According to Squeers, "Women are the peacemakers"

But, nearly 250 scholarly studies show women are at least as likely as men to engage in partner aggression and that partner violence is often
mutual.

I suggest you read http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARreport-50-DV-Myths.pdf and get back to us.

Stev,
try to keep up. The argument is that women too are caught up in patriarchy, including all its tropes and behaviourisms. My suggestion is that by nature, that is undistorted by patriarchy, women are not aggressors.
It would be nice if people could think outside their gender defensiveness and insecurities!

Squeers, I suggest that you are the one that is failing to keep pace.

Your statement "My suggestion is that by nature, that is undistorted by patriarchy, women are not aggressors" is completely unfalsifiable (i.e. there is not one observation that can refute your hypothesis). Any observation that a woman is aggressive will be simply explained away as being under the spell of the patriarchy". Your statement is thus a tautology: aggression = patriarchy.

Of course, back in the real world, your little theory runs into a world of trouble when we encounter intimate partner violence in up to 30% of LESBIAN relationships (Renzetti, 1992 cited in http://www.csaj.org/documents/176.pdf)

Stev,

my suggestion, that women are not aggressors by nature, does not of course mean that life experience can't make them aggressive, or that the aggression index for both sexes doesn't fluctuate like everything else according to behavioural fashions. Let's not forget too that the domestic violence women are involved in is typically with 'men', who are conditioned to dominate; or that many lesbian relationships are based on that same standard heteresexual model: one butch and one compliant. Indeed a fundamental and 'voluntary' inequality is possibly the benchmark of most relationships, regardless of gender--that is, a masculinised hierarchical order prevails and pervades all relationships and institutions. Is this not the case? Priests and nuns, doctors and nurses etc etc.
Like men, women too are influenced by role-modelled aggression, from sport to politics to porn, but there is ample evidence that by nature the majority of women are spectacularly less aggressive than men. Just look at gendered behaviour on the roads, or shopping malls, or the stats on all violent crime.
But regardless of all that, you're just not getting that the behaviour, and thinking, of both sexes is conditioned by a masculinised ontology. Women and men are affected at a deep psychological, and no doubt instinctual, level by testosterone-pumped behaviour. A sensible woman can be seduced, against her better judgement, by a 'real man', just as sensible men are easily intimidated by him.
I think the author's on a winner; our sophisticated technocracies are prey to primitive masculinism. We need to emasculate culture!

Re Coming To Our Senses & the regeneration of culture.

If you have no Pleasure Dome, you have nothing to protect, nothing to preserve, nothing to serve, nothing to perpetuate that makes any difference whatsoever.The core of life must be preserved as a Pleasure Dome of everything sacred, everything most profound, everything most intimate.

If you destroy the temple and the greatness of Woman, you reduce life to scandalous nonsense. Monotonous, aggressive exchanges, and petty concerns and rivalries, and all the rest of the nonsense of mind divorced from the realm of feeling. You must have the Pleasure Dome, temple and all. And then you will know what to do when you go to do business, when you go to Parliament.

Once the Pleasure Dome is established, human beings are not going to create any war or mayhem that is going to prevent or destroy that circumstance. But mankind is throwing that possibility with both hands. Everything about Woman - in other words, everything about the domain of feeling and the senses, and pleasurable association with the feeling and sense domain - is corrupt at the present moment, and aggressively opposed.

It is not just the Divine Spirituality that is opposed - Woman is opposed. That which Woman IS, that which she incarnates, that which her pattern is about, requires humankind altogether to be integrated with it, as the core of life.

This fundamental transformation, or the restoration of the Pleasure Dome as the context of human life is the necessary transformation that is required world-wide.

The complete restoration of it, the liberation of the human disposition from the opposition to Woman, to Shakti, to feeling, to the art of all the senses, glorifying and turned toward the Divine Condition of existence. Done in temple, done in bed, done at meals, done in human community.

The Pleasure Dome must be restored.

It would be interesting to know how different people define masculinity, or femininity for that matter. Is differentiation still important and necessary in society or do we aspire to a homogenous state where there is little to distinguish. Personnaly I hope we don't.

More often when we talk about gender, it is really about power relationships as Houlley suggested.

I have worked with some great managers, both male and female. Having been exposed to politicians in various shapes and forms, there does not seem to be much to differentiate them gender-wise, in regards to the pursuit of power. Female politicians can be full of us much carp as male politicians and are just as corruptible some great show ponies but not much in the top paddock. There are some admirable female and male politicians as well.

As for a masculinist conspiracy, it assumes some sort of illuminati male order pulling the strings to ensure women are shut out of important decision making processes.

I don't think it is that organised or thought out. There has always been in some industries a 'jobs for the boys' culture but this is slowly changing as long as we don't replace it with 'jobs for the girls' mentality and continue to strive for employment or appointment on merit.

Reality dictates that there will always be some discrimination but those breeds will be extinct by 2050.

Human civilisations evolve the pattern is usually along the lines of - discrimination/exclusion, revolt, adjustment/positive discrimination, backlash and then either settlement or counter-revolution (as demonstrated on OLO). :)