(7 of 11)
Women now control the vast majority of consumer dollars in America -- especially the discretionary dollars. If that is not power, and privilege, what is? An extraplanetary visitor, scouting a report for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy perhaps, might look at the evidence of their lives (the myriad labor-saving devices, the opulent food and shelter, the sheer abundance of choices that most of the rest of the world desperately envies) and come to the conclusion that white middle- and upper-middle-class American women -- from whose ranks the majority of militant feminists arise, the ones who call themselves "womyn" to keep the hated syllable "men" out of their identity -- are the most privileged people in the history of the planet. The alien would be stoned to death for saying it, however.
When will women take full responsibility, fifty-fifty with men, for initiating sexual contacts, thereby assuming the occasionally painful risks of rejection? That risk of rejection makes men, who usually must take the active part, not only look foolish many times, but also appear to be sexual harassers, when in fact they may be merely inept. A successful approach to a woman is called romance and courtship. An unsuccessful approach is called sexual harassment and may be a crime.
! Feminist politics goes against the animal behaviorist's insight that females organize their lives around the getting of resources (food, shelter, nice things) while males organize themselves around the getting of females.
The collision produces a dishonest configuration. Women elaborately manipulate and exploit men's natural sexual attraction to the female body, and then deny the manipulation and prosecute men for the attraction -- if the attraction draws in the wrong man. Women cannot for long combine fiery indignation and continuing passivity (attempting to have the best of both those worlds).
At the end of Ibsen's play A Doll's House, Nora walks out of her domestic prison and slams the door. When men try to behave decently and pay the bills and be good fathers, and then are informed for their trouble that they are not only unimportant in the scheme of things but also vicious and piggish, they may become sufficiently disillusioned to slam the door themselves -- pre- emptively. They are warned off. A man begins to think that marriage is a very foolish choice, an overrated idea.
Let us proceed to the three mysteries (two violent, one benign) that lie at the heart of the matter: Rape, Judicial Bobbitt-Lopping, and the Antioch Rules.
More than any other factor, male violence against women animates the anger against men. That violence (murder, rape, battering) is in everyone's mind -- an ambient viciousness that bewilders and angers and frightens men -- though never as much as it terrifies women.