Http://mensnewsdaily.com/2009/11/29/...ns-oppression/
The Myth of Women's Oppression
Sunday, November 29, 2009
By Paul Elam
Forty some odd years ago, feminists bellowed their way into mainstream
attention, launching a major offensive on what they called a patriarchal
system that had oppressed women for centuries.
Painting women as downtrodden and powerless, they railed against men with
the missionary zeal of abolitionists and with largely the same message.
In short, women were slaves and men were their masters. They demanded
liberation and have been making demands every since.
They did a magnificent job of pitching all this. That could be a testament
to the inherent truth in their ideas. Or it might be something else, like
the fact that they already had so much power that few were willing to
question anything they said in the first place.
You can put your money on the latter, because even a remotely objective
examination of the facts leads to a far more reasonable conclusion.
Women were never oppressed to begin with. Not even close.
I'm no historian, but I did attend some history classes before I finished
middle school. So, by the time I was 13, I knew what oppression was. And
lucky for me I was 13 in a time when people still knew what it wasn't.
Oppression has some pretty obvious tell tale signs. Like torture and death;
like bullwhips and chains; gas chambers and death camps. Oppression is a
roadmap of scars on the back of a field hand that was purchased at an
auction. It is the rope that gets strung over a tree branch in broad
daylight and used to choke the life out of someone convicted of being the
wrong color.
It is an indelible stain on humanity, void of compassion, dehumanizing both
the oppressed and the oppressor. And the evidence of it is so offensive to
modern sensibilities that we preserve proof of it as lessons for the coming
generations.
Now, when we compare those things to the historical world of women, which
was largely one of being protected and provided for, we get an entirely
different picture. It is a portrait not of the oppressed, but of the
privileged. And it begs a good many questions that need to be answered.
For instance, how many times in history did we have slaves with the first
rights to a seat in the lifeboat? Which slave masters were compelled to go
off to war to protect the lives of their slaves? How many oppressors tore
their own bodies down with brutal labor so that they could provide food and
shelter for those they oppressed?
Zero sounds like a good answer.
It also makes one wonder, or should, how many slave masters had to get on
their knees before their prospective slaves, bearing gold and jewels to ask
permission to be their master? How many slaves could say "no" and wait for a
better deal?
How about another goose egg?
It's not coincidental that feminists pointed to marriage as an oppressive
institution. Pointing at nothing and making a lot of noise has worked pretty
well for them. And so, in a collective fit of neurotic activism they
attacked the one institution that had served as the source of more support
and protection for women than any other in history. They became obsessed
with depicting a walk down the wedding isle as the path to oppression; each
woman's personal Trail of Tears.
You couldn't buy this kind of crazy if you were Bill Gates.
"Hey!" some feminists are shrieking by now, "What about voting rights? Women
were not allowed to vote! That's oppression!"
Well, no, it's not. And all we need to do is look at the history of voting
in America to prove it.
In the beginning, almost no one could vote. It was a right reserved for a
few older white males who owned land, which left almost all men and a lot of
other people out of the picture. This doesn't say anything particularly
special about women. So if this constituted oppression, then it meant that
nearly everyone was oppressed. Maybe the early Americans didn't catch on to
that one because they were too busy.celebrating their new found freedom.
Anyway, as time passed, because men of good values wrote an amazing
constitution, voting rights were expanded to other groups. First to the men
who didn't own land, then later to other ethnic groups, then still later to
women. Even further down the road the voting age was lowered bringing
another large group of people into the fold. And today we are debating the
voting rights of illegal aliens.
Formerly oppressed hamsters may be next.
And we should consider that there was something of a tradeoff for women
regarding the vote. Like exclusion from combat and men compelled to turn
over the fruit of their labors and to die for them at the drop of a hat.
Perhaps it wasn't a fair tradeoff, mainly to the men. But proof of women's
oppression? Comedians pay for material that isn't nearly this funny.
The same was true for owning land. Plenty of women weren't allowed to.for a
while, anyway. It probably had something to do with the fact that it was men
who had to have land on which to build women homes, or perhaps they figured
that men who were expected to face bullets in order to protect that land
might be better, more deserving keepers of it.
Who knows what insanities plagued us before feminism restored us to reason.
Whatever the reasons, those rules weren't long lived. Besides, not being
able to own land was pretty much softened by the fact that women could
choose men to provide it for them through that oppressive institution of
marriage, and the phallocentric, linear thinking alleged tyrants that they
married.
I am old enough to remember well the older rules for men. Work hard and take
care of your woman. Be prepared to lay down your life for her. Watch your
mouth in the presence of a lady. Offer her your seat, even if she is a
stranger. The same for opening doors and lighting smokes.
Disrespect her and risk a beating. Touch her in the wrong way and you're a
dead man.
This isn't the way oppressed people are treated. But we do have another word
for those fortunate enough to benefit from these kinds of standards.
Royalty.
We didn't coin the term "princess" for women without a good reason.
With a few trivial exceptions, this has always been the gold standard for
the treatment of women. The fact that this is beginning to change, that men
are starting to put the brakes on doing a lot of things out of chivalry, is
just another example of feminism shooting women in the foot. Accidents
happen, especially self inflicted wounds, to people that play with guns when
they don't know what they're doing.
Still, I have to hand it to feminists in their capacity to spin a wild yarn.
Taking a privileged class of people and convincing the world that they were
picked on was a masterful piece of skullduggery. But it was only successful
because the mandate for men in western culture has always been to give women
whatever they want without much question. Otherwise, the plethora of
feminist ideas would have buckled under the really oppressive weight of
unchecked dishonesty.
Nonetheless, our unhealthy enabling of them set the stage for women to pass
up men in every aspect of life. Women are now getting more educated than men
and they also have most of the jobs. Nothing suggests this is going to do
anything but favor women even more in the future.
All that from an ideology that resides a house of cards that only remains
standing because the wind itself has been scared out of blowing it down.
I would offer the feminists my kudos for shrewd work and a job well done,
but winning a race is easy when you start with one foot already across the
finish line, and everyone else pretends not to notice.