Loving Men Respecting Women: The Future of Gender Politics

The one over-arching principle that pervades and unifies every element of my book can be expressed in a single word: Balance. In defiance of our one-sided belief system, the book’s premise is this: in the benefits enjoyed, the liabilities suffered, the power, the victimization, the freedoms and the constraints, it all balances out between men and women – and it always has. The book’s purpose is to do what it can to promote a general understanding and perception of this balance throughout the culture at large.

It may be presumed at the outset that the reader agrees with common wisdom and perceives imbalance—an imbalance of power enjoyed by men and an imbalance of victimization suffered by women. We have always recognized a world of male power/female victimization, yet that has never been more than half the full story. The missing half can be found. It is contained within a shelf-full of excellent but as yet rather obscure books. What might be thought of as the female power/male victimization half of the story remains obscure because neither sex wants to hear it. Nevertheless, for every female complaint, there is an equal and opposite male complaint. For every one CEO there have been many POWs. Hard/hazardous labor, battlefields, prisons, mines, the streets, the sewers—men have always occupied both extremes, the most and the least enviable positions on earth, the latter in far greater numbers than the former.

Imagine, if you will, a gigantic scale with love on one end of the balance beam and respect on the other. This love / respect dynamic upon which balance between the sexes pivots can be described in two brief statements:

Throughout history, both sexes have respected men more than they have respected women.

Throughout history, both sexes have loved women more than they have loved men.

Feminism has made women’s lesser status in all things along the respect axis abundantly clear. Both sexes have listened and both sexes have worked together to change the cultural environment in ways that promote respect for women. That men are less loved, however, may ring true from the start and be met with cynicism just the same. Both sexes receive the female side with empathy and the male side without empathy exactly because both sexes love women more and men less.

Note that hostility toward women is given the derogatory label of “misogyny.” That’s because hostility toward women is forbidden. Ours is really more a misandrist (“male bashing”) culture. But few know this word misandry, which would condemn hostility toward men the way the word misogyny condemns hostility toward women. Our culture does not concern itself with the issue of hostility toward men even to the extent of giving it a name. A word that would censure the practice of hating men is of little use in a world wherein expressions of blame, hate and hostility toward men, are everywhere embraced.

But I won’t attempt to argue my paradigm-shifting case in the space of this brief essay. Instead, I’ll simply assert the following four key statements: First, at birth, members of both sexes are assigned roles, socialization and conditioning that facilitate and ensure a world wherein men are more respected/less loved and women are more loved/less respected. Second, historically, men have been no more empowered to escape their biology, role, socialization, conditioning and concurrent fate than women have. Third, the two sexes, equally powerful, each having equal influence over the world and over each other, engage in equal complicity and partnership in making the human world what it is. Fourth, throughout history the enormous consequences and vast repercussions suffered by women for being less respected have been matched in full by the enormous consequences and vast repercussions suffered by men for being less loved.

These are the four key statements because they lead to the single most important truth in sexual politics: It All Balances Out!

In light of the world as it’s ordinarily perceived, the above may strike one as an outrage, but I can make my case well. I hope to do so, because I believe a culture-wide perception of this balance I speak of forms the only path leading to the full preservation of love between the sexes. Believing that men have the power and women are the victims is the ultimate source of our 50 percent divorce rate and “fatherless society.” Only with a full understanding of how It All Balances Out can there be a dissolving of the kind of divisive hostility, vengeance motives and victimhood that are even now, out in the world at large, poisoning love between the sexes. To understand that It All Balances Out requires an understanding of both perspectives, female and male. Understanding begets empathy, which begets compassion, which begets love to replace rancor and resentment.

As things stand at the dawn of the new millenium, we can clearly see that men and women have broadened their horizons. But at the same time we feel a profound wedge has been driven between the sexes. Progressing further and healing the divide will require replacing fem-inism with a new two-sex sexual politics that deals with the many and varied issues of women and men as equal opposites that balance each other.

If average, ordinary men were empowered enough, enlightened enough and courageous enough to speak to what truly lives in their minds and in their hearts, a new cultural ideology based on balance, fairness, maturity and sanity would soon replace the escalating “battle of the sexes” insanity wherein we now stand bewildered.

We have learned to take seriously the need for both sexes to better respect women. But our lack of love for men itself blinds us to the need to be equally understanding and sympathetic regarding the issues and inequalities of men. By better understanding the vulnerabilities, both sexes may learn to empathize with and love men. The goal ultimately is for a unified movement that would combine the concerns of men and women equally under one banner. But first men must stop coming to the rescue of women long enough to start dealing with their own issues and the issues of their less fortunate bretheren (the disables hard/hazardous laborers, the street homeless, the physically/emotionally maimed veterans, the imprisones, men who have had their children taken from them). Both sexes must forego the illusion of illusion of “superman.” Men must cry out and women must listen. Only then can the sexual politics of th future be built upon an even foundation.