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The Myth of Women's Oppression



 
 
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Old November 30th 09, 06:09 PM posted to alt.child-support
Dusty
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Default The Myth of Women's Oppression

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.

 




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