Reconsidering Feminism

I realize that some of the following thoughts and words I am about to post may be interpreted as sexist, however, I simply ask of the reader to first interpret the message behind the post and consider it and then if you still think I’m sexist...then maybe I am sexist but maybe we just do not see eye to eye on the matter.  I thought about avoiding this topic for a while for fear of being misinterpreted or offending others, but then recently I have come to see just how passionate I do feel about this topic and that I would be compromising my passion/desire for truth by not expressing my beliefs on the matter.  So here it is, reconsidering feminism...

Over the last thirty to forty years there has been much said in criticism of the male establishment in Western Civilization--and rightfully so.  I believe that the establishment should always be constructively criticized and questioned.  However, in the recent decade or so, I have began to question the current state of our civilization (in particular, the American civilization) and the methods by which our society chose to respond to/embrace the feminist critiques of the male establishment.  These questions particularly arise when I take a look at the current state of the American family.

To start out with, the current illegitimacy rate or rate of children born out of wedlock in the United States stands at about 38%-40%.  Among non-Hispanic whites the rate is 25.4%, among Hispanics (of all races) the rate is 47.9%, and among non-Hispanic blacks the rate is 69.5%.  This is more than double the illegitimacy rate of 1975 and prior to the 1960’s, the illegitimacy rate among non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks was almost dead even.  

So what? So people don’t necessarily wait to have kids anymore...yes I’m sure that’s upsetting to Conservative Christians and those with Victorian-Era values, but marriage is ultimately just a social construct that varies depending on the culture anyways, so it’s not the end of the world.  Maybe not, but what puts these statistics into perspective for me is that the divorce rate in the United States in that same time period correspondingly increased to nearly 50% (where it is today).  Which tells me that not only are people having kids outside of marriage but these kids are not being raised by nuclear units that incorporate both of their biological parents--they are either being raised in displaced/dispersed families or single-parent families and that IS a red flag in my book.  Why?  What’s so bad about being raised in a non-traditional or a single-parent family?  It’s just the direction in which the contemporary family has evolved, right?  That’s when I put my foot down.  No--no matter how much social evolutionists may try to sugar coat it, living in displaced or single-parent families will never replace or even compare to living in a two-parent household.  Period.

Study after study after study has shown that children who are raised in displaced or single-parent families are exponentially more likely to have severe behavioral problems, engage in delinquent behaviors, have low academic performance in school, and have a higher drop-out rate.  Not only that, they are also vastly more likely, when grown, to engage in criminal activity, high-risk sexual behaviors, struggle with drug and alcohol abuse and have displaced or single-parent households of their own.  In fact, I’ve even heard of recent studies that have shown that if you were to subtract the criminal population raised by single-parent families, you would have a dead-even crime rate between whites and blacks--dead-even, no disparity whatsoever.  Let’s just be real--It is NO secret that in ANY neighborhood in the nation, wherever you find high rates of children raised by displaced or single-parent families, you will find an equal (like take a mirror and wipe it with windex--exactly equal) abundance of households of low socio-economic status.  

So why did I bring these statistics and concerns forward?  Am I solely blaming feminism for the decay of the American family?  Absolutely not but I am definitely going to put blame where blame is due.  Because let’s face it, everyone has heard the cry of the single mother berating her boyfriend/husband for leaving her to raise the family all by herself.  Everyone has heard the Reverend rise to the pulpit on a Sunday morning and reprimand “the brothers” for not stepping up and “taking care of the sisters” and not taking responsibility of their actions.  Everyone has watched the Lifetime Movie™ special about the single-mother survivor who lived through 15 years of an abusive relationship with a monster of a man who beat her daily and drank himself into a stupor every night and finally, after 15 years, she got up the courage to leave him.  Everyone has heard the rallying cry of “Sisters are doin’ it for themselves...”.  But has anyone over the last twenty years stopped to take a look at the other side of the story--the consequences of feminism and the effect that it has had on men and society in general?  Did we ever take a moment while we were busy breaking down traditional gender roles to question why these roles existed in the first place?  This is where my critique comes in. 

In many ways, I consider myself a product of contemporary feminism.  I was the youngest and the only boy in a family of three powerful, successful, strong-willed women (whom, I love to death, by the way--I’m not bashing them at all, I am merely making a broader, further-reaching point using my upbringing as an example) and one very caring, very well-intentioned, yet slightly passive father.  I didn’t have many strong male role models in my life, they were mostly female and as you can imagine this led to a lot of anger and frustration as a kid and especially as a teenager when I was trying to figure out how to be a man.  

Now a lot of people would have looked at my situation and said, well your father just needs to man up and take on a more pro-active role in the family--that’s that.  But on the reverse side, I could’ve said yes but my mother and sisters built our household around feminine preferences and frequently when my father tried to be pro-active in family life, everything would blow up in his face because the household was not built to fully accommodate the presence of a male adult.  So yes, I’m sure that in situations like mine you could yell at the father and tell him to man up and take responsibility for the situation and help out the son but that’s all he’s hearing all the time anyway: from society, from church, from family.  Is it really productive to keep on repeating the same message over and over and over without examining the reason why that message is apparently not being acted upon?

I know for a fact that the dysfunctional tendencies of my upbringing were nowhere near unique to me--it has become an epidemic.  Across the country (in every racial and ethnic group) driven, successful, motherly/nurturing women are juggling work, family and home life while their passive/non-existent husbands sit on the couch and watch football, drink beer, and live off others hard work.  It has gotten to the point where the problem no longer just consists of isolated inter-family issues, it is a society-wide crisis and it is progressively getting worse and worse.  So rather than despair and bitch and moan about the state of affairs, let’s look at why they are this way and what could be done to address our society’s current social problems.

Now, I am not trying to promote any kind of religion or conservative theology by any means, but let’s look at how every major religion and holistic school of thought in the world, even those with female leaders/deities, instituted a social framework in which the father acted as the head and provider of the household and while the mother acted as the nurturer and manager of domestic details.  I do not believe that that is a coincidence--at all.  Granted, we should never blindly follow a religion or philosophy without first thoroughly questioning it, but there is no denying that ALL of the most successful, sustainable civilizations throughout history were built around this male lead/female nurturer model instituted by the various religions and philosophies that they purported to.  And I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of the major civilizations that did begin to espouse non-traditional gender roles had all seen better days and were all resting on their laurels quite comfortably and shortly thereafter fell into insignificance (i.e. the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians).

Now what am I trying to say?  That we should immediately revert back to traditional gender roles and go back to the way things were in 400BC?  Absolutely not, so please bare with me while I make my point and then elaborate on it.  My point is, those who came before us had thousands of years of experience, thousands of years of social experiments and lessons learn and re-learned and the vast majority of all of these civilizations came to similar conclusions: that men should lead, and women should nurture.  

After studying the issue myself for years, I have come to realize why those who came before us came up with this model and all of the irony involved in this model.  The truth is, almost universally, women are MORE capable leaders than men--it’s true.  Yes, you can quote me, as a self-described strong-willed man, I admit that women are generally more capable leaders than men.  Let’s face it, they are generally more driven, more self-motivated, more organized, better with time management, better at multi-tasking, less easily distracted and more quick-thinking on their feet than men are.  Whereas men are generally a little more lazy, a more easily distracted, not quite as organized, not quite as good with time management, and more prone to think with their dicks instead of their brains--all very compelling reasons why women should rule the world and why men should sit on couches, watch football, and drink beer all day.  But you see, that is EXACTLY why men should be leaders and women should be nurturers.  Because what happens when both genders do what they feel the most comfortable with (women leading and men being lazy) is that women do all of the work and men sit around and watch football.  

It’s my full belief that the traditional gender roles set in place by the civilizations of old were done so not because of some assumption of feminine inferiority but rather nearly the exact opposite, because they had known from past lessons learned that when women, who are very capable of leading, led then men became apathetic, lazy bums.  Because men will not step up when it’s not necessary (or especially when the woman is already doing the leading better than he would). I believe that the traditional gender roles were intentionally counter-intuitive but that’s exactly what made them so intuitive and effective.

I believe that the feminist movement was completely necessary because there were obvious systematic, societal abuses of women that had to be addressed and more importantly the feminist movement forced Western Civilization to wake up and remember just how capable of beings women are.  However, I think it may also be appropriate in the coming years for society to recognize that feminism has played it’s role and that it cannot effectively advance women’s rights any further without destroying the American family and consequently society as a whole.  

I think it’s high time that we begin to revisit and explore slightly more traditional gender roles in our society--not because we hate women or want to oppress them or because men want to “reclaim what is rightfully theirs” but because we know what women are capable of and we know what men become (or rather don’t become) when women take over the role of leading the family (just because women may be more capable of leading families than men are doesn’t mean that they should).  The traditional gender roles of men and women worked not because they came naturally to both men and women but because they created the perfect balance within a family dynamic by forcing both men and women to break out of their range of comfortable responsibilities and do what they are not necessarily comfortable with or best at--for the man to take the initiative, take the lead and make family decisions even when he would much rather watch football and drink beer and for the woman to be supportive and nurturing of the family and follow her husband’s lead even though she would much rather being leading the family herself.  This way a team dynamic is facilitated within the context of the family and there is all-around more participation and more involvement from all parties and no party feels like they are at their limit while the other feels useless.

It is also my belief that if society starts revisiting traditional gender roles now while we can still be rational and moderate about it, we may be able to avoid a more massive, more extreme feminist backlash that I can already feel brewing in the veins of frustrated and confused suburban teenage boys raised by powerful soccer-mom/CEO’s and in the hearts of the inner-city thug-kid who has never met his father or any of his friends’ fathers.  Kids are sick and tired of being fatherless and mothers are sick and tired of being single. If we are not there already, our society has gotten dangerously close to an extreme position on gender roles that very well may blow up in our faces in the near future.  As the saying goes, “History repeats itself,” and one can definitely see from looking back through history that the Pendulum Effect is an all-too-common theme in social affairs--society goes to one extreme and then the backlash takes it all the way to the other extreme to compensate.  For the well-being of the American family and to avoid extreme responses, in my opinion, our nation needs to start reconsidering feminism.

Additionally, if women truly want men to step up, lead, and be real men--as I constantly hear them say--then they need to simultaneously step down from the positions that they would like for men to take over.  And that does not mean wait until the man steps up and then let him lead, that means that women need to step down trusting that their men will step up, not waiting for them to do so.  Only when women demonstrate that they are willing to let go and let men lead will men start stepping up and taking on the responsibilities that society so desperately needs them to take take on.  Only then will the epidemic of the "deadbeat dad" be defeated.  Because behind every deadbeat dad (or rather in front of every deadbeat dad) is an overbearing mom.  That's my philosophy.
  
So there it is...my honest thoughts on feminism and gender roles, my apologies for being so long-winded and scattered at times...