The Backlash! - January 1996

Is the Equal Gender Rights debate destined to remain concentrated only upon issues of money and political power? Or is it finally time to take into account the tremendous sexual power -- relationship power -- that women wield over men?

In every human culture men create a protected zone for women. Men sacrifice their own bodies to create a buffer for women -- against war, against the rampages of nature, against toxic or pestilential conditions. Men succeed as political leaders only insofar as they provide safety for women. a bull is not even acknowledged sexually until he can enforce a safe perimeter within which the cows can graze in peace.

Men want to protect and nurture women. Men want to do things that women like. Men go to war to maintain the protected zone. Men battle the forces of nature -- they work in coal mines, drill oil, lay bricks -- to make the money that ensures a secure environment for women.

Heedful to the needs of women, men assume leadership in the political arena -- patrolling the outer boundaries of the protected zone. Traditionally, women assume leadership in the arena of human relationships that obtain within the protected zone -- the family and the marketplace. Yes, the Marketplace. Around the world, from Ancient Greece to any vegetable stand in modern day Bolivia or shopping mall in Chicago, the markets are driven by women. Buying, selling, the exchange of money for goods and services, are conducted for and by women. Women are more physical, more social, more materialistic than men.

Men seek money insofar as it affords them a way to please women. Money, for men, is a social currency -- a means to gain access to women. Simple stuff. It's why a falcon challenges a marauding eagle and brings back a rabbit to his nesting mate.

Men, the warriors, the perimeter-defenders, are deeply, personally concerned with saber-rattling in North Korea or what those grease-ball Spartans are up to now.

Women negotiate the costs of market items. Those costs are determined by what women are willing to pay for them. Women raise their daughters to be skilled at raising children and bargain hunting.

Historically, the education of boys was turned over to a male community -- a male spiritual community -- where boys learned to read the holy language so they could make direct contact with the values that pertained in their culture.

Raising kids and assessing products are essentially the same processes all over the world. However, the cultural terrain of a nomadic or agricultural or mercantile or manufacturing culture are each contoured differently. Nomadic cultures sensitize themselves to the movement of animals. Agricultural cultures must anticipate rain. Mercantile cultures develop protected trade routes. Manufacturing cultures are concerned with access to resources. This cultural menu of male activities is dedicated to the singular goal of serving up protected zones for women.

Men must stay apprised of shifting cultural parameters because, when an alliance unravels, they need to make a decision about whether this is something they are willing to fight over, or not. Men cast a wide net in the ocean of life, and behind them, in the protected zone, women administer the daily affairs.

That's balance!

And then, in one sudden historical blip, along came feminism and public education, which turned male culture inside out. Today 85 percent of teachers are white women. Boys, who used to be schooled by men, are now schooled by women. Boys, who used to learn from men how to be honorable and ethical and participate as responsible adults in their culture, are now being taught by women how to get a job. It's like training eagles to eat grass.

These boys can never become men because no one has showed them what men do! America has no culture because America has no male culture -- because America's men are being raised by women.

In ancient Athens the women ran the home and the marketplace. The men fished and fought wars and showed up in the public Forum to participate in the dialogue of the times. There, men learned the price of olive oil in Crete and evaluated reports of Sparta's new armaments. Men participated directly in the discussion, the Forum, that framed their culture. They invented Democracy, not merely by voting, but through debate and dialogue -- participation.

Nowadays, news is fed to us through a media lens which has been sensitized to the economic aspirations of women, while remaining callous to the relationship aspirations of men. In America, men became over-involved in the marketplace, and were supplanted by female teachers in the schools. We switched roles.

The results are as predictable as herding open-ocean dolphins into fish tanks -- overcrowding, diseased emotional lives, violence, and frustration. American men do not have a vision of what this culture wants from them because this culture has never told them.

Now that women are returning to work in the marketplace, men must return to their primary responsibility -- nurturing and educating young men. Women cannot turn boys into men, only men can do that.

Half of all grade school and high school teachers should be men!

Sixty percent of our marriages end in divorce and our youth associates in gangs where 95 percent of the boys were raised in homes without fathers. Whereas men used to be the protector of women, now government has become the protector of women. The balance is gone. The reciprocity is gone. Men still need women but women don't need men. Government provides economic and social safety nets for women in distress thereby making men ever more obsolete.

Men still do the heavy work, the dirty work, the dangerous work. We still rely on men to fight wars. Clean work in bureaucratic and information jobs is inundated with female employees while the competition for labor jobs has become so fierce that construction workers have not received a raise in 20 years. School teachers' salaries have surpassed those of working men, so the argument that men won't teach because it doesn't pay enough no longer holds water.

The average man -- black, white or brown -- is being relegated to a servile labor class. And, due to overwork and divorce, he is being denied access to the minds and bodies of his own children. An under-utilization of the human spirit. Like hiring priests to work at MacDonald's.

Equality, if it means anything, must come to mean equal human relationship rights for men.

We are a culture in free-fall. We will not endure unless we regenerate healthy male culture in America. We are in the dire position of having allowed female values to shape our cultural focus, meanwhile, denying men contact with their kids. Let women have the jobs -- we want the kids!

Despite cultural conditioning to the contrary, it must be recognized that men are superb team players. That's how we got to the moon, crossed the Atlantic, hunted buffalo. Our opponents, most often, are not other men. We rally to engage outer space, the open ocean, or starvation. Men are experts at building community and working as a team. We always have been. Men are less focused on what individual rights we have, and more on what individual rights we are willing to give up to benefit the team. This prudence is what we are equipped to pass on to young men.

And it's the diametric opposite of what women teach their sons. While women articulate what rights they have, men negotiate what rights they will relinquish to play on a larger field and entertain a grander goal -- a goal beyond individual ego. Boys learn more about life on the sporting field than they ever learn in school.

It's time for men to play catch-up in the arena of human relationships. Women live 8 years longer than men. Nineteen out of 20 people who die on the job are men. Within two years of divorce men commit suicide at 10 times the rate of women. In divorce, a man will lose his kids unless he can afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars trashing his ex to prove she is morally unfit as a mother.

That might not be so hard were it not for the myth that, like a ghost, bewitches our intellect: we live in a society that actually believes women are morally superior to men. That women automatically know more about what is good and right than men do. Ironically, this attitude arises from the marketplace of sexual commerce.

Men are overwhelmingly, biologically attracted to a shapely female form. It's not learned. It's deep biology -- how a bare breast or curved behind grabs our attention like a train whistle in a tunnel. They've got it, we want it. When women say "no" to sex, they project a loftier moral attitude, both increasing the value of their sexual currency and leading men to impute this marketplace savvy to women's higher moral nature. We assume that women are more honest, ethical and truthful in all things than men. It's like believing that cannibals eat other people because they need the vitamins.

Women know that women are not always kind, caring and sharing. Sometimes they are mean, conniving and manipulating. It's men who cannot face up to the notion that women are not morally superior to men -- because if that's true, then our society is built on wet sand.

Despite the protected zones men have always provided for women, we have been labeled as the oppressors of women. Vastly more than half of America's wealth is owned by women. Women earn less money, but spend more money, than men, and men are routinely denied involvement in raising their own children. Yet, we are the oppressors of women.

The most reckless omission in our one-sided Equal Rights debate concerns how important the presence of a child is to the development of a healthy man. When a man is around kids, he is more inclined to be clean-spoken, ethical and consistent. Interacting with kids raises a man to a higher level of his being. It's been like that for thousands of years. Men raise kids and kids raise men. Human beings thrive on this reciprocity.

Is equality our goal? Is balance what we want? Would we like to see inner city kids stop gunning each other down? If so, then it's time to regenerate male culture in America.

Let's get men back into the schools, and facilitate mentoring programs in every school and religious community. Let's reapply ourselves to building male community, and recreate all-male clubs and all-male activities. Why not? Women do that.

Let's introduce young people to men they can admire and respect -- men who reciprocate by being genuinely involved and concerned with the lives of these kids.

Men are team players. Men build community. That's what we do best. Let women run the marketplace. Let men build community. We will no longer permit ourselves to be regarded merely as a wallet. We are the visionaries of human civilization. That's our true historical role.

We put men on the moon and brought them back. Let's decree a national goal of creating a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, pan-religious American male culture that will become a model for the rest of the world. One thousand years from now this noble achievement could be viewed as America's true contribution to human history. It's a stimulating, attainable, worthy goal, and our young people are hungry for it.

Kids need men, and men need kids.

Rich Zubaty is the author of Surviving the Feminization of America and founder of Mentor. To order the book, call: 1-800-959-0061 extension Panther.