By Rod Van Mechelen
What the sameness standard fails to notice is that men's differences from women are equal to women's differences from men. There is an equality there. - Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law
Equal Rights Are Not Equal to Equal Outcomes
1992 Bellevue, Wash. - Equal rights are no guarantee of equal opportunity. (You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Ballantine Books Edition, June 1991, Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., p 95) Thus, how men extend equal rights seems oppressive to many women. (You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Ballantine Books Edition, June 1991, Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., pp 128 - 129)
Relying on this perception of oppression, pop feminists confuse equality and equal opportunity with equal rights, and use the law and the courts to stack the deck in their favor in the name of "equality." In the process, they violate men's rights, because in society there is generally no such thing as absolute equality. Only equal rights.
My Random House College dictionary defines equality as "the state or quality of being equal," and equal as "of the same in quantity, degree, merit, etc." These definitions confirm what most of us already know - no one is really equal to anyone else. Our aptitudes, abilities, and special differences preclude the possibility, and any attempt to enforce anything other than equal rights leads only to the lowest common denominator, where genius is gutted and prosperity is reduced to poverty.
Understanding this, we understand both the goal and the flaw of the pop feminist's public agenda: to obtain sameness in quantity and degree without merit.
Pop feminists complain because men as a demographic make more money than women do. To them, this is unfair because it's unequal. So they demand affirmative action to change that. Yet, men work more hours and more years in the paid labor force than women do. Productivity and perseverance, not discrimination, cause men to earn more. Thus, there are only two ways most women can achieve income-parity with men: earn it, or violate men's rights.
Through laws and threats of government intervention, they coerce corporations to give preferential hiring to women, because few women are doing what it takes to earn it for themselves.
Essentially, pop feminists are demanding and getting superior rights for women to compensate for the superior economic performance of men. In their arrogance, they aver this should serve as an injunction to men to work harder to provide parity for women. Anyone acknowledging the truth of the nature of inequality, however, should not be surprised by the increased incidence of rape, suicide, and violence in our society such policies cause. Violating men's rights to get economic equality cannot help but create a backlash. (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Carol Gilligan, p 100)
2012 Olympia, Wash. - In the years since I wrote that passage, idiots and imbeciles have accused me of justifying rape because men feel they are getting a raw deal. What a crock!
Ironically, this double standard is precisely what they want: "Women admit to having a double standard, to wanting equality in employment and pay along with privilege in social status." (Women Vs. Women: The Uncivil Business War, Tara Roth Madden, p 61)
Some Are More Equal Than Others
In the pop feminist paradigm, need is a moral imperative. That is, a person's rights are determined by their needs. (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Carol Gilligan, p 54) Consequently, as they think women's needs are greater than men's, women's rights should have the higher priority because, "everybody has the 'right' to live." (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Carol Gilligan, p 57)
The idea of a "right to live" presumes the "right" to consume. A "right" to consume requires that others provide what will be consumed. Certainly, everybody has the right not to be killed, but a person who is forced to work in service to others' "right" to consume is a slave. Thus, their ethic is slavery. In practice, that means male slavery.
We are all aware of millions of others who need our help, and most of us wish we could help them all. But if we treated their needs like rights, we would expend ourselves trying to satisfy them: our own needs would go unfulfilled. (After decades of having other countries enjoy the largesse of our Imperial Presidents, our own nation is now enjoying just this result as our own national needs go unmet.) So we need some means by which to narrow the field down. Something not too arbitrary, something that violates neither our sense of justice nor the principle of equal rights.
Political attempts to create equal opportunity always rely on "worsening the situations of those more favored with opportunity." (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick, p 235) Since such action is, by nature, aggression, and since pop feminists say they oppose acts of aggression, they should oppose this, and favor a system that would be fair.
In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick provides a concept of justice that would satisfy this. He sums it up as, "from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen." Basically, this is a "hands off" concept: you get what you earn or are given, period. Pop feminists are sure to balk at this, but we have already exposed how their arguments rely on some presumed right to enslave men.
Nozick's idea, however, rests upon the principles of non aggression, and readily lends itself to a concept of justice as fairness: "(S)ocial and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all." (A Theory of Justice: Original Edition, John Rawls)
Cutting through the academic jargon, what this means to us is, power and wealth are justified only if they contribute to, or do not harm the common good, and if there are no unfair obstacles barring the rest of us from earning equal power and wealth. This can be paraphrased as, "You get what you earn or are given, and that's okay if what you get or earn either benefits or does not harm the common good, and if all of us can aspire, without prejudice, to earn or receive the same."
This is utterly fair, producing hierarchies without domination and providing equal advantages without diminishing our inherent inequalities. But we are social beings with an inherited history that imposes structural inequalities upon us all that are neither just nor fair. Legislation to remedy these rely on forcible appropriation and redistribution of wealth and opportunity. A group can justify such action only if it can prove unique victimization of its members warrants it. That is precisely what pop feminists are successfully doing by portraying men as more violent than they are, and women as more oppressed than they are.
To do this, they rely upon the effects of choices women make without considering the choices, or who makes them. They point to the preponderance of low-paying jobs women hold, and expect us to ignore the general inclination of women to make their job selections on the basis of personal needs rather than just on income. (Women Vs. Women: The Uncivil Business War, Tara Roth Madden, p 3) By pre-defining this inequality as the result of male oppression of women, they make the enactment of legislation to empower women at the expense of men a moral and social imperative.
This is unjustified
Again, we do not live within a historical vacuum, and if there is any true gender equality, it is that our common history imposes structural inequalities upon both genders that are neither just nor fair:
Feminists are demanding 51 percent representation in such areas of our society as politics, law, medicine and business administration. But regardless of how close they come to attaining that, virtually 100 percent of the cattle butchering, grave digging, sewer cleaning, and garbage collecting that is so critical to that society will continue to be done (b)y males. So will almost every other backbreaking, marrow-freezing, stomachturning job. (Manhood Redux- Standing up to Feminism, C.H. Freedman, p146)
To appropriate the money and opportunities men earn, and then redistribute them to women, is to install women as the dominant sex. This is not equality, but the epitome of female chauvinism.
Rod Van Mechelen