Feature: The Falsehoods of the Sisterhood

Mike Spaniola composed an insightful essay that examines the politics of domestic violence and looks at why men take so much abuse with so little protest. Read on for's first feature article submission...

The Falsehoods of the Sisterhood

by Mike Spaniola

The first case of domestic abuse occurred when a prehistoric man was forced by
his "significant other" from the safety of their cave with the command: "Get
out there and kill something to eat, and don't come back empty-handed!" Ever
since, a reliance on and the exploitation of male brawn and brain has evolved,
from the cornerstone of exploration and invention, to the blood, sweat and tears
of the industrial age.

Even in recent times, men have had to labor under comparatively harsh
conditions, enduring 30 to 40 years of "forced service" to meet the male
obligation of supporting one's family. Toiling in the filth and suffocating
confines of underground mines, men have endured such trauma as the threat of
imminent death or have lost their souls to the numbing netherworld of the
assembly line or to the blast furnace infernos of the foundry.

Today, this age-old abuse of men has gained political sanction in yet another
form: "feminism." Far from the oppression that some women claim at the hands of
men, today's social hysteria simply extends a savage coercion of the millennia:
that men must risk life and limb to protect and to provide for women and
children (and, today, social torment in the name of chivalry and sisterhood).
One could say that had society thought to treat men with more concern,
compassion and justice throughout the ages, more men may have felt compelled to
return it.

Quite possibly, the reason that men have accepted male-bashing for so long is
that men are accustomed to acquiescing to women, such as staying on a sinking
boat to face a certain death so that women and children can seek safety first
(or being "nice" to your sister and her friends simply because they are
"girls"). If you think about that in the context of today's society, (i.e., a
majority of men letting women abuse them physically, psychologically and
politically) then you can begin to understand why groups such as the National
Organization for Women (NOW) have gained such a stranglehold over the
legislative and judicial processes in this country. NOW recently panned the Fox
Network, and one could surmise that "fair and balanced reporting" runs
contrary to the promotion of NOW's often surreptitious agenda.

Nothing in the current domestic violence laws is so pernicious as the mass
destruction of families caused by the growing and nearly unbridled use of
restraining orders by judges and prosecutors of the "Fourth Reich." Such orders
drive men from their homes and into the streets with nothing but the shirts on
their backs, with no hearing, and these men are guilty until they can prove
themselves innocent.

Women can perpetrate "flash point" anger reactions in men through long-term
emotional and verbal abuse of men. Despite that, today's domestic violence
laws permit any such abusive woman to go from the crime's perpetrator (or in
the least, its accomplice) to its victim. This legislative and judicial bias
extends even to murder, if you're a woman, as the courts routinely
sanction the "battered woman syndrome" as an ameliorating defense for having
murdered one's spouse.

Domestic violence is on a course similar to the emerging days of stricter
drinking-and-driving laws, when removing chronic alcoholics from the roads came
to the forefront of the social agenda. Granted, at that time, the court system
had been lax on repeat offenders. Still, the numbers of these offenders
were relatively few. Nonetheless, support for "get tough"
drinking-and-driving measures reached overzealous proportions and quickly
became an expedient way to attain and hold political office. Now, with the
domestic violence issue, feminists have broadened the definition beyond what is
rational and moral, and such laws obviously no longer serve to protect women so
much as they serve to persecute men.

One could compare this to broadening the definition of an earthquake.
Conceivably, authorities could lower the vibration threshold needed to register
an earthquake to a level that would now include a heavy truck rumbling past
your home. Biased sources who wanted to pervert and exploit this new definition
could create an advertisement depicting the aftermath of the San Francisco
earthquake in 1909 and claim that "an earthquake occurs in this country every
10 seconds," implying that such widespread devastation occurs very frequently
when, in fact, it is very rare. But, according to the new definition of an
earthquake, the "every 10 seconds" would be true, though only to the letter
of the word. This sleight of the facts pervades public perception on
domestic violence and on many feminist issues in general (consider, too, that as
with the zealous enforcement of tougher drinking-and-driving laws, the middle
and under classes have had to bear the brunt of the political theatrics. As it
was once noted, a judge is simply a politician in a Halloween costume).

Feminism has much less to do with its public relation image of social justice
than it does with politics as usual. Under the guise of "social justice,"
politicians beholden to feminists fan the flames of fear and ignorance to
create the polarization needed to assure campaign contributions. This has
created a neo-McCarthyism and makes Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged seem ever the
more prophetic. Rand states that eventually society's "producers" grow weary
of the "takers" and withdraw; only then will the takers begin to appreciate
and see the value in the producers.

Until then, men will be trivialized, taunted and tormented even in polite
company. Men, though, are the products of a society that has demanded that they
protect and provide, and men have done well at this subjugation for
generations. Still, men, especially white men, are portrayed as insensitive and
dull-witted. In a recent TV ad for a brokerage firm, a young man uses a
Ouija-type message ball to answer investment questions. Would today's
politically correct society cast a 20-something girl in that role? By watching
that commercial, one would hardly guess which gender has excelled at
technological ingenuity in recent decades. This male-debasing trend was
noticeable years ago when a TV ad cast a middle-age white man as a car thief in
a commercial advocating use of the "The Club," a steering-wheel locking
device. Statistics clearly show that this demographic (middle-age white men)
are seldom arrested for or convicted of such a crime, but who will protest (or
defend) the use of a balding, white man as a common thief, even when it is so

Neo-McCarthyism has come so far today that our current presidential
administration fully endorses this type of social distortion. Men have become so vulnerable
to such manipulation as to defy reality itself. Although innovative and honest,
the majority of men are nonetheless insulted by a political climate that holds
men responsible for inferiorities contrived as impossibly unique to anyone
else. Boys in school learn at the expense of the girls, we are told. But it is
boys who have worked in the garages of America in their spare time to develop
better cars and engines and, most recently, computers and software. How is
society served then, when feminist teachers tell boys not to "monopolize"
school computers so that girls can sit at the screen and gossip electronically?
How will promising "boys of tech" hone developing computer skills? For having
been industrious, men are now portrayed as shiftless; for having been
innovative, men are shown as domineering; for having been sensitive and honest,
men are now manipulated and degraded. In short, today's special-interest
social groups dictate that the successes of men be made evil so as to excuse
those who did not directly participate in the achievements of men.

Professor Ruth Wisse of Harvard is quoted as saying, in 1998, that "... women's
liberation, if not the most extreme then certainly the most influential
men and women in terms of power and competition instead of reciprocity

NOW president Patricia Ireland last spring made vicious remarks about the
recent defeat of a case by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the Violence
Against Women Act (VAWA). Her remarks clearly show that NOW is, at best, a
special-interest social group, and, at worst, the latest version of a hate
group. In her comments, she encouraged voting for Al Gore, saying that the next
president will appoint three Supreme Court justices. One can only guess that
feminist control of legislative bodies at the state and federal levels along
with military policymakers, the majority of the media and, increasingly, the
police is not enough.


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