Dear Vanna,

We should feel sorry for your picture of
poor males. They're not evil, just
miguided!
They, as you say are single-focus
workaholics who love the office,
are supported by a stay-at-home wife,
and they're willing to put their job before
family or a diverse life.

That doesn't sound like any sane person most
of us know. But it might be useful for you to ask
why these males are letting demands of
capital overrule the human needs of both
them and their partners?

The sort of picture you paint of men doing these
80-hour a week jobs - are men who don't have
anything else in their lives, who don't have
any caring responsibilities or other interests.
For that matter research shows that it's not even
good for business to have these highly stressed
"monocentric" workers.

No wife wants someone who's going to be working 60
or 70 hour weeks. And, no child wants their dad
working those kind of hours.

Why do they do it? So they can buy a new plasma TV?
A house with four bedrooms?

Sad!

Cornflower: “The weighing of possible returns” to which you refer is simply the current vogue in a research environment that emulates corporate culture, which I largely reject: it is not an absolute measure of research worth. Whichever way, I receive no payment for my research, so your point doesn’t apply to me: mine is an adjunct (unpaid) appointment; I make a living elsewhere.

The outcome is a genuine different ground as an alternative to the current feminism vs men’s right debate. Different ground *may* result in different outcomes. I don’t apologise for wanting different outcomes. It’s not about claiming to have found solutions: it’s about opening up avenues to possible solutions.

“The public is stupid and wrong” is a statement that has held true on many occasions. Take slavery or making black people sit at the back of the bus, for example. People once thought these things were perfectly reasonable until they were shown otherwise.

Gelfer

"The public is stupid and wrong” is a statement that has not held true on many occasions and there are plenty of examples of that, especially where totalitarian leaders are concerned.

Sorry for the typo that omitted a letter from your name in my last post.

Travel well, I sense you have a lot more fleshing out to do on the article because there is a lot left hanging that has obviously confused since you are adamant you have no dog running in the feminism vs men’s rights debate.

Gelfer, if it makes you feel any better, I actually applaud your desire to find new ground to re-frame the feminist/MRA debate, however, recasting patriarchy in the language of conspiracy is not the way forward because the language is essentially the SAME as that of patriarchy - flowing as it does from Gramscian roots. Barkun is 100% correct about it being the path to paranoia.

The real trap that a young intellectual like yourself needs to avoid is elitism. As a young man at Melbourne Uni, I was also attracted to structural explanations, a theory of everything, that explained the injustices of the world in one neat package. This, of course, was also Gramsci's starting position - the workers failed to rise up in revolution because of their false consciousness. Only intellectuals could perceive these vile invisible forces that enslaved the ordinary people but were hidden beyond the perceptions of mere mortals.

R0bert's comment is spot on - dominance is a human discourse not a masculine discourse. Pynchme also recognizes that most men are not privileged and can have non-dominant lives which are not valued by the powers that be. It is only a small step to recognize that some women might also be privileged.

There is no need to genderize every power differential as though gender is the principal cause of all dominance (when there are other candidates such as class, race, education, technology, geography, strength, biology etc).

Instead of refuting rational arguments (for instance - that 'conspiracy' is a pejorative term; or that conspiracy theories can be traced back to the work of the Marxist, Gramsci, and thus are not a unique construct of gender theory; or that lesbians have just as much intimate partner violence as any other group), we see the devastating riposte that we 'don't get it' or we are 'unable to think outside our gender defensiveness and insecurities!'. This is intellectual arrogance of the highest order.

You’re the second person on this thread who has tried to belittle me with the term “young”. That’s a gerontocratic power strategy, particularly used in the men’s movement. I write about this in my book, “Numen, Old Men: Contemporary Masculine Spiritualities and the Problem of Patriarchy”, should you ever fancy the read. Again, part of the conspiracy. For what it’s worth, I’m a 35 year-old father of three. What counts as “young” these days?

It’s not elitist or arrogant to explore things that make the world better: to suggest otherwise is anti-intellectualism of the highest order (again, part of the conspiracy). Unfortunately, everything you say seems to embed you further in the conspiracy.

Foxy,
I've never known a wife (or partner in feminist terms) that doesn't want her husband (or partner in feminist terms) out working and earning lots of money.

That has not changed in history.

Males are the majority of the inventors, builders, discovers, musicians, artists, law makers and writers of text books.

That has not changed in history.

Nothing much is ever likly to change, because of testosterone.

There is no conspiracy, its just testosterone.