Dear Newsweek Editors,
What a wonderful, long overdue milestone in U.S. gender relations is your
9/13/99 cover-story of Susan Faludi''s new book, "Stiffed: The Betrayal Of
The American Man". It is well beyond time that men may be seen as merely
desperately mortal human beings, instead of being incessantly demeaned and
popularly dismissed as a morally, ethically, even biologically inferior
class of sub-humans. Thank you. This milestone is not one gun shot or
bomb-blast too soon.
However, Ms. Faludi's work barely touches the surface. While her prose are
poetic, and her conclusion that American men are getting a raw deal is just
and somewhat hopeful, she falls way short of a comprehensive, fair,
anthropological understanding of cultural mechanics. Though she and
Newsweek deserve maximum applause for this brave attempt, alluding finally
to equitable compassion for men, she remains understandably shackled by her
sexist-feminist semantics and evil stereotypes of men, and by her loyalty to
the self-serving moral superiority of sexist-feminism. (Of which she knows
she is perhaps the preeminent author).
For instance, after six years of research to tritely explain today's boys as
the product of their wartime forefathers' failures, (what less could you
expect from such a feminist icon?), how could Faludi avoid the following
statistics? Our WWI drafted grandfathers could expect to live nearly as
long as our suffragette grandmothers. Only three to four generations later,
and after approaching a half century of feminism, we U.S. males today can
expect to live 7.5 years less than the women we men are still mortally
obligated to protect and provision! And this mortal exploitation is largely
because we males are 95% of workplace mortality. As men, we are obligated
to lifetime careers of providing the wealth, infrastructure, and resources
for women such as Faludi and her sisterhood to do 82% of U.S. consumer
spending and receive 89% of tax-paid government entitlement funds. Not to
mention therewith America consumes 65% of the Earth's resources, by some
reports. Where do all the 175 millions of American women get all that
money, ability, environmental impact, and longevity, all so blindly taken
for granted as their gender right (not privilege), if not for the blood,
sweat, tears, sacrifices, generosity, and goodness of us mortally disposable
American males? Also, how is it that feminists fail to acknowledge the
massively dominant cultural power of motherhood, as Faludi here does?
Fatuous Faludi is disingenuous in her avoiding ownership of how the hurt,
betrayed soles of U.S. men have been stiffed. Largely because of her prior
Pulitzer prose, "Backlash", today men are systematically denied freedom of
speech, the right to assemble, equal protection under the law, equal
parenting, equal alimony, equal property settlements, equal social welfare
programs, equal entitlements, and are systematically fired for the mere
comfort and rumors of female employees. Let alone denied equal compassion.
(Faludi should interview me. I have a hell of a story to tell her about the
inequitable treatment of genders in the workplace. Though I'm hardly unique
among men who are violently, if not directly physically, abused by
power-mongering, vindictive anti-male spinsters nurtured by Faludi.)
Largely because of Faludi we as a society dwell on the freedom and choices
of women to be- or not to be- mothers, but on the obligations of
unintentional, disposed,-- so-called "dead-beat"-- fathers and husbands.
(How is it that men are characterized as afraid of commitment, when women
initiate 72% of divorces?) We dwell on the taboo violations of sacrosanct
female bodies, but ignore the circumcision, conscription, and unequal death
rates of male bodies. Let alone male soles. (Why is it that domestic
violence and male behavior are virtually synonymous in Faludi's writing,
when the vast majority of physical child abuse is inflicted by mothers, and
the vast majority of that abuse is inflicted on boys, boys that may survive
to be men, men told that women want equal treatment? Let alone emotional
abuse. Does Faludi not acknowledge the power of her own mother because of
some legacy of emotional abuse? If so, she would not be alone in her ilk.)
Per the same cultural mechanisms, we dwell on the feminist semantics of
"glass-ceilings" and "comparable worth", but ignore unequal compulsory
risks, stress-related mortal illnesses, and life-long loyalty, obligations,
and death rates in the workplace. All these disproportionately effect men,
that men may win success (what ever that is), may be valued and approved of,
and regardless of those elusive personal rewards-- men obligated to provide
for women and children. Per feminist values and our consumer responsive
media-- we dwell on the self-serving feminist proclamations of the misogyny
of a patriarchal society, as evidenced by women reporting attempted suicide
ten times more than men. We are feminist engineered to dispassionately
avoid the larger truth that males (being alienated, marginalized, isolated,
and abandoned in a feminist consumer convenient throw-away society) actually
commit suicide four times as often as females. Women intuitively talk and
socialize as an end in itself; while lonely hurt men do physical things.
The squeaky wheel gets the attention. Dead men don't squeak. Patriarchy?
Where gender discrimination is absolutely illegal in government we sell
government postage stamps to benefit female breast cancer, ignoring that
prostrate cancer is nearly as common but only one tenth as funded as breast
cancer. Per the same mechanisms, we assiduously avoid the understanding and
semantics of misandry. Men are so stiffed and disposable that the word
misandry is not even in most American dictionaries. Including Faludis?
A major reason why a men's movement has not evolved is a simple matter of
fact-- of disposable time. Men have been, and remain, more time-constrained
to appeal to, to protect, and to provide for others (mostly women) through
lifetimes of mortal obligations. Men went to Vietnam, and still go to
Selective Service, and to trade and career-training schools to chase careers
unto death and to seek women's approvals and intimate favors. Men do not
go to academia to amass four decades of narcissistic sexist libraries,
narcissistic sexist academic disciplines, narcissistic selfish political
movements, and lucrative narcissistic pop-journalist celebrity status, all
whereby to objectify, manipulate, exploit, and dispose of the other gender
as ever-more inferior-, yet ever-more responsible-, hate-objects. Here in
Seattle, at the University of Washington, .02 percent (that's two one
hundredths of one percent) of the shelf-space of gender-studies literature
is given to male-friendly treatises. How have men been stiffed? By men
buying into feminism, believing that feminism is palpable, new-generation
humanism. By building ceilings and doors since the Paleolithic to shelter
women, then opening doors for women, to then be despised, demeaned, and
rejected as evil patriarchs for holding doors open for women. And when men
don't hold doors open for women then, no matter, men are characterized as
evil discriminating patriarchs of closed glass ceilings. men are stiffed by
expecting that in yielding space, responsibility, obligation, and effort to
women in the traditional hazardous male workplace, it would mean that women
would be equally willing, responsible, and expected to suffer the equal
mortal risks, insults, hazards, hostilities, limitations, and debilitations
in order to achieve status and success in the workplace. But instead, men
in the workplace, finding themselves immediately disposable for the mere
sense of security, protection, and power of women in the workplace. It's OK
to obligate disposable male bodies to be vaporized as combat pilots; but by
God and Tailhook, those same men are destroyed and pilloried for the taboo
of offending and touching sacrosanct female bodies. Stiffed? When will we
be equally protective of men's bodies, psyches, and welfare the way, and to
the degree, we are about females? When will we care equally about males as
people? Faludi and Newsweek may now be the start. But its a suspect
commercial, self-serving beginning. When will it be equally unacceptable to
sexually mutilate 80% of American males as infant baby boys, one every 20
seconds, as it is to merely touch a woman? A major reason a male movement
is lagging is because male reactionary anger to such ubiquitous double
standards is treated as a biological, chromosomal defect. Faludi
acknowledges that male anger is given no legitimacy. We've been socially
engineered (mostly by HER!!) to avoid seeing male anger (i.e., backlash) as
a predictable response by naturally sensitive humans to ubiquitous,
exploitive, endless, mortal social injustice. Instead, because of her, male
reactionary anger is aggressively fired, divorced, prosecuted, and
incarcerated. Such anti-male culture is a direct result of Faludi's
massively influential history of wrongly and unjustly asserting that men are
dominant and in control, and are morally inferior for their backlash to
feminism. She reaped massive income and icon status for a book that chewed
up, spit out, raped, and abandoned men.
Another reason for an unequal male-movement is that Newsweek did not give a
cover-story to Warrren Farrell and his 1994 book, The Myth of Male Power.
Farrell's work was vastly more scientific, encyclopedic, and conclusively
documented to make the very same points as now does the Pulitzered, more
florid Faludi five years later. But in this consumer society, a truth, a
notion, or a perception of gender is not valid or socially acceptable until
a female feminist says it. A man does not have the power to say in his
gender's behalf what a Christina Hoff Somers, a Cathy Young, a Kathleen
Parker, a Camille Paglia, or now a new Susan Faludi can. This clearly
displays the massively superior moral power and social credence that women
hold over society in general and over men in particular, as mothers, lovers,
wives, as coddled dilettante feminists, and as anti-feminist journalists.
This female power is the primal, dominant force of human evolution. When it
is realized (1) that the instinctual doll play of girls (, i.e., the
resourceful objectifying and engineering of humans and society for
self-centered, self-actualizing gratification and affirmation) is
unfathomably more powerful in human culture than is the more physical
instinctual play of boys, and (2) that dolls appear in girl's graves at the
emergence of Homo-sapiens and of human culture 30 - 35,000 years ago, when
it is realized (3) that for the 700 generations of humanity since then it is
the women who have been given priority in the lifeboats and given the
priority protection and welfare of sacred domestic environments, and when it
is realized (4) that the interests, preservation, and intimate authority of
females (as mothers , lovers, and wives) remain the dominant ends of human
evolution and of virtually all human behavior of both genders, etc., and
when (5) it is understood that the booty of marauding men, be they
Scythians, Huns, Vikings, Conquistadors, or Walter Mitty, ends up in the
graves of their contemporary women, when (6) these things are gratefully
acknowledged by national celebrity feminists such as the here failing
Faludi -- (7) only then will the rapacious feminist lies of so-called
"patriarchy", "male power", and "female victimhood", etc., ad naseam, all be
realized as absurdly cruel and evil doll-play behavior. I.e., by the most
enviable, privileged recipients and products of all human evolution, so far.
I.e., by Ivy-League, dilettante American feminist high-priestesses. I.e.,
by sexually stunted, sociopathic spinsters self-actualizing in complete
academic and capitalistic freedom. How insane it has been for the Katherine
MacKinnons, Andrea Dwarkins, Gloria Steinems, and the former Susan Faludis
to lucratively assert that males, male power, even sex itself, are a
conspiracy to subordinate women. If men and patriarchy really ruled, such
events and celebrities of insanely selfish feminism would not be possible,
not explicable, not even imaginable. More worldly, feminine, European
women are baffled by the hostility, prudery, ignorance, and power of
American feminism, and by how it is demeaning, destructive, and uncivilizing
to both women and men. And the world is baffled by America's violence.
Men are not so stiffed by the failings of their fathers per feminist
Faludi's assertions, as they have been stiffed by Susan Faludi, herself.
Until Faludi has the integrity to acknowledge and apologize for her own
monumental contribution to our social morays of gender lashings and
backlashes, her pretty prose and cover-girl pose now on newsstands across
Western Civilization are largely commercial opportunism. Until Faludi, the
arch-feminist, admits her own stiffing of-, and the subsequent alienation
of-, males, and until Faludi acknowledges her own contribution to the
endemic desperate reactionary "backlash" of male anti-social violent
behavior, and until Faludi aggressively demonstrates her deliberate
distancing from her evil sisterhood ilk of MacKinnon, Jill Ireland, Steinem,
Dwarkin, etc., beware of this commercial hypocrite lioness, Newsweek-covered
in sheep's skin. Faludi has much too much to answer for, before she so
gratuitously asserts, 'that feminism is so big-hearted that it can encompass
an enlightened welfare and justice for men'. What?!? No comment could
stiff men more than such a fatuous and absurdly vain assertion as that!!!
(And men are inferior if they use the word "fisherman" instead of the
feminist word "fisher"?1? While feminism is to represent men?!?) Feminism
is NOT neo-humanism!! Feminism is sexism, pure and simple. Feminism is
institutional, systematic, comprehensive, bigoted, selfish, government
supported, tyrannical, even religious sexism. Period. It objectifies,
dehumanizes, exploits, suppresses, marginalizes, fires, kills, and disposes
men. Persona non grata. It even has narcissistically disposed of males as
pronouns from much of our now dysfunctionally self-conscious language.
Feminism is no more humanistic, and no less pernicious and hurtful, than is
racism. All this in large measure is due to a decade of Faludi's monstrous
influence on gender perceptions in America. Faludi's condescending
self-justification for sexist feminism and her own historic central role in
it, shows how absurdly myopic, hopelessly narcissistic, and cruelly inhumane
are American feminism's high priestesses.
All critically said by someone who a dozen years ago was the most ardent
feminist of anyone I know; i.e., myself. Still, Newsweek and Susan Faludi
now demonstrate an unprecedented milestone of necessary gender
reconciliation in America; that is, if civilization is to advance to a more
compassionate, inclusive humanism. Let alone survive. Due to anti-male
feminism, many have not survived. Tragically, for all those victims of
desperately inarticulate backlash male rage, Faludi's now new, marketable,
bigger heart comes meaninglessly too late. Tellingly, Newsweek's current
cover story could not be achieved by any man on behalf of men. Look how
feminist-dominated New York publishers black-balled Warren Ferrell. Maybe,
just maybe, Columbine High, Springfield, Oregon, Oklahoma City, etc., ad
naseam tragedies of backlsashing "dis-ed" males, would not have happened if
five years ago Newsweek made Warren Farrell it's cover-story of a newly
legitimate social movement of care and compassion for males. Maybe, just
maybe, 100 million socially diffident people having an accidental
y-chromosome would not have need nor occasion to vent such suppressed
anti-social anger in their own domestic privacy, if bravely nowhere else.
Nonetheless, thank you, for this surprising milestone, for anything
male-compassionate, finally in the major American commercial news media.
Why has there been no comparable male-movement? As Faludi points out in her
interview of Shanyika Shakur, male anger is not legitimized until it is
recognized by the media. Maybe now the legitimacy of male backlash rage can
be given equal free speech, safe to assemble in public and not diffidently
coerced in the bedroom. Maybe now a legitimate social movement can arise
with such inclusive humanism that it can recognize the goodness of men, even
white males, as people, too. But not if it's "stiffingly" called
"feminism".
Respectfully yours,
Peter Maule
Kirkland, Washington
