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Subject: Why men are threatened by women From: fathers  Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 16:18:55 +0000 ()
How the Web Was Won
Subject: Why men are threatened by women
From: fathers 
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 16:18:55 +0000 ()

Newsgroups: soc.women
Organization: Internet Online Services
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ar231@FreeNet.Carleton.CA Karen Gordon wrote:

The following is from Susan Faludi's 'Backlash'):

                        __________________________

But what exactly is it about women's euality that even its slightest shadow
threatens to erase male identity?  What is it about the way we frame 
'manhood' that, even today, it still depends so much on 'feminine' 
dependence for its survival?

A large nationwide poll that has tracked social attitudes for the last two
decades (Yankelovich Monitor survey) takes us a good way toward a possible
answer.....

For 20 years, the Monitor's pollsters have asked its subjects to define
'masculinity'.  And for 20 years, the leading definition, ahead by a huge
margin, has never changed.....
It isn't being a leader, athlete, lothario, decision maker, or even just
being 'born male'.  It is simply this: being a "good provider for his 
family".

If establishing 'masculinity' depends most of all on succeeding as the prime
breadwinner, then it is hard to imagine a force more threatening to fragile
American manhood than the feminist drive for economic equality.
And if supporting a family epitomizes what it means to 'be a man', then it
is little wonder that the backlash erupted when it did - against the back-
drop of the '80s economy.

In this period, the 'traditional' man's real wages shrank dramatically (a
22% free-fall in households where white men were the sole breadwinners),
and the traditional male breadwinner himself became an endangered species
(representing less than 8% of all households).



**********
It is precisely this type of "misinformation" which makes men revile 
feminists showing both a disregard for the facts and a misunderstanding 
of the statistics.  Inflation in this period reduced the value of the 
dollar by 11 fold. To the buyer of a home this looked like an increase in 
the "value" of the home of 11 times, but this is misleading.  GNP per 
worker in 1973 was $11,235, but adjusted for this decline in the value of 
the dollar it was $112,350.  GNP per worker today is $48,000 at best.

To refer to an overall national decline in GNP per worker of at least 57% 
as "a 22% free-fall" looks very much like a hidden agenda.  And that 
hidden agenda is to conceal the very traumatic effects of a failed 
feminist theory - that women in the workforce would IMPROVE incomes for 
everyone.  Instead, EVERYONE, men and women alike, suffered.
**************




That the ruling definition of 'masculinity' remains so economically based
helps to explain, too, why the backlash has been voiced most bitterly by
two groups of men: blue-collar workers - devasted by the shift to a SERVICE
economy, and by younger baby boomers - denied the comparative riches their
fathers and elder brothers enjoyed.




**************
Gross misinformation again!  Economies do not "shift to a SERVICE 
economy". They lose their competitiveness, then they lose manufacturing, 
then they lose the "service" which supported manufacturing.  Service 
industries support manufacturing, and some time after manufacturing is 
gone there is nothing to support, and then service economies are gone.  
The only reason the service industries are still around is that we are 
living off of our laurels.
The dentist who drilled the teeth of the children of the auto worker who 
built cars which captured 60% of the world's auto market in the 1960s 
didn't create the dollars which paid his salary - the sale of the car 
did.  And today that same dentist drills the teeth of children of auto 
workers who build cars which now capture less than 20% of the world's 
auto market is far more likely not to get paid.  He can drill all the 
teeth he wants but will not make the US competitive.  But if we get rid 
of affirmative action, women in the workforce, & government 
over-regulation, we might be able to build cars competitively, and MIGHT 
recapture some of the world's auto market, which might eventually put 
some dentists back in business.
*****************



The '80s was the decade in which plant closings put blue-collar men out of
work by the millions, and only 60% found new jobs - about half of those at
lower pay.  It was a time when, of all men losing earning power, younger
baby-boom men were losing the most.  The average man under 30 was earning
25-30% less than his counterpart in the early '70s.
Worst off was the average young man with only a high-school graduation: he
was making only $18,000 - half the earnings of his counterpart a decade
earlier.




***************
Wrong!  Again!  A California male in 1973 earning the average GNP per 
Worker of $11,235 could buy a 3,000 square foot house for $35,000.  A 
California male in 1995 earning the average GNP per Worker of $48,000 
can't even come close to buying that same house, which now costs $420,000 
even with 23 years of wear and tear.  Forget about a new 3,000 square 
foot house.
Do the math.  In 1973 that house cost 3.1 times his income but today it 
costs 8.75 his income and he can't even buy it.  The purchasing power of 
his income declined a bit more than "25-30%", didn't it?
*****************




Inevitably, these losses in earning power would breed other losses.
As pollster Louis Harris observed, economic polarization spawned the most
dramatic attitudinal change recorded in the last decade and a half: a
spectacular DOUBLING in the proportion of Americans who describe themselves
as feeling "powerless".

This segment, now representing a remarkable 1/5 of the study's national
sample, was dominated by young men - median age 33 - disproportionately
single, who were slipping down the income ladder - and furious about it.

They were the younger, poorer brothers of the baby boom, the ones who
weren't so celebrated in '80s media and advertising tributes to that gen-
eration.

The men who belonged to this group had one other distinguishing trait: they
feared and reviled FEMINISM.

"It's these downscale men, the ones who can't earn as much as their fathers,
who we find are the most threatened by the women's movement," observes
Susan Hayward, senior vice-president at Yankelovich.  "They represent 20%
of the population that cannot handle the changes in women's roles.  They
were not well employed; they were the first ones laid off; they had no 
savings and not very much in the way of prospects for the future".



*************
And what they have a very hard time recognizing is that, in order to 
achieve "equality" between the genders, educators nationwide subtly but 
very effectively deprived them of a good education.  In order to narrow a 
sociallization "gender gap" teachers gave the benefit of the doubt to 
girls and sent very powerful messages to the boys that their outstanding 
performance just would not be recognized or rewarded.  The result?  A 75 
point drop in SAT scores, a 14% decline in ACT math scores, and a 
widening of the "gender gap" from 12.2% to 13.7%. 
Add to that affirmative action which by design displaced qualified men 
with less qualified women, demoralized the rest of the organization when 
it was clear that performance was no longer the determining factor in 
promotions, and demotivated superior performers who then either sat back 
and quit trying or left entire industries.
**************




Other surveys would reinforce this observation.  By the late '80s, American
Male Opinion Index found that the LARGEST of its seven demographic groups 
was now the 'Change Resistors' - a 24% segment of the population that was 
dis-proportionately under-employed, "resentful", convinced that they were 
"being left behind" by a changing society, and most hostile to feminism.

To single out these men alone for blame, however, would be unfair.  The
backlash's public agenda has been framed and promoted by men of far more
affluence and influence than the 'Resistors' - men at the helm in the media,
business, and politics. Poorer or less-educated men have not so much been 
the creators of the anti-feminist thesis as its 'receptors'.  Because 
they are most vulnerable to its message, they have picked up and played 
back the backlash at distortingly high volume.

The Resistors have dominated the ranks of the militant wing of the '80s
anti-abortion movement, the list of plaintiffs filing 
'reverse-discrimination' and 'men's rights' lawsuits,


************
But still nowhere near the volume of the pseudo-harrassment lawsuits 
filed by women.
************


and the steadily mounting police rolls of rapists and sexual assailants.



***********
The decline in the "father-headed household" led to much more social 
pathology than just an increase in rapists and sexual assailants.  This 
is just the tip of the iceberg represented by the "mother-headed household".
**********



They are men like the notorious Charles Stuart, the struggling fur salesman
in Boston who murdered his pregnant wife - a lawyer - because he feared that
she - better educated and more successful - was gaining the "upper hand".
They are young men with little to no prospects - like Yusef Salaam - one of
6 charged with raping and crushing the skull of a professional woman jogging
in Central Park.  As he later told the court: he felt "like a midget, a 
mouse, something less than a man".

And just across the border (Canada) they are men like Marc Lepine, the un-
employed 25-year-old engineer who gunned down 14 women in a University of
Montreal engineering classroom because they were "all a bunch of fucking
feminists."

The economic victims of the era are men who know 'someone' has made off with
their future - and they suspect the thief is a woman.

At no time did this seem more true than in the early '80s, when, for the
first time, women outrankeing between 12th and 17th place depending on 
whose statistics are used.
******************




The start of the '80s provided not only a political but an economic 'hair
trigger' to the backlash.  It was a moment of symbolic crossover points
for men and women: the first time white men became less than 50% of the
workforce; the first time more women than men enrolled in colleges; the
first time more than 50% of women worked; the first time more than 50% of
MARRIED women worked; the first time more women with children than without
children worked.

Significantly, 1980 was the year the U.S. Census officially stopped
defining the 'head of the household' as the husband.

To some of the men falling back, it certainly has looked as if women have
done the pushing.  If there has been a 'price to pay' for women's equality,
then it seems to these men that THEY are paying for it.

The man in the White House during much of the '80s did little to discourage
this view.  "Part of the unemployment is not as much recession," Ronald
Reagan said in a 1982 address on the economy, "as it is the great increase
of the people going into the job market, and - ladies, I'm not picking on
anyone but....- because of the increase in women who are working today."


**********
But what he should have said is "With an extra 21 million females in the 
workforce a decline in GNP per Worker by 55% is statistical evidence that 
their contribution to productivity is less than zero - it is a huge 
negative".  It was, and he knew it, but he is a politician who could not 
tell the whole truth about this problem. 
I am not.  The truth is that every bit of statistical evidence regarding 
the effects of feminism, women in the workforce, "equality", the high 
divorce and illegitimate rates, reveal them to have had not a single 
positive effect on society.
*********




In reality, the past decade's economic pains most often took a dispropor-
tionate toll on women, not men.  And working women's so-called 'gains' 
under Reagan had precious little to do with men's losses.  If women 
appeared to be snapping up more jobs in the Reagan era (of 1.56% annual 
job growth - the smallest rate under any administration since Eisenhower) 
that's only because women had few male competitors for these new 
employment 'opportunities'.  About 1/3 of the new jobs were at or below 
the poverty level, up from 1/4 a decade earlier, and lowly 'female' 
service jobs in retail and service industries accounted for 77% of these 
'opportunities'.




*************
This is the only accurate part of your post, but it omitted the 
statistics. Several feminist articles have noted that women's incomes 
relative to men's have increased, and this is true until you look at the 
complete story.  In this 2 decades after-inflation incomes for men 
declined 67% and those for women declined only 66%.  Feminists view this 
as a "gain".

This is the best we can expect from feminism.
*************



regards,


fathers


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