of that energy.)  These and various other problems leave the boys consistently getting lower grades, and in later years their rates of dropping out altogether are much higher.  (The traumatic effect of failing in school on one's self-concept undoubtedly has a lot to do with some turning to criminality; add this one to the list of crime-encouraging influences that impact more harshly on males.)  Farther along yet, about a fourth more young women than young men are now getting the advantage -- of serious lifelong importance -- of a university education.

Yet all of these problems have been ignored in the recent public discussions of gender-based disadvantage in education.  More role models for young adult women in universities -- acquired by draconian means if necessary -- are constantly urged by people who never mention the problem at the early age when role models are far more crucial.  Massive overhauls of public education (which may not be a bad idea in itself) are proposed to help the girls "catch up," which in the actual circumstances can only mean that the proposers want the boys to fall even farther behind.  To justify such unfair attitudes, once again, a grossly distorted picture is painted of one-way female disadvantage: facts about the boys' disadvantages are suppressed, and sometimes the facts that are presented are seriously distorted. 

In area after area of life, that pattern is the same: a one-sided view of gender reality is presented -- either stressing real female disadvantages and ignoring those of males, or outright fabricating discrimination against females -- by the suppression and manipulation of facts.

What happened?  How did a movement that started out so motivated by concern for truth and justice get so far off track?  The answer evidently includes the common human failings touched on in the course of this essay: groupthink, black-and-white reasoning, and the powerful pull of perceived self-interest.  The operant word in the latter case is 'perceived': let it be stressed once more that whatever discriminates against members of one sex eventually, one way or another, winds up hurting members of the other sex.  The egalitarian feminists of the 1960s and '70s, asked whether they were prepared to give up women's traditional advantages, replied that they were willing to accept all of the consequences of equality.  In the black-and-white vision of the dominant feminists of the years since then, women have never had any advantages whatever, and even today the situation between the sexes is characterized by massive male oppression and widespread misogyny.

By nature, black-and-white (or "kodalithic") thinking involves adopting an extreme position, and being unable to conceive any alternative to it except the position at the other extreme.  This is manifested in the responses standardly given by extremist feminists (of both sexes, as always) whenever any sort of opposition to their views is registered: that it represents opposition to gender equality itself.  Do you object to preferential hiring of either sex?  Obviously, your real goal is to send women back to the kitchen and take society back to the '50s.  Do you oppose negative stereotyping of men as well as that of women?  You are hiding your misogyny behind a mask.  Do you think male victims deserve sympathy too?  You are contemptibly insensitive to women's suffering, if not yourself a violent male in denial.  Your reward for opposing neo-sexism -- which is sometimes as vicious as any bigotry has ever been -- is to be labeled a sexist bigot.

The common buzzword for all of this is 'backlash' -- opposition to any feminist program whatever is backlash against all of women's progress.  There certainly is a strong tendency in human nature to fear progress.  (Sometimes; at other times, the tendency is to jump at the novel and trendy.)  But in its chronic overuse, the charge is often twice false and twice ironic.  It is false in that the opposition to neo-feminist positions is very often not mindless and reflexive (like the literal backlash of a whip) but carefully reasoned, and very often, once again, is aimed not at going back to the way things were but at achieving real equality for the first time.  It is ironic in that the 'backlash' charge has itself come to be made so reflexively, and in that -- as has been noted repeatedly in this article -- it is contemporary feminism itself that is most wedded to preserving, and intensifying, various traditional attitudes.  The sad fact is that feminism today is not a progressive movement; it is profoundly regressive.  More specifically, it is brutally sexist.  The different-but-equal philosophy of moderate traditionalists today arguably is a kind of equality (though whether it is far from the best kind of equality is another question).  But the neo-feminist philosophy is as much grounded in beliefs of opposite-sex inferiority and in self-promotion of "our kind" as the worst of traditional male chauvinism.

Unfortunately, the false charge of reactionism has to date proven highly effective in silencing opposition.  Given the raised public awareness about the many genuine discriminations women have historically suffered, most people are unwilling to publicly defend a position between the two extremes for fear of being seen as supporting the historical extreme.  (That, together with having been kept ignorant of many actual facts about gender equalities and inequalities.)  The sad result is that most of the public debate on gender-equality issues is highly polarized: the only ones usually willing to speak up against the excesses of feminism are conservatives who oppose nearly everything about feminism (in contrast to opposing merely half of what it has come to stand for).  In this sense, the "backlash" charge has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Something for the pseudo-liberals and faux progressives who support the new sexism to think very seriously about, however, is this: the pendulum pushed too far one way has a tendency to go back too far in the other direction.  If you convince the general public that there is indeed no moderate alternative to contemporary feminism, no alternative except going back to the bad old days, they just might decide they have to opt for the bad old days.  There could yet be an actual backlash.

Where do we go from here?

Fortunately, more and more people from all parts of the political spectrum are beginning to be alarmed about the extreme positions in regard to gender which our society has been supporting.  Joining the long-ignored fathers' groups and a few other voices are a variety of new organizations -- notably women's organizations whose explicit purpose is to promote equal rights and equal concern for both sexes.  Less formally, large numbers of individuals are beginning to speak out as well.  Though they differ with one another over a variety of standard political issues, over how much the government should do about social problems and how much should be left to individuals or families or the private sector -- they realize that those who disagree in good will can still work together on important issues, such as gender justice, on which they do agree.  They realize that fundamentally, men and women are allies, not adversaries, and that conflicts of interest between them are to be solved, not by separatism and recriminations, but by inclusion and caring communication.

Concerns for women's wellbeing do not have to be supported by half-truths and outright fabrications -- they can stand up to an honest examination of the facts.  The greater vulnerability of women to assault can be addressed without resorting to the myth that only women are victims and only men are victimizers.  The externally imposed roles that continue to thwart the aspirations and potentials of individual women and men can be studied and addressed without pretending that only females suffer under them, or that they were invented in the first place for the sole benefit of males.  Whether they apply the emotionally charged but vague label 'feminist' to themselves or not, those who genuinely believe in equality between the sexes must begin speaking in a different voice than we have been hearing of late.  To provide one such voice is the purpose of this website.