What's wrong with men?

This started as a response to a post by Graham Lineham & veered off course.

Ramblings from 3:30 am on a Saturday.

The "what's wrong with men?" question is less about women's empathy than women's frustration. Name an existential threat to our species or our planet that is not driven by men or masculinism? Some of our more "successful" men like Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley obsess about masculinity because they know they lack it - just like the guys on Twitter who declare themselves "alpha males" definitely are not - because any positive manifestation of the masculine is observed. This obsession with masculinism - the most negative manifestation of masculinity - is what has our society rewarding psychopathy in business and politics, driving the planet to the limits of Her resources and vitality, and the Western world flirting with Fascism. “Strong Men” are bad leaders. Fascism, by definition, is misery for the masses, even if you agree with it. Profit at any cost is exploitation and eventually suicide by our species.

I have a meme somewhere of an older, brightly dressed woman holding a sign that says "Women would carpet bomb the world with groceries" which encapsulates the difference between feminine and masculine orientations. Men are still waging war and capitalism has stores dumping perfectly edible and wearable goods, often new in package, into dumpsters, destined for landfills, instead of donating it or giving it away because that's profitable. We raise enough food to feed the world 7 times over, but we waste 40% of it and we still have people dying from starvation. There are 6 homes sitting empty for every poor sick person sleeping in the streets. Women are managers - we manage not only homes but hospital wards, schools, offices, businesses and budgets of every description and anyone who grew up in a middle or lower class family knows Mom can make a great dinner out of not much at all. The countries who had the lowest infections and death rates during the pandemic were run by women, most notable Jacinda Arden of New Zealand. We want to know "what's wrong with men" so we can fix it!

One last note about men as emotionally unstable women - men like to say women can't be trusted with power because one week of the month we are "irrational." When a woman is menstruating her hormonal balances are at their most similar to the hormonal distribution in men. If women are irrational for that one week, then men might just be irrational all the time.

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Traditional masculinity is what got us into this mess. It hasn't been eclipsed, people can barely see it because it's still endemic. It’s Patriarchy. I hesitate to use the word because a lot of people, men in particular, stop listening. That’s part culture and part a lack of education in Herstory, which is a Feminist reconstruction of history. Feminist scholars, archeologists, librarians and Priestesses have sifted through the dust and ashes of what was left when the forces of patriarchy destroyed the old world and all the evidence of women’s roles in it. Our groves were cut down, sacred places defiled or covered over with churches and Cathedrals, pantheons reordered to put father gods at the top in place of the Great Mother Goddess, myths rewritten so that images of Feminine power are murdered, raped, subdued. This Feminist scholarship birthed the field of Women’s Studies which was so successful it only took a few years for men to colonize it and rename it as Gender Studies, once again writing out the females. We need to bring Women’s Studies back. People need to hear a view of history not written by white Christian men. One that is older, deeper, kinder. What we call pre-history is dismissed as unimportant. It wasn’t what we’ve been led to believe. There were no cavemen dragging women back to their caves by their hair as the comic Alley Oop programmed us to think. There were instead matrilineal kinship groups that worked cooperatively creating civilizations of art and beauty that traveled and traded across the world in what is now called “the ancient mariner culture. We are taught that “ancient” Greece and Rome were the beginning of civilization but they were actually the end of it.

This world has been soaked in blood by patriarchal/masculine values of conquest, violence and entitlement for 6,000 years. Imperialism is masculinism. Capitalism is masculinism. The way we reward psychopathy in business and government is masculinism. Do you know when America started caring about people? When Frances Perkins created Social Security. It took a woman to refocus the government to help old people instead of leaving them to live in poverty. FDR created the New Deal and greedy old men have been trying to undo it ever since. Capitalists keep wanting to privatize SS, or turn it over to Wall Street, because they can't stand the idea that there's a pool of money from which they cannot profit. Corporations are cutting down the rainforests every day and murdering activists who try to stop them, though destroying that rainforest will eventually kill them, too. This response is a little disjointed - sorry about that - so I'll jump to the chase. I believe the violent imposition of patriarchy on what had previously been a fairly peaceful world was the worst thing that ever happened to humans. It is destroying us. Our planet is a living being that can heal Herself and if we don't get back in balance, Her immune system is going to slough us off like a virus. It's happening right now - a 98 degree ocean in Florida, tornados, floods, wildfires, heat domes, ice failing to form in the global South.

We have to stop.

The best thing that came out of the pandemic was showing us how resilient Nature is. People stayed off the beaches and the sea turtles thrived. The hole in the Ozone Layer healed because we weren't filling the skies with pollution. Wildlife started moving back into their old habitats. Gaia got room to breathe for the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Age and healing began. As usual for humans, we didn’t learn the lesson. We’ve mostly gone back to our old ways. There are pockets of Progress on the planet, mostly in places like Iceland, Finland, Northern and Western parts of Europe. They have more females in leadership and they make better decisions. They ban chemicals that we use in our most popular foods. They have robust Social Safety Nets that provide free or affordable health care, education and housing. They reward innovation, and put corrupt bankers and other white collar crooks in jail. They value their children in ways we just don’t. The US is embroiled in fights over abortion, long since settled in other developed nations, we have religious extremists trying to control our government while our allies watch us in disbelief because religion plays little, if any role in their politics. We waste food and goods at enormous rates instead of giving it to the poor, but we want those who need help to jump through hoops for paternalistic means tests. Why are we so stingy? Because we care about profit instead of people. Because patriarchy.

Feminism, women’s values, would mean getting those goods to people who need them. Educating kids instead of indoctrinating them and both the Left and the Right are guilty of that. Using the time and money wasted on the abortion fight to help people, build a better safety net, give people Medicare for All and a Universal Basic Income. Buy up some of the 6 empty homes for every homeless person and house those poor people.

There are thousands women like Frances Perkins in our political system. All the patriarchy has to do is get out of their way. That’s what it means when they say “The Future is Female” - if we want a future, it’s going take women in positions of power to redirect the waste to the people who need it, to design sustainable systems, to take a cue from Jacinda Arden and start defining our success as a society by the conditions of our people instead of our GDP.