One of the typical lines from feminists is that men are conditioned by patriarchal hegemonic culture to attempt to dominate women. Everything is about power and control to these people, which suggests that this is very much on their minds. But is there any truth to it?
I don’t think so.
Being a man, I think I’m qualified to make a few generalizations about men, and one thing I can say with some certainty is that when a man goes home, he wants peace. Power games are the last thing on his mind. There’s enough stress outside the home. On the road, in the office, and just dealing with the hassles of modern life are enough. How many guys want to deal with competitive coworkers, inconsiderate commuters and difficult bureaucrats only to go home and take on another job as taskmaster of a wife and children? And even if a man did want to do this, where would he find the energy?
The truth is that men don’t want to have to manage their wives. No, they really want a cooperative partner. A companion. Call it what you want, but they don’t want to have to exercise strict control and monitor everything a wife does. As a parent, I know how much of a pain it is to actually have to manage people in one’s family. Although I do the job, and I think it’s worth it, I often wish the kids could just take care of themselves. The only “satisfaction” derived from controlling kids is that I know they’re safer that way, and they are learning how to behave and become more responsible. The end goal, of course, is to teach them how to get by without external control.
It’s possible that power struggles within families are more important to women, because women have always exerted the most control and power through intimate relationships, whereas men tend to do so in groups of men outside of the family. This may be an inborn difference — it is common amongst social primates such as chimpanzees and macaques. So with some investigation, we may find that the feminist obsession with dominance and control in the family is actually a manifestation of a primal insecurity that is common to women. Unfortunately, feminism has brought this desire for control into government and law, creating the monstrosity known as American family law. It’s a terrible place for intimate concerns, because the state is by its nature devoid of the sympathies and affections that characterize a family.
However, despite the fact that the idea that men are obsessed with controlling their wives is ridiculous, and largely projection on the part of feminists, it has become fairly widely accepted in some circles. A man who goes through a contested divorce will come face to face with a system largely predicated on the notion, and suddenly find that whether or not he’s actually tried to exert any control over his wife, that’s the premise the state is working under. This means that the mechanisms of the state, including the police, social workers and the courts will assume that he needs to be systematically stripped of any and all control to “equalize” the situation. And they will do this with all the blind, uncaring force of the law.
This needs to be changed, obviously, but we can’t do anything about it until men speak up and challenge the presumptions that have entered the discourse on gender issues. We men may be at an inherent disadvantage, not being as focused on family politics as women, but now that it has become a feature of the impersonal state we have an opportunity to face the problem on equal terms. But first we have to stop personalizing our response to it. What this means is that when we fight this inhuman system that treats men and fathers as the enemy, we have to stop thinking of the fight as with the women in our lives that we love and care about, or the women we used to love.
Men do instinctively care about women, especially those close to us. Our biggest weakness is that we have allowed our personal feelings get in the way, which is a mistake because there’s nothing about the family law system that cares about our daughters, sisters, wives and mothers any more than it does about us — it’s simply a bureaucratic machine. Striking a blow against this machine does not equate to lashing out against a woman in our lives. Feminists will certainly portray it that way – that kind of manipulation is how they’ve come as far as they have – but as more and more women are affected by it themselves, whether they are daughters, granddaughters, sisters, aunts or second wives, even women are starting to lose their faith in feminism.
So, in framing this struggle, we have to depersonalize what it is we’re fighting against. And that means even laying aside your feelings about your ex-wife, if you have one, or any other woman who has taken advantage of the system to screw you over. One of the main reasons we’ve been so helpless against it is that men are not dominant in intimate relationships. As long as any struggle against the injustices men face is tainted by personal feelings of betrayal, or tied up in the deeply complex feelings of intimacy that characterize our relationships with those we love, or have loved, we’re going to be at a disadvantage.
If feminists can continue to dominate the narrative and perpetuate the myth that this is about our wives, or other women we care about, we’ll continue to flail. Being angry about injustice is fine – it provides much-needed motivation – but as much as righteous anger helps, there’s just something base about a collection of domestic squabbles. No, it isn’t our wives or girlfriends we’re fighting here — it’s a cold, heartless machine that mows down families like a combine, leaving nothing but stubble in its wake. If we can stop it, we’ll all be the better for it.
