Why fathers can’t be mothers and vice versa

Why fathers can’t be mothers and vice versa

There is a well-known phenomenon of a revolving door in graduate degrees that lead to demanding positions: quite a few women with an MD or a PhD retire after graduation or several years later. Feminism describes this constant stream of women who have reached their thirties and forties as resulting from “micro-aggression” allegedly directed at them in their work environment and creating, according to the feminist narrative, a “glass ceiling” designed to “suppress the female sex.” But what such women are reporting is completely different.

Most women experience children as self-fulfillment, while most men receive parallel mental fulfillment from their place on the social matrix (the status), that is, from their position. There are exceptions to this, but the rule and the exception do not disqualify each other, and now after we acknowledged the exceptions, the non-exceptional must also be acknowledged – a man whose main achievement in life is raising children, and a woman whose main achievement in life is a position on the human matrix, will both find it difficult to see in that alone self-realization. Here there is an immediate danger that readers who identify with feminism will revert to the feminist ad consequentiam argument, which says, “if someone utters the truth about male and female drives, this alone would prevent women from occupying positions – therefore the drives don’t exist.” However, we didn’t say that women cannot or should not have such roles – the idea that this is what was stated, is merely part of an argumentum ad consequentiam, of thinking, “If we acknowledge the existence of human drives it might be an impact that we don’t like, and this impact was the intention of whoever admitted this.” Not at all. The fact noted above (that women experience children as self-realization while men receive parallel mental realization from their place on the social matrix), is not leading to any of the consequences feminism is afraid of, and admitting the above isn’t coming out of any intention to prevent women from achieving anything. It could have, but it doesn’t. This is important: not everything that could be true, is in fact true. Most of what could be true, isn’t true. Your friend could be traveling to Rome to get away from you, but they’re not, they want to see Rome. The fact that something could be true is not evidence that it is true. Your boss could be complementing you just to make you unsuspecting while they try to get you fired, but they’re not, they are simply happy with your work. Millions of men and women could say that children cause women self-fulfillment while positions cause men self-fulfillment to keep women down, but they’re not, they are only expressing what they feel and know as humans.

This difference between the two sexes regarding what causes self-fulfillment, stems from innate sexuality. Women have an innate desire for children (and there are exceptions; acceptance of the exceptional person mustn’t turn into disqualifying the vast majority). Women should not feel guilty about their desire for children or their view of children as an existential purpose and self-fulfillment, because this is not a product of social conditioning nor of male expectations but of innate female sexuality. Society should also refrain from instilling in women a sense that expressing an aspiration to have children, or a desire to dedicate themselves to children, is “harmful for the status of women” or “a betrayal in feminism.” The desire for children is the deepest sexual urge in women, and therefore any judgmental attitude toward it is the oppression of women. In fact, the female urge for children is similar in its intensity to the male urge toward women. Most of the magnitudes found in men’s urges toward women are rarely found in women toward men, but rather, such magnitudes are seen in women toward babies and toddlers. Just as many men feel an almost uncontrollable urge to touch women, many women feel an almost uncontrollable urge to touch babies (while men find it difficult to even distinguish between babies). Women often see almost every baby as an endearing being, as men feel toward almost every woman.

Most women do not achieve satisfaction from positions that do give them status, but at the same time make it difficult for them to bond with their children or even demand of them to avoid motherhood.

Women see having children an existential purpose, as men see in sex with women, in the following simple sense: A man who feels that there’s a possibility that he will never have sex with any woman, will have a feeling that there is no point to his life, and most women who feel they may never have children, will feel similarly that there is no content and purpose to their lives. The opposite is not true in most people – a man who feels that there’s high probability he’ll never have children will not reach the emotional extremity that the thought of never sleeping with a woman will cause, and a woman who feels she would never sleep with a man would not usually reach the same emotional extremity that the thought of never having a child would cause.

All of these are not “roles.” These are the innate female and male sexualities. In many if not most of men, the male sexuality sees children as something that must be given to a woman so that she would want to share her life with the man. We must be committed to saying the truth, and this is a human truth, even if it sounds to a feminist too simplistic or even too ridiculous to be true (much of actual human existence, is indeed quite ridiculous). Men are interested in women; children are, for most men, a price to pay to get women’s consent to live together. Prior to having children, men generally have no special interest in becoming parents; rather, they want women. Generally speaking, it is only after having children, that men fall in love with their children, and this could remain limited to the children they are raising – they generally don’t develop special regard toward children in general, as many women have much before having children.

This should not be taken as an assertion about what should be the human condition, but as an innocuous observation familiar nearly to every living person about what humankind is, and what the innate qualities of human beings are. This is not to say that men do not love their children – they are in love with them. However, only a small proportion of men regard raising children a goal in and of itself rather than a consequence of sharing their lives with women, and many of the few who do see children as an existential goal, are traditional men who think of children as a kind of small personal tribe that grants them power and status in a traditional society.

One of the consequences, is that most women do not achieve satisfaction from positions that do give them status, but at the same time make it difficult for them to bond with their children or even demand of them to avoid motherhood (yes, the exceptional person was recognized above – all the others also deserve acknowledgment once in a while, and here we are discussing them, not the exception). There is a well-known phenomenon of a revolving door in graduate degrees that lead to demanding positions: quite a few women with an MD or a PhD retire after graduation or several years later. Feminism describes this constant stream of women who have reached their thirties and forties as resulting from “micro-aggression” allegedly directed at them in their work environment and creating, according to the feminist narrative, a “glass ceiling” designed to “suppress the female sex.” But what such women are reporting is completely different. For example, Dr. Georgia Free, a medical doctor, rejected this narrative on her popular YouTube channel when she explained how feminists march young women like herself into restricting positions, saying “Dear teenage girls of the past and present… I’m sorry, we lied to you… We lied to you because we were lied to as well.” A former corporate executive similarly said on her vibrant YouTube channel, “Feminism is lying to you”.

The feminist vision, that male spouses of such women will take care of babies and function as mothers, is not, for the most part, aware of the basic drive for motherhood of the women themselves.

As someone who knew quite a few women who left a position shortly after graduating, to fulfill other aspirations – one became a dancing teacher, another a therapist, yet another a healer – the feminist description of environmental “microaggressions” forming “a glass ceiling” that supposedly turns the revolving door, is simply not true. They retire reporting sympathy toward them in the positions they held, even exceptional and eager support to keep them there, none of this being helpful in dealing with a sense of existential non-realization, a feeling that the position in and of itself, as a place on the social matrix of status, simply does not grant them any kind of existential realization. These positions are significant primarily for the feminist spreadsheets to reach 50% women somewhere – not to most women, save for the well-acknowledged minority. The same feminists who compile the “grand spreadsheet of feminism”, by the way, usually do not devote 12 years of their life to isolating cells in a tube or to counting light spots under a prism in order to be imprisoned at the end of this academic training for 10 or 12 hours a day alone in a dark chamber with a microscope, while regarding this an existential realization. On the contrary – they dedicate most of their life to self-realization, while sending other women to live this life, to balance the spreadsheets for them.

The conclusions from everything written so far are many. First, it is necessary to allow women in senior or demanding positions to make time for children. The feminist vision, that male spouses of such women will take care of babies and function as mothers, is not, for the most part, aware of the basic drive for motherhood of the women themselves. Second, we must acknowledge that even after any possible social change, most women will prefer positions that allow the private life to have more weight than work, because the position itself simply does not grant most women a sense of existential fulfillment. Therefore, women should not be tracked forcefully (by feminist influence in education and culture) into roles that typically have much more weight than one’s private life – only cultivated equally as men. Equal opportunity and not “equity”, which amounts to tracking, forcing, and on the end of the equation, of men – discrimination. Along with equal nurturing and opportunities which are currently not lacking, women should also be sufficiently informed to make a free choice about their life. Feminist coercive tracking is morally wrong. Equal cultivation and equal opportunity do not involve leading people without their knowledge into a reality that will cause them suffering. Society should reject the reflexive feminist criticism over every numerical difference when all other conditions are kept equal. Men should not be blamed for inclinations created by female sexuality, and should not be attacked because of women’s preferences that men did not create, cannot influence, and are not responsible for (in fact, blaming men for women’s free choices, that are entirely out of men’s control, is a pattern of an abusive relationship, that formed between feminism and men). Society must not force women and men to act against mental desires just in order to satisfy some psychological need of a reclusive small faction to feel satisfaction from looking at a table in a spreadsheet that shows an arbitrary and forceful “50%”. People are not someone’s numbers. People before tables.

The idea that both boys and girls can be cultivated in the same way for motherhood, is similar to the idea that both a pigeon and a hen can be taught to fly, provided they receive identical nurturing.

The different (and complementing) drives of men and women have an additional consequence: The ability of men and women to take care of babies and toddlers has a different psychological significance in both. For a woman who wanted children, the caring involves emotional pleasure and satisfaction, and a sense of self-fulfillment and realization, at least for a significant portion of the time. For the man, caring involves almost continuous self-coercion and a feeling of non-realization (we have acknowledged exceptions above – here the non-exceptional receives much-needed and seldomly-held discussion). Women as well may feel non-realization during childcare; however, this comes alongside satisfaction and fulfillment. Which is not the case for most men. Therefore, equal participation in taking care of children does not create an equal emotional burden. But before we contemplate about this ramification of differences between male and female sexuality – why for men, childcare involves almost continuous self-coercion and thus greater mental sacrifice?

The human reality is the complete opposite of the Gender Church belief, that by raising boys and girls exactly the same way identical adults will emerge (which underlies the latest trend in the Gender Church – raising girls and boys “without gender identity”). The belief is that same cultivation in all areas results in sameness, and this faith is implemented in particular with the intention of making boys able to provide maternal care, for example, by encouraging boys to play with dolls, which is perceived as learning to provide care (this reveals some ignorance regarding why girls play with dolls. Dolls are not used by girls primarily for practicing motherhood, but for simulating social situations, most probably because of an innate inclination toward social interaction and analysis, in which women are proficient – this is not a “stereotype” but a simple fact about humans, with all due exceptions). Of course, one can teach both boys and girls to become mothers and expect both to be equally good at this in adulthood. However, only girls have the innate infrastructure for doing two things – develop into mothers in response to nurturing of motherhood, and form a new neural infrastructure compatible with motherhood during childbirth. Only women have a second hormonal adolescence – during pregnancy and childbirth – that shapes the brain into the motherly behavior just as the first adolescence shaped the brains of both sexes to develop their sexualities. The idea that both boys and girls can be cultivated in the same way for motherhood, is similar to the idea that both a pigeon and a hen can be taught to fly, provided they receive identical nurturing. Certainly, the same taming can be done with both, but only the pigeon has innate genetics awaiting this learning as an external stimulus that would lead to the development of the ability to fly, while the hen, was not born with an aviation program like the pigeon’s, so the same training to both will not produce two creatures with similar aviation abilities, but rather, one that flies and one that barely skips, because they are genetically different, they have different plans. And if we still insist on creating out of a pigeon and a hen two creatures with equal flight capabilities, it will definitely not be achieved with “equal upbringing.” We will have to invest in the hen much more hours of intensive training to reach the very lowest levels of pigeon flight (at most, we will reach a kind of non-violent gliding-falling, off an elevated “throwing zone”).

In the same way, women are born with abilities that will allow them to be mothers, that men are not born with. Identical up-bringing of both sexes is not the creation of similar abilities. Because only one of them has a plan awaiting cultivation to develop. And in the same way, giving girls the enrichment that will cultivate their maternal abilities is not tracking them, but merely allowing a potential inherent in most women to develop.

The result of these differences is that the mental challenge for a man who participates equally in childcare is not equal to the mental challenge of a woman who does the same thing, just as the efforts of our hen to fly like a pigeon are not similar to the efforts the pigeon puts in flying – with no disrespect to the enormous mental challenge that a woman faces in motherhood.

Changing up-bringing from infancy will not change the deep feelings beneath the extroverted behavior. The fact that women experience children as self-realization while men receive parallel mental realization from their place on the social matrix is not a result of some cultural programming.

Perhaps in order to appreciate the type of mental challenge we are discussing here, one needs to be aware that babies are not passive beings. They are active, assertive, and demanding. The cultural image of a baby is that one of a doll; nothing could be further from the truth. A baby is more similar to a ruler, and most of the time, not of the democratic type. The demands, requirements, and needs of a baby proceed moment by moment, day and night, on weekdays and holidays, in a continuous, relentless minute-by-minute sequence that lasts several years, until the age the baby becomes a toddler and the dependence gradually subsides. Because of that, the baby’s parent is required to deal with an almost unendurable amount of mental strain, which not comparable to any other area in life (to illustrate, I was a soldier, even in wartime; I was a doctoral student who stayed in the lab for so long that he wasn’t sure if it’s day or night outside; I was an employee required to work for 36 hours straight; and none of that came close to the stress that caring for my son had put me under when he was a baby, before, during and after my paternity leave). This strain is experienced differently by most men compared to most women because regardless of any upbringing, a man does not have equal abilities when he is required to provide equal childcare ti babies. This means that in order to achieve a result equal to that of the woman, he will need to put in much more effort. To add to the man’s fortune, while a woman facing the same challenge has a feeling of existential self-realization when providing care (for most women, at least some of the time – women must be honest about this point), and this provides a remedy for the difficulties, the man does not feel self-realization from taking care of babies, but an existential non-realization, like that felt by a typical woman who devotes her life only to a position, and thus he undergoes even more mental sacrifice in generating his equal share. Emotionally, equality in care does not produce an equal mental burden. Finally, on top of this increased mental burden, something more is added. Today, women who expect equal participation from men are guided by feminism to express their expectation with the familiar feminist contempt, meaning by requiring men to participate equally without expecting any appreciation for it, to make it clear to men that “this is not a favor, it’s your duty, and you are not receiving a cookie for fulfilling your obligations” (the term “cookie” comes directly from feminist discussions). So, while women are exalted for taking care of children alongside working, the identical effort by a man – dividing the day exactly like a working mother between work and babies, doing both in the same proportions as the working wife (as demanded by feminism) – is typically done under contempt, cynicism and criticism. Men are thus put into an unsustainable emotional position that no person would accept (let alone a feminist woman): you will sacrifice yourself, and you will be despised for it. The fathers develop emotional distress, sometimes suicidal thoughts, and warn other men of entering a parental relationship.

Changing up-bringing from infancy will not change the deep feelings beneath the extroverted behavior. The fact that women experience children as self-realization while men receive parallel mental realization from their place on the social matrix is not a result of some cultural programming. These differences are not created by education but from the differences between masculinity and femininity as two complementary types of innate sexuality. Men, as a general rule, cannot be mothers as women can. Equal cultivation from birth will never make them so, and demanding them to nonetheless be identical to mothers will create a much more severe mental burden for them then the same care would impose on women – this is not equality anymore than demanding all women to lift on a daily basis bags of sand beyond their muscle capacity is. Women are likewise not a substitute for fathers. Every parent knows that children are authoritative, posing demands and applying almost every available means to dictate their 12-months or 24 -months-old will, and that no household can function (nor the basic needs of the baby fulfilled and health kept) without the ability of the parents to guide and direct their children to actions and compliance with basic needs (going to the bathroom, eating dinner, dressing up, going to bed). Thus children require some sort and level of authority – and this applies to the most liberal of households as well. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying, probably to oneself more than to you (they apply authority, they say “go,” “come,” “take,” and “stop” as any parent, because there is no way around it). As noted, children would often resist caring and guidance (few people know this before becoming parents; most are not aware that this is the burden of parenting), and here the importance of fathers comes into play. Men have a deeper, louder voice, a more massive figure, an assertive attitude, and project authority. This could have been merely a stereotype, but the reality is that it’s not, it is a simple property of human existence. This male authoritativeness – which can be provided in the most gentle and caring manner but would still be a distinctive projection of authority for a child – is imperative for taking care of children. It is the father’s innate authority, that defies the baby’s dictating power, and guides the baby and toddler to acceptance of the mother’s requirements and requests. Mothers are rarely capable of providing the same authority. Without the exclusive care fathers add to the equation, an ongoing conflict can arise, again, exhausting the woman more than it would have burden a man. If women were to function as fathers, for lack in means of driving the children into basic healthy and necessary functioning through manly authority, they might resort to an emotional plead – “you are hurting your mother”, thus installing guilt as a motivational impetus, rather than a psychology driven by seeking love and growth, which can be emotionally exhausting for both parent and child (and may be hypothesized to affect the child in the long run). Therefore, mothers too, cannot function as fathers. Both are needed for their unique innate qualities, they are not interchangeable.

Society should not require men to function as mothers, only as fathers, and my personal recommendation would be to encourage men to be active fathers, and to closely help their wives (help, as opposed to being an identical copy of their wives as demanded in feminism). Society should likewise not mislead women about the ability of most women to function as fathers. It should also refrain from tracking women into a life that would cause most of them existential suffering and regret, and instead provide only equal cultivation and opportunity, to choose any life they wish to have, including working in a position that would not interfere with raising children, even if this would appear in some spreadsheet as women and men not showing identical numbers in some specific position type. Society must accept the choices women make, and not blame or shame anyone for these choices – not the women themselves, and certainly not men, who have little to no control over women’s choices and carry no blame for them.

Originally published here: https://lovists.com/2021/09/08/why-fathers-cant-be-mothers-and-vice-versa/