"Both conservatives and liberals are protective of women and thus reinforce the traditional male-female sex roles, but they use different rationalizations for that protectiveness. The conservative expects women to receive special protection via social custom. The liberal expects women to receive special protection via governement programs. The conservative assumes most women want the traditional female roles, and the traditional female role requires men to protect women. The liberal assumes men's old roles were power and privilege designed to serve men rather than be men's way of protecting women, so the liberal feels women need protection to compensate for the male power structure. Both conservative and liberal therefore conclude that men should protect women, and no one should protect men. . .Special protection with real equality is oxymoronic. . .Men's concerns do not fall on a continuum between conservatism and liberalism, but in a triangular relationship."

- Warren Farrell

The Right-Wing Psychology of Men

The following is an excerpted sub-section of the same name from Chapter 10 of Barbara Ehrenreich's book The Hearts of Men. This chapter, entitled "Backlash -- The Antifeminist Assault on Men", starts out with a discussion of the battle in the `70's over passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was strongly opposed by largely conservative, traditionalist women. This 1983 book, which is noteworthy in at least acknowledging that men have hearts, is generally concerned with the changes in our concepts of masculinity brought on by the decline of the (male) bread-winner role in the post-World War II economy. What Ehrenriech misses, and thus fails to consider, is that the increase in male fecklessness which she sees might be a reaction to women's decreasing reliability as wives, even as they retain their "bread-taker" role. I reproduce this without permission from Anchor Pr/Doubleday, but, hey, you should read the book, maybe even buy a copy from them.

"Short of a program to indenture men into wage-earning for individual women [which is pretty much the point of Clinton's and Congress's 1996 Dead-Beat Dad's Bill...], all that the right can actually offer is the restoration of a moral climate in which male rebellion will once more be either deviant, sinful, or medically unwise. Part of this effort lies in the right's campaign to restore `the consequences' of heterosexual sex, by eliminating abortion and possibly contraception. Another part is the campaign to eliminate or criminalize homosexuality (and in the hate literature I have seen, the gays are disproportionately male). Then there are the multi-pronged efforts, often focused on the content and funding of education, which aim to popularize the Old Testament as a guide to everyday social relationships. Finally, and with less fanfare, there has emerged a New Right understanding of the psychology of men, a set of insights and assumptions which, once again, rationalizes conformity as a means to health.

"Compared to the earlier conformist psychology represented by the neo-Freudians in the fifties and sixties, the New Right psychology is marked, above all, by a profound contempt for men. In the neo-Freudian scheme, men achieved maturity and mental health through their own efforts. They performed their `developmental tasks', at least most men did, and only the minority who fumbled at this undertaking were cordoned off for psychiatric attention as potential homosexuals or victims of permanent immaturity. In lay terms, the deviant minority were failures, half-men, weaklings. But in today's New Right ideology, all men are weak, and there is no redemption through individual works, or even `tasks'. Men, in their weakness, are maintained in working order only by the constant efforts, demands, and attentions of their wives.

"Ann Patterson, an Oklahoma anti-ERA activist interviewed by Jan O'Reilly, put it this way:

`If you take away a man's responsibility to provide for his wife and children, you've taken away everything he has. A woman, after all, can do everything a man can do. And have babies. A man has awe for a woman. Men have more fragile egos.'

"Here the paycheck has become instrumental to some larger therapeutic project, a psychodrama of family dependencies aimed at propping up the fragile male ego. All will be lost if a man's tenuous sense of self-esteem is challenged by a female paycheck, even a meager one. As Kathleen Teague of Virginia Stop-ERA and the American Legislative Exchange Council explained to me:

`If a man doesn't feel needed by his wife, he'll go out and find another woman who does need him. Take the case of a woman who's been a housewife, then she gets women-libberized and goes into the work force. No matter what, her husband isn't going to feel he's number one in her life anymore. So she will lose him to a more conservative woman.'

"What a more conservative woman will offer is explained by Phyllis Schlafly in The Power of the Positive Woman. `A wife must appreciate and admire her husband', for the marriage will not last unless `she is willing to give him the appreciation and admiration his manhood craves'. Fortunately, women themselves have no such cravings, for she tells us, `Whereas a woman's chief emotional need is active (i.e., to love), a man's prime emotional need is passive (i.e., to be appreciated or admired).'

"This new, 1970s style right-wing analysis of the heterosexual bond is a far cry from the traditional conservative view, in which the sexes were united by the natural, God-given, complementarity of male strength and female weakness. In the nineteenth century, for example, a common argument against women's suffrage was that women should not be allowed to vote for laws that they were physically incapable of enforcing, though, of course, no corpulent state legislator was ever called upon to apprehend and personally detain a lawbreaker. (Women's strength was presumed to be of an ethereal, moral kind, which would be instantly compromised by contact with a ballot box.) But today's New Right ideology inverts the traditional imagery of gender roles: Men are `passive, fragile'; while women are `active' and [like Barbie] `can do everything'. Taylor Caldwell's insistence on women's innate strength and competence is echoed again and again by Phyllis Schlafly. At the victory party for the defeat of the ERA, Schlafly attributed her side's victory to their greater self-confidence as women. The feminists, she said, `are victims of their own ideology; they believe that women can't do anything, that women are oppressed. But we of course know we ... can go right out and do anything we want.'

"In their shift away from the traditional axis of male strength and activity vs. female weakness and passivity, our modern antifeminists were no doubt influenced by their own adversaries: feminism, with its insistence on women's strength and ability, and humanistic psychology, with its discovery of men's softness and vulnerability. For example, Tim LaHaye, a member of the national board of the Moral Majority and a prolific family-life advisor whose almost exclusive published source of information is the Bible, opens his 1977 book, Understanding the Male Temperment, on a note lifted from the literature of men's liberation:

`For the past thirty years, six-foot-four John Wayne has stalked through the American imagination as the embodiment of manhood.... He has left not only a trail of broken hearts and jaws everywhere, but millions of fractured male egos, which could never quite measure up to the two-fisted, ramrod-backed character who conquered the Old West. The truth of the matter is that no man could measure up to that myth in real life -- not even John Wayne.'

"The revision of right-wing psychology that took men from being natural protectors to being natural weaklings has not been easy and is certainly not complete. After allowing men to dismount from the John Wayne image, LaHaye moves quickly to exonerate his fellows: `Personally, I'm convinced that most men of our generation are as good as men have ever been. Oh, I have to admit that we hear regular reports of cop-outs, dissenters, and deserters of wives, children, and country today -- but what's new about that? Western history reveals that we have always had `yellow-bellied hoss thieves' and wife-beaters.'

"The Heritage Foundation's Onalee McGraw seemed more conflicted by the contradictions between male behavior and what was formerly taken to be natural or divine law. At the beginning of our conversation she shared with me her `premise' that `the permanent heterosexual union is natural; I even say this is a quality given by a divine person and is written so to speak in the heart of man'. Yet she warmed to the subject of the male rebellion and the collapse of sanctions against footloose breadwinners, she asserted knowingly, `The men are going to leave [their wives] if they don't have to pay, because men are this way. Especially, you know, when they get into middle age.'

"Once it is admitted that what is `written on the heart of man' may be of the same genre as what is written on the walls of men's rooms, then the world becomes a much less secure place in which to marry and raise a family. As Schlafly's troops forthrightly admit, the interests of men no longer coincide with those of women, at least in the short term, and the short term may last until the onset of baldness and angina. Taken just a little further, the right's negative reappraisal of male nature implies that men are not just a problem for women, but for any kind of stable social order. This radical view, anticipated in rough outline by Freud, is the cornerstone of the social theory of the best-selling right-wing writer George Gilder. Gilder elevates the grasping anxiety of the Schlaflyites to a moral crusade: Men are the problem, and wives, in the old-fashioned sense, are the solution."

-- Debra (Thisis@it.com), July 19, 2001

Answers

For a more primitive (and perhaps more sensible) perspective on the roles of men and women, read "A Law of Blood, The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation", by John Phillip Reid.

-- cwy (cwy@cwy.cwy), July 19, 2001.

The introductory paragraph reminds me of the reason for selecting blue for boy infants and pink for girls. It was thought (way back when) that the color blue would protect people from evil (and the devil). So boys, being very sacred beings, needed the protection and blue was always used to wrap the little ones. No one gave a hoot about the little girls, so pink was chosen and it seemed people accepted that as the color for little girls.

-- A big boy (wrap@me.in.blue), July 19, 2001.

"So boys, being very sacred beings," Farrell would only shudder at being so misunderstood.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), July 19, 2001.