It's the end of the world as you know it (and I hope to fuck you don't feel fine).

I'm not even going to bother offering you the choice between a red and a green pill. Your illusionment is your own problem; don't expect me to provide it. I'm here to tell you what the world is, what you've sometimes seen slivers of but never put together.

We live in a Matriarchy.

That's right, a Matriarchy. And, by and large, we always have.

David Gilmore, in Manhood in the Making, asked the question that would, taken beyond the implications he was willing to make, change the world: qui bono? -- who benefits? Tracking cultures around the world, large and small, he finds remarkable similarity in the definition of manhood. We tend to think of gender roles as socially constructed and thus infinitely malleable. As late Medieval and Renaissance Europeans thrilled to books describing bizarre animals and people, so we still thrill to descriptions, by anthropologists and science fiction writers, of societies in which gender functions differently. Our pulp fictions are filled with female warriors, gun-toting and latex-wearing figures we might think male if not for their bulging breasts. It is a vision of the industrial revolution gone wild, and it is just as mythical as the cannibals of the new world. We delight in the exceptions and forget the rule.

Gilmore's work, in this context, is nothing short of revolutionary. Not only do we love exceptions, as our news which covers the occasional strange murder as if a foreign invasion demonstrates, but we abhor continuity. Historians write not, as Ernst H. Kantorowicz did, of inherited legacies with many forms, but of discordance. In religion and literature, the true comparative studies have given way to more Aristotelian forms; so too in psychology, in which Freud and Jung are no longer read by students, who read instead present-day denunciations of the same and thus learn to hate without encountering. Anthropologists, and to a large extent historians and literary scholars, have descended to the level of sociologists, whose work is always about a social cause, which explains everything and to which they (and their students) must adhere, and never about the subject at hand. While we discount grand narratives (poor Gibbon!) and their continuities, we sublimate our desire for the same and create continuities of ideology: we are eager to accept that the status of women, or racial minorities, has raised and lowered without consistent progress, but we nonetheless assume that, throughout (at least Western) history, women and racial minorities (which are seen as oppressed today, thus providing a social message) have everywhere and always been oppressed. And while the recognition of the myth of progress is most welcome, we impose new myths to which all facts must be subordinated, never recognizing the irony that this is just a newer version of the old historical textbooks with a literal ascension of illustrated scenes on their inside cover, leading upward to our present enlightened, then Christian and now feminist, era. Gone -- gone -- are the facts, is the learning, is the subject at hand.

One has to love anthropologists as one loves a good clown. Take, for example, the case of the Berdaches. Exactly what was a Berdache is impossible to say. Essentially, a Berdache was someone who, in certain Native American cultures, seemed somehow to straddle male and female worlds. This, of course, means that they are much loved by anthropologists and feminists. Yet the Berdache does not exist anymore and can be found only in records left by white settlers and explorers, whose terminology is very much open to interpretation. It is debated whether the Berdaches were biologically male or female; some think that they were treated culturally as if of the other gender, others that they faced discrimination. Some regard them as male homosexuals, while still others doubt their very existence, believing that explorers simply misinterpreted cultural signals. Yet the Berdache (of which we know nothing about) is cited fairly regularly as an example of fluid gender roles, with the connotation that, if he (or she, or he-she or she-he) cannot be used as a model for our own society, the Berdache can at least serve as a kind of inspiration, a symbol that we have predecessors for our enlightened, gender-bending times. Ironically, it is this -- our own present Western desires and assumptions -- that the Berdache symbolizes, not anything about the reality of gender or Native Americans.

Gilmore's book challenged anthropology more directly, however. Anthropologists (not coincidentally like colonial travel narratives) have long attempted to find matriarchy, defined as rule by women, often making tenuous interpretive leaps to do so. They have sought to find cultures in which the gender roles the West inherited are reversed or blurred. J. Peoples and G. Bailey's Humanity, an anthropology textbook, claims that "the 'man as hunter' image is oversimplified" and offers evidence: the women of a certain pygmy tribe of the Zaire rain forest hunt in groups with nets and the Agta, a Philippine mountain tribe, in which women sometimes accompany the men as they hunt (262). To say the least, this is hardly overwhelming evidence. Fishing with nets, as opposed to spears, is hardly hunting per se and can be quite a passive activity. Similarly, occasionally standing alongside men who hunt does not a huntress make. Clearly, there is no oversimplification in evidence. To be sure, better examples may be found than these, but they are so exceptional, so irrelevant, that the cross-cultural status of men as hunters must stand as one of the generalizations in human history most lacking in exceptions. The exceptions are not remarkable, as much as we want to focus on them: the fact that there are not more, and stronger ones, is.

To be fair to anthropology, these examples of abuse are symptomatic not only of anthropology but of much of academia. Anthropology, though thoroughly corrupted, is not the problem: feminism, and the corruption of study by social causes and their agendas, is. History and literature are also bastions of such ridiculous rhetorical leaps in the interest of feminism and contemporary racial consciousness. A recent article in Society for Cinema Studies, the most respected academic journal devoted to film, only briefly mentioned the film it was supposed to address, instead discussing present-day oppression of blacks including such matters as U.S. government-sponsored movement of alcohol and drugs into black neighborhoods -- which, whether ultimately true or not, whether it is important that the consumers of such substances chose to do so or not, is still utterly irrelevant to the film at hand.

Literature is no better. I once had a class on Chaucer which, under the guise of discussing gender in "The Wife of Bath's Tale," the class was made to read a 300-page anthology of writings on women throughout history, with group presentations made to class, all of which consumed about two weeks of the semester. Many presentations concluded with a summary like this: "so, in other words, these guys hate women, who are dirty, lustful, terrible, demonic, in league with Satan, all of that." Clearly, not a lot was being learned: the message was solely that writers and men throughout history really, really hated women. Only all of it was lies or, at best, misinterpretations. In my own presentation, I stressed the rhetorical context in which such denunciations occurred, often by characters within a narrative, sometimes within a character's narrative within a narrative, often accompanied by many signals to irony, humor, or unreliability. Moreover, I pointed out that these readings were selected from much greater bodies of work by these important writers and were typically unrepresentative. Most dramatically, I pointed out how the narrative context to the passages chosen, including sometimes that the whole passage was a satire, was buried in the almost unreadably small text of the introductions to the passages, and then in subordinate clauses of sentences deep within the paragraphs -- hardly the location one would expect to find such important information as the fact that the rant against women that one is reading is, in fact, spoken not as the famous writer's point of view but through a character who that writer clearly depicted as insane. Moreover, I pointed out that the entire book was created by a feminist in response to the fact that, while volume after volume had been produced anthologizing obscure female writers, or writers who expressed feminist or proto-feminist views, few to no anthologies existed that demonstrated the supposedly misogynistic tradition that feminists described and against which they railed. Clearly, this great misogynistic tradition did not exist as such and could only be manufactured through such jury-rigging -- as part of an effort to substantiate an entire field of study and specialization within all fields in the humanities, and thus to substantiate the salaries and fame of those with such specializations, who are, after all, much in demand and wielding great power. All of this, I hasten to add, was lost on the professor and the students, who continued day after day to reiterate how terribly misogynistic all of these great white men were, utterly ignoring not only the context but such basic matters as whether these writers were being ironic, whether their misogynistic passages were fictional, or whether the writers praised women elsewhere at far greater length.

If I appear digress, I assure you that it is only an appearance and that not only shall we return to the earlier topic, but the digression will resonate as the argument progresses, or rather throughout the total argumentative artistic artifact that is the essay.

In this context, it should not surprise that anthropologists responded viciously to Gilmore. After all, pointing out differences, the alienness of other cultures, providing them as implicit models for our own, has long been the anthropologist's bread and butter. But it wasn't just that Gilmore found connections between cultures, stressing -- like Camille Paglia -- the continuity of history rather than its discordance. It wasn't even that he bucked the trend and fairly uniquely focused on manhood in a time of tremendous focus on women. Had he found that manhood, across cultures, oppressed and tyrannized women, his book would have been hailed as a great accomplishment (while not being so); reviewers might have warned against his comparative or universalist approach, but always with the caveat that "these are important matters and there is still much to be learned here." Rather, Gilmore's real accomplishment was not only in finding great similarities across cultures, but in showing, distinctively and certainly, how manhood across cultures protects and benefits women, even at great personal cost to men. What Gilmore exposed was the lie at the heart of feminist interpretation: that women were kept at home out of a desire to oppress, rather than protect. What Gilmore did was ask qui bono? -- and with those words all of feminist historical revisionism was turned on its head. And this could only anger anthropologists, whose members from the earliest to the most contemporary have been thoroughly debunked for contaminating evidence, interpreting incorrectly, and taking as objective fact the stories natives pun to delight themselves and give the white person who paid them what he or she wanted.

Gilmore found that manhood, unlike womanhood (a word we don't even regularly use, preferring femininity, about which different rules operate), was a status that was always in jeopardy. Whereas girls are considered women when they menstruate and a woman who misbehaves is simply considered a bad woman, at worst, a man who fails in manly tasks is, across cultures, not considered even a man -- his very identity is stripped from him. If a man runs from a fight, so much as admits that he is scared, so much as admits that he feels torturous pain, fails to perform his job, or cannot father children, he is considered less of a man or not to be a man at all. Initiation rites into manhood in many cultures qualify as torture, the likes of which women almost never experience -- and when they do, it is considered a great event, if not a scandal. While rape does not kill, men are put to death for it, sometimes torturously, across cultures. Feminists love to talk of rape as commonplace or endorsed by society, but their arguments involve great theoretical leaps: in fact, rape is condemned in the strongest terms across cultures the world over. Women who run from rape, or who lose the fight with their rapists, may rightly be considered to have had sex, sometimes with a notion of being despoiled attached, but no more than attaches culturally for sex in general, and those women are never chastised for having been raped or for running from a rapist. In stark contrast, men confronted by a group with weapons are routinely chastised for running or losing the fight, which, after all, involves greater stakes.

Across cultures, Gilmore shows that men routinely face, precisely because they are men, such treatments as public, blood-drawing, ritual whipping (157), insults, taunts, and mocking (13), and the ripping away of boys' foreskin and subcutaneous flesh without the "slightest hesitation or an involuntary twitch" from the victim and with "no efforts to mitigate the boy's anxieties prior to the operation or to lesson his agony during it" (163-164). On rape and the contrast of its treatment to male flight, Gilmore writes: "All human beings experience dangers: women face severe risks in childbirth... [and] the unpredictable danger of sexual abuse or even rape. Yet ... most societies regard rape as a crime... to run away from a rapist carries no social opprobrium and is in fact a generally approved strategy" (121-122). Gilmore touches on the theme of male disposability, a major one across cultures and observable in our own: "In fulfilling their obligations, men stand to lose ... their reputations or their lives; yet the prescribed task must be done if the group is to survive. ... To be men, most of all, they [boys] must accept the fact that they are expendable" (223).

Feminists talk and write about how much women contribute to society, the central implication being that they do so more than men. This is, after all, a necessary point to reach if one is going to argue that women are systematically oppressed: if men contribute more to their society's survival, the idea that patriarchy benefits men and oppresses women becomes possible. The implication is that, if women do substantially more of the work, they are relegated to the status of slaves, laboring for their male masters. Yet this smacks in the face of an obvious fact: men tend to hold the jobs. Feminists here are at a quandary: they want to promote women working as liberation, if they do not outright assume it, but they also want to argue that women left at home do at least as much work. This becomes tricky because working women might easily be seen as actually doing less work than they were before in the house, perhaps even brushing off their past labors onto lower-paid child care practitioners who do the slave-work that women have chuffed off. Yet, typical of feminists, both claims are made without notice of contradiction or tension. Feminists had to allege that women at home work just as much as men at the job that earns the family's income, and they were successful in doing so -- so much so that today "a mother's job is the hardest in the world" and variation on that statement have become, if they were not always, commonplace, if not tinny. The stakes are grand: if one sees women at home -- cleaning, cooking, and raising children -- as easier than male work at jobs, women had it good. And feminists cannot have that, since it dispels the myth of patriarchy, or at least undercuts it. As such, those interested in social transformation have redefined the word "work," making it apply to virtually anything women might do. Anthropologists, interested in work that contributes to social survival, have defined such work in ways that benefit women and not men, including rather ridiculous unnecessary chores and habits. Gilmore debunks this, surveying more societies than such feminist anthropologists, and setting female contribution to subsistence as between 30 and 40 percent (118).

What Gilmore does is nothing short of redefining, or perhaps restoring, manhood. Referring to "the old saw ... that masculinity is self-serving, egotistical, and uncaring," Gilmore writes that "manhood ideologies always include a criterion of selfless generosity, even to a point of sacrifice. Again and again we find that 'real' men are ... generous, even to a fault" (229). He writes that "women nurture others ... with their bodies, with their milk and their love... . Men nurture their society by shedding their blood, their sweat, and their semen, by bringing home food for both child and mother, by producing children, and by dying if necessary in faraway places to provide a safe haven for their people" (229-230). Gilmore eventually inverts many conventional definitions: "To support his family, the man has to be distant, away hunting or fighting wars; to be tender, he must be tough enough to fend off enemies. To be generous, he must be selfish enough to amass goods, often by defeating other men; ... to love he must be aggressive enough to court, seduce, and 'win' a wife" (230). What Gilmore does, then, is expose the interpretive simplicity of seeing male patterns of warfare, toughness, and selfishness as nothing more than, essentially, evil. In fact, men make war for perceived social good, are trained to die to protect society and women in particular, and constantly face danger -- none more prominent than the possibility of instant stripping of their very status as men -- in order to make and to keep them able to do the same. Yes, men rule, but the question is "who benefits?"

It should be pointed out that Gilmore, in his final chapter, pulls back a bit from some of his claims; it is as if he fears the backlash he knows will come. More important, he avoids the implications of his own work. When asking whether women can participate in a male ethic of accomplishment, he states that he leaves the answer for philosophers (231). A study of manhood across cultures, he does not wish to examine the revolutionary questions his work raises -- the answers to which will go far beyond contemporary feminism.

The questions that Gilmore does not ask, but which we very well should, abound. If men were self-serving, why be so willing to sacrifice themselves? Why train themselves to do so? Why send men off to war? If patriarchy is so misogynistic, why not send women off to die in war? Why not enslave them in the workforce? Why not regularly deride them as not being women, as being worthless, if they fail in their tasks? Why not execute and torture them at higher rates than men? Surely, something is wrong with our definition of patriarchy.

After all, who benefits? It is surely not men, trained to be tough, to fight, to die; ritually abused and tortured; always precarious in their position and identity, their very status as men vulnerable to loss at a moment's notice. Who benefits? If one defines benefits as gets an easier life, if one defines as desirable a lack of violent dangers and public derision of the most personal kind, the answer, decidedly, is women.

Gilmore suggests this, but sees it as beyond his scope. His work will, if justice is done, be remembered as significant in all of history. What he has done is lay the groundwork for a new understanding of gender in history and government, which I will proceed to reveal.

Today, in America, we complain that women are underrepresented in our Congress and have never been represented in our Presidency. We hear of women's wages being 60-some percent of male wages for the same job. We hear of women being disadvantaged in schools. Of how one out of five or four or three women have been raped or sexually molested. Of how women are objectified on our billboards, in our movies, in our TV shows and our advertisements. Of domestic violence. Of how women are enslaved to an impossible body image, of how women feel terrible about their small breasts and fat thighs, of anorexia and bulimia. Of men cheating on their loving wives and girlfriends, beating them, harassing their female coworkers, killing and abusing. Of deadbeat dads. Of sins too innumerable to mention.

In looking at societies and their statements, one must always exercise caution. Sometimes what we talk about as problems indicates real problems, and sometimes it indicates solely our concerns; usually, it indicates some combination of the two. For example, a society in which whites dominate may speak, and has spoken, of how whites are in jeopardy. This may well indicate that whites are in jeopardy, but if we assume this is all there is to it, we ignore the fact that such statements at least as crucially demonstrate social concern for white status; in other words, perceived victimhood often demonstrates not as much the status of victim as the status of the victim -- not the suffering of said victims as much as the concern over the victims, if not their social dominance. Good historians know this fact, yet it is rarely applied, given the strong dominance of feminism over Western discourse, to issues of gender.

The realities behind contemporary America's gender war are remarkably different than most public statements. Fact after fact frequently quoted by not only feminists but by the mainstream press, as well as reporters and academics, are simply wrong. Again and again, what is taken as gospel in the matter of gender is in fact subtly deceptive if not outright lies. Christina Hoff Sommers's crucial work, Who Stole Feminism?, demonstrates exactly this. A work of a self-confessed feminist who believes that feminism is, at its core, simply the belief in female equality, Sommers argues that feminism as a movement has been derailed, hijacked by extremists in the late seventies, leading to what Sommers dubs "gender feminism." We shall examine this thesis and its assumptions later, but what Sommers' book is most crucial for is not the thesis she wishes to attach to it for personal reasons, but for her facts -- or, rather, her examination of feminism's facts.

To begin, the facts quoted by mainstream feminists frequently do not exist at all. When one contacts the organizations who have supposedly performed the surveys and studies feminists quote, those organizations explain that they are aware of these citations but that the surveys or studies they refer to simply do not exist. When one contacts the feminist authors about these discrepancies, those authors typically react with great hostility, interpreting their exposure as part of a hostile and reactionary "backlash" against feminism, a concept designed to produce exactly this cult-like resistance to debunking. Feminists are also notoriously unavailable for comment on such matters, preferring instead to speak without hearing questions, to entertain questions only from loyal audiences, and to quickly dismiss any critical questions as ignoring the plight of women. Critical questions are frequently drowned out by hisses from the audience. When a feminist author is finally reached and confronted with incontrovertible proof of their factual errors, they express confusion as to how such errors could have occurred, typically passing the buck to those authors whose statistics they have cited without checking the citation. It seems as if feminists cite inflammatory statistics from each other's books and public statements, not only never checking but often inflating the same statistics over and over as they are quoted and quoted, becoming further removed from their source. When the first feminist to cite the statistic is questioned, they may privately promise to remove the statistic from further editions but never issue a public apology or even correction, reprint the statistic anyway (expressing, again, surprise at such an "error" just as they did at the statistic they invested). Moreover, they frequently express that, however erroneous the statistics are factually, they nonetheless do good by convincing people of the seriousness of the problem. This trend towards defending the false as somehow "true in a deeper sense" can be seen again and again in feminist discourse. In short, feminist statistics cannot be trusted.

The frequently cited statistics about the gap between female and male wages in the United States are a prime example. Many of the statistics come from previous decades though they are "erroneously" or "mistakenly" attributed to the contemporary situation. Moreover, such statistics typically do not take into account the fact that women work fewer hours during each week than men do, thus lowering their income. Sometimes jobs that are not exactly analogous are compared as if analogous. No adjustment is made for the time women take off from their careers, thus slowing down their advancement, in order to have children or for other reasons, which women choose to do far more than men. When only some of these adjustments are made, the wage gap miraculously reduces itself to about a couple of percentage points. When such matters as time taken off from work are estimated, as well as the overtime that men are more willing to spend, women actually come out ahead, making more than men do after the same number of years, when working the same number of hours. Yet the "fact" that women make less at the same jobs is still frequently bantered around the world's media.

Despite this, women are still the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs. Women are even spoken of as a "minority," thus evoking the language of the underdog and implying that they require extra support. Not only does the evidence suggest otherwise, but women are in fact not only one half of the two sexes, but actually a slight majority of the population, not only in the United States but around the world. Males actually slightly outnumber females at conception, but male mortality rates are higher, their lives more disposable, and thus women represent about 52% of the U.S. population.

One has only to walk the streets of a major city or go to a movie theatre to see a double standard in place that mocks men much in the style of a minority and assumes that women are generally oppressed in spite of all evidence. Our T-shirts are filled with images of not only female assertion but of the celebration of actions by women, including violence, and of statements outright attacking men. I recently saw a red T-shirt that read "I" -- followed by a heart symbol - "LOVE TO MAKE BOYS CRY." If this were reversed, it would be considered impossibly insensitive, if not offensive or even potentially criminal. Men and women are groups, and it seem terrible to be so proud of making the members of any group cry solely because they are members of any group. Just imagine the response to a T-shirt that read "I LOVE TO MAKE BLACKS CRY." This is what we're dealing with. Our films are filled with bumbling and incapable men used for comic effect much as blacks were used in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Female domestic enslavement of men is seen as comic, while male domestic enslavement of women is seen as oppressive.

This is nothing that has not been visible for some time. When Lorena Bobbit famously cut off her husband's penis and threw it from a moving car into a field, later claiming that he had raped her despite an utter lack of evidence, feminists gathered and celebrated, making a "V" shape with their fingers and closing it, over an over, in display of their expressed solidarity with their criminal sister and their own desire to cut off male genitalia at will, whenever they perceived men to get "out of line." Without any evidence, Lorena Bobbit became a hero of and exemplar for the feminist movement solely because she had cut off her husband's penis. By the time the evidence came to light and her crime appeared more criminal, feminists had abandoned her and the media quietly ignored their celebration of her. On its own, this should be seen as an incontrovertible and widespread case of Freud's theory of penis envy, as well as the viciousness of the feminist movement. But it also demonstrates the extent to which this self-defined oppressed "minority" utterly dominates our culture. The whole incident became fodder for comedy and talk of wifely suffering, as opposed to husbandly suffering and feminist hatred of men. Imagine, for a moment, that a man had put a butcher's knife into his wife's vagina and large groups of men celebrated, knowing nothing besides this, making a circle gesture with one hand and a slicing knife of the other. Imagine, for a moment, that a black had been lynched and crowd gathered to celebrate, making lynching gestures. Then imagine that the press uses this opportunity not to talk about the hatred displayed, but to talk of how some men, women, or blacks if not deserve such treatment at least are really, really terrible.

Studies have shown that Americans, including both men and women, respond stronger to news of a woman being raped or shot at than about a man being brutally murdered. This is intuitively correct; we see it all the time. If this were reversed, we would see it as a sign of sexism. If we replace the man with a black and the woman with a white, we would see it a sign of deep racism. The fact that women or blacks displayed similar reactions would be seen as demonstrating that they have adopted the dominant attitude about their own inherent inferiority and the comparative lesser value of their lives and their suffering. Why do we not afford the same logic to men?

The theory is often bandied about that girls suffer in our schools from the competitive and confrontational nature of American education, which benefits male thought patterns as opposed to the more collaborative nature of female thinking. Boys and men speak out more than girls and women, and even class discussion is seen as favoring boys. Yet this can only strike us as strange, given that female test scores and bachelor's degrees earned significantly and consistently exceed male scores. When American black scores on standardized tests and black earnings of bachelor's degrees are lower than white scores and accomplishments, which they consistently are, equally consistent concern is shown in the media, and the assumption is made that standardized tests and our style of education are biased against blacks, yet males are not afforded this benefit of the doubt. It is true, however, that men achieve doctoral degrees more than women, though women are narrowing that gap, but this fact has nothing to do with a sudden change in style of education at the doctoral level, nor should it be considered a problem when compared to the vastly greater gap in terms of numbers affected at the bachelor's level, and should be attributed to women being more likely to take time off, including to have children, to be unwilling to subject themselves to the many years of largely unrewarding work that doctoral degrees require, and to women's wll-acknowledged risk-adverse nature compared to men, especially given the debt acquired by most students to obtain the doctorate and the difficult market that many doctorate-holders face. Again, concern is placed on women while it is men who, in the big picture, have the lower odds of success in our academic system.

Statistics of domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and anorexia and bulimia are grossly overestimated. Many citations are simply false. The studies that do exist -- and get attention -- tend to be done by organizations devoted to such problems, organizations whose very livelihood -- and those of their employees -- depend on such problems existing. Misleading questions are often asked. The famous statement made by apparently enlightened, and almost certainly well-intentioned, parents, some variation on "if anyone touches you in a way that makes you uncomfortable," is a good example: being uncomfortable at a touch does not equal sexual contact or harassment.

Sexual harassment has been redefined as essentially any statement or gesture that may be taken as sexually uncomfortable, including the hanging of signs or posters. A woman today can claim that a movie poster showing a woman in a bra makes her feel uncomfortable and win a sexual harassment suit. A man cannot say that an actress or figure outside of the office is attractive without the realistic fear of such a suit. Moreover, no provocation is needed: any such suit or even simple verbal claim is likely to have disastrous repercussions, including firing, suspension, and a general perception that the man involved is a risk to his employer, who may also be the subject of a lawsuit, potentially requiring millions to defend, plus millions in a settlement or judgment, irrelevant of actual guilt. Any man who thinks that his employer will stand by him in the case of a sexual harassment claim against him is fooling himself, as far too many men have discovered. Moreover, even if a woman dismisses the claim, such as if she discovers it to be erroneous or calms down after filing the claim as a vengeful tactic, that claim is likely to remain part of the man's permanent record despite the dismissal. Employers are considerably hesitant -- and understandably so, given the potential liabilities involved -- to hire a man who has faced a sexual harassment claim, even if it was dismissed. Claims made by men, meanwhile, are not only far, far less frequent but typically not taken very seriously.

Sexual harassment has become nothing less than a method for women -- for any woman -- to damage, if not destroy, any man's career. In and of itself, independent of any other factors, sexual harassment represents the sheer dominance that women exert over men in our society, so great that a woman of any class or status can make a groundless claim against a man of any class or status and reasonably expect to damage or destroy that man's career or reputation. Such a discrepancy can only be compared to apartheid systems, yet criticism of such a system is seen as insensitive to real sexual harassment claims (which certainly do exist, whatever minority of overall claims they represent), if not representative of outright misogyny.

Even rape has become so politicized as to become meaningless as a term. Many feminists, as well as campuses and courts, have defined unconsensual sex as simply unwanted sex, including cases in which a woman wanted sex at the time but later regretted the act. To begin with, a woman no longer need say "no" for rape to occur. Having sex with a woman who has been drinking opens a man to the charge of rape on the grounds that the alcohol had impaired her ability to consent. However true this description of the effects of alcohol, the fact remains that a woman chose to drink and, whatever the circumstances, consented to sex. Men who did not know the woman they penetrated had even been drinking have faced charges of rape on these grounds. The fact that the man may also have been drinking is, paradoxically and hypocritically, typically not taken into account: men are expected, no matter how drunk, to be responsible for their sexual actions, while women are not. Additionally, women who regret sex the following morning, or who believe that they were uncomfortable with certain sexual acts, have filed charges of rape despite that they made no objection at the time. After all, in retrospect, they did not want to engage in such activities, which thus qualify as "rape." Long gone are the days when rape meant a knife to the throat of a woman taken in an alleyway. Of course, a man charged with rape can expect his reputation, relationships, and career to suffer as a result, regardless of his innocence or the outcome of the case. For every case in which a rapist is found innocent because, as in one high-profile case, the woman asked him to wear a condom and he did, thus implying that she consented to the act, there are literally hundreds in which men are wrongly convicted or charged.

Sexual harassment and rape, as a point of fact, have the highest incidences of false reporting of an crimes. In layman's terms, this means that investigation shows that such crimes did not occur, even in their present liberally-defined definitions. The number of cases in which charges are filed with police yet the crimes did not occur are higher than with any other crime. This suggests what we should know intuitively: that girls and women use such charges to get back at their parents, boyfriends, or other men who they do not like or wish would go away or suffer. Yet, in the wake of this evidence, what we hear again and again is not of the demonstrable false reporting, as documented by police departments across the nation, but about how few incidents of sexual harassment or rape are reported, a claim which is utterly hypothetical. If anything, the embarrassment faced by a person who has been sexually harassed or raped is outweighed by the lucrative prospects of a suit and the revenge that it offers, as well as by the camaraderie of supporters who come out of the woodwork for seemingly anyone filing such claims. Moreover, victims of many crimes, not the least of which is fraud, face similar if not greater embarrassment, yet this is never discussed in the context-free discussion of sexual harassment and rape.

One of the reasons we are told that women do not report rape, the implication being that it is a much greater problem than any statistics can capture, is the fear of their sexual history and desire for the rapist being questioned or attacked during a trial. Yet such a right to confront one's accuser is mandated by the Constitution of the United States, and to deprive men of this basic right in such cases would clearly create a double standard against men. Just imagine if bankers started arguing that they should not have to face an aggressive cross-examination of their own business practices in a suit about monetary fraud, since to do so would embarrass and damage the reputation of the witness. While we talk of "putting the victim on trial," this is, in fact, standard in our system of jurisprudence - we're just more concerned about it in cases of rape. After all, the witness's history is relevant: a jury should know whether a banker testifying against a man charged with fraud has himself committed fraud. A woman's sexual history should be considered in rape trials: if she has had sex with every Tom, Dick, and Harry, the odds that she would fail to consent are certainly lowered. While politically correct, this is an obvious fact: it doesn't make much sense to rape a woman if one can have her for a small fee, whether monetary or measured in proximity, conversation, or meals or beers purchased. Yet women are routinely protected in court from questions of their past sexual history or attraction for the rapist, which are frequently seen as badgering or irrelevant to the facts at hand. Women in such cases may even be allowed to testify in absentia -- i.e. on videotape or in written testimony -- thus circumventing the constitutionally-mandated right of the defendant to confront his accuser. However regrettable the situation when a woman has actually been raped (a very different matter than whether the man is found guilty), our system of jurisprudence is designed to protect the accused, who is presumed innocent, and not the accuser. If one wishes to change our entire legal system, that is one thing, but to provide women special consideration in trials that are not extended to men is clearly hypocritical.

When my parents asked me this question when I was in grade school, I responded, in front of my father, that my father had done so at times while driving me in the car, by which I meant that his occasional placing his hand on my knee, intended to feel reassuring, felt somewhat awkward and forced; I had answered the question honestly, as it had been asked, but (as my parents' reaction quickly showed) that question had been at best an equivocation and at worst dishonest and deliberately misleading. The response in my case to their response led me, in my embarrassment, to feel that I would not tell them if someone touched me because I feared a similar response. By misleading in the name of good, a bad effect was achieved. Similarly, by so expanding the definition of rape and sexual harassment, those who are really raped and sexually harassed are demeaned. A woman who has been raped at gunpoint has only suffered the same crime that a college girl who gets drunk at a fraternity party and goes up to a boy's room where she is fucked without objection, only to think better of it the next day. A woman who has really been sexually harassed through frequent and persistent comments by her coworkers about how she might be in bed has only suffered the same crime as a woman who objects to a movie poster.

One of the most heinous cases of common discrimination against men occurs around pregnancy and children. Women have been granted abortion rights which, however attacked on religious and moral grounds, continue to be protected by authorities and frequently exercised by American women. The rationale has been that women should have the right to control their own bodies, including their ability to produce new life. Simultaneously, men are made to pay child support to women with whom they have fathered children, whether wanted by those men or not. The media frequently covers "deadbeat dads" who do not pay their child support, often a large portion of their incomes, and the government has sporadically and in much celebrated fashion "cracked down" on these insensitive oafs who do not want to support their own children.

Either position is defensible, but both cannot be defended simultaneously. If a woman has the right to abort, she has that right because the potential child within her is a part of her body and thus her property. Yet those cells contain genetic material from the father. Essentially, male ejaculate, once it leaves the penis, immediately becomes female property and is no longer considered a part of the male's body. A double standard may already be perceive here, in as much as men are not granted the right to abort their potential children based on the fact that those cells are a part of those men's bodies. But even if one argues that ejaculate is the property of the woman, in as much as it has been "added" to her body (as opposed to part of an invading force), one cannot then argue that men should pay child support. After all, that man has no legal right to his own ejaculate, which is no longer considered connected to him. Essentially, child support presumes that male ejaculate is male property precisely when it apparently benefits women for society to hold that view. Women get it both ways, any philosophical consistency ignored in the interests of women's rights or the welfare of children, respectively: a man has no right to his ejaculate or to his unborn child when such a right might give him a right to abort or insist that that child is carried to term, yet the moment that ejaculate and the child it produces becomes a liability, his role is suddenly acknowledged with great force.

Again and again, courts have upheld the notion that child support exists independent of the father's rights. Legal precedent states that legal paternity is entirely different from biological paternity. Once the courts have designated a legal father, the facts of paternity need not matter. A number of men have discovered exactly this when DNA tests show that the children for whom they have been paying support is not in fact theirs: the courts have ruled that such men must continue to pay support irregardless of their actual paternity. In a number of cases, the men involved only began paying child support because they believed the child theirs, only to discover that the women involved, whom the men believed to be faithful, were having sex with other people at the time. No accusation of fraud is permitted in such cases, and the men foolish enough to be conned by their often deliberately deceptive girlfriends or wives are left to pay and pay, month by month, for eighteen years.

This is justified as being in the interest of the child, yet it is men who bear the financial burden of this interest. After all, far fewer women than men pay child support. This is because our courts tend to regard, as their rulings though not their theory demonstrate, children as female property even after their birth. It is well-known, yet little concern is granted the fact, that courts grant child custody to mothers over fathers in remarkably lopsided fashion. Similarly, requests for visitation or to restrict or eliminate visitation favor women. Men as a class are deprived of their rights to their own children, yet forced to pay for them as if their rights were equal, which they in no way are.

Of course, as far as all of this being in the interest of the child, no matter how hypocritical intellectually, is concerned, not only does that argument not extend to abortion, but it is big government business. The government keeps a significant amount out of each child support check, ostensibly in order to compensate itself for the bureaucratic handing of these checks. The ending of child support, on the grounds that the financial burden is the price of custody or that women have abortion rights (and thus that men have no right to custody or responsibility for support), would mean an end to scores of government jobs. It is worth noting, in this regard, that a significant double standard exists here as well that goes beyond governmental financial concerns, since women are not prosecuted for failure to pay child support nearly as much as men are, and we rarely hear of "deadbeat moms."

Moreover, child support does not go to the child -- it goes to the mother, with the assumption that it will be spent on the child. In many cases, it is. But in many cases, it is not. Investigations of child support, as well as anecdotal evidence, have turned up exactly this. Many poor mothers spend a portion of their child support checks on themselves, minimizing their children's costs; I have personally known of cases in which a $400 check received through the government -- from a father working a minimum-wage job at a fast food restaurant, barely able to eat or pay rent for his small, squalid, shared apartment -- went half to the likes of make-up and video rentals while the child's food and diapers were so minimized as a part of the budget as to constitute a health risk. Such cases are hardly rare. At the same time, many rich mothers live in lavish homes and receive tens of thousands of dollars a month from their children's father, which pays for their private schools and tutors, clearly not necessities, but also contributes to the maids, the house, and the pool -- all while the mother takes vacations without the children and spends vast amounts on herself. Exactly where the money child support provides is of course impossible to ascertain, as it simply enters the mother's income pool.

At the same time, men are second-class citizens in our courts in other matters as well. Women are far less likely to be committed for the same crime than men, and sentences given to women are but a fraction of than sentences given to men for the same crimes. Women, in our courts, simply hold a privileged status akin to that of nobility. Again, when such discrepancies are pointed out between races, they are national scandals, causes for celebrities and special interest groups. Yet when such statistics are released for men, the news rates a small article far from the front page of the newspapers, at best, and almost never receives precious airtime at all.

Men represent the overwhelming majority of our prison population. When blacks are found to be imprisoned at far higher rates per capita than whites, the assumption is typically that the court system is institutionally racist. Yet this same assumption is not extended to men, who are simply assumed to be more violent. No one seems to point out that men are imprisoned for non-violent crime, from drugs to tax evasion, at far higher rates than women, although statistics on commission of drug use and tax evasion show far higher rates for women than their incarceration rates for the same. The only solution can be institutionalized sexism -- not against women but against men. Women are less likely to be arrested, less likely to be prosecuted, less likely to be convicted, less likely to be given stiff sentences, and more likely to be paroled.

Simultaneously, conditions in prison are worse for men than for women. It is well-acknowledged, though not necessarily well-known, that police officers use the conditions of jail as a punishment and deterrent for people they believe to be committing crimes. I have personally been told by police officers that they arrest men on charges that they know will be dismissed in order to subject those men to the conditions of staying in jail overnight, during which they will undoubtedly be raped. These police officers have joked in front of me about how these men emerge from jail the next day, walking funny and looking traumatized, the idea being that they have learned their lesson. By contrast, I have known women who have spent the night in the same jail and reported that, though they were scared and surrounded by unsavory characters, there was no risk of rape. In our prisons, men are routinely anally raped, more dangerous and traumatic than vaginal rape, forced to perform oral sex, beaten, and even murdered. This is well-acknowledged, and remarkably few people seem to care. Yet when a new study a few years ago found that female inmates suffered sexual abuse at high numbers, the media covered the study heavily and consistently, never mentioning the fact that such rates were a fraction of those for male inmates. Again, we have come to take it for granted that men are brutalized, even when innocent (as in the case of police using rape in prison by arresting people too late to be bailed out until morning, or on a Friday to prevent being bailed out until Monday), yet news of women suffering comparatively remarkably less and less traumatic rape and brutalization is a major news story eliciting horrified letters to the editor, sometimes by the same writers who write that imprisoned men deserve their (far worse) treatment in prison for their crimes and dismissing concern about such treatment as attempts to turn (male) prisons into "holiday camps" or "vacation resorts."

The worst case, perhaps, is simply male life expectancy. Men live approximately seven years less than women, dying on average in their sixties as opposed to their seventies. On average, women live over 10% longer than men. This might not be so upsetting in the case of an individual woman and an individual man, but when one begins to multiply such discrepancies by the hundreds of millions the sheer scale of this injustice becomes clear. In the United States alone, the sum lifespan of the men living today is off from that of women by about a billion years; living American men would have to live a cumulative total of a billion years longer to gain approximate equality for women. This should be a staggering figure. If one American man were to gain effective immortality and survive until the year 1,000,000,000 A.D., the scales of expected lifespans between the sexes would only be approximately equalized. We are talking about holocaust-level proportions here. If the average Jew killed in the holocaust would have lived thirty more years, perhaps a generous evaluation, and seven million Jews were killed, the amount of human life lost measured in years that would have been lived would be 210,000,000 -- about a fifth of the discrepancy in lifespans between the genders. The fact that lost years of life are spread out over a far greater population, however less easily visible and thus a subject for movies and tears, does not make the tragedy any less great.

Clearly, there is a difference between outright murder and systematic discrimination causing early death, but such systematic discrimination, as the social movements of the twentieth century have shown, can be all the more insidious. And let us be clear: the holocaust of male lifespans is exactly the product of systematic medical discrimination. The evidence is irrefutable. A just society, hearing of such a discrepancy, would focus with emergency measures on the group dying at such a significantly earlier age. Yet instead of such concern, we hear instead of female heath and the need for increasing concern for female ailments. This can only be understood as the result of an apartheid-like system.

Our government pays to educate women on breast exams and concern for breast cancer is a tremendously popular cause. So concerned are we that the newest analysis comparing the damage of radiation used in some examinations to the benefits of detecting cancer at every age level always makes the national news; doctors are even recommending elective removal of the breasts for women of a certain age with a history of breast cancer in their families. The statistic that one woman out of nine gets breast cancer has long been bandied about, and I have even heard spokeswomen citing that the situation has gotten worse and is now closer to one out of eight. One famous advertisement, circulated in many popular magazines, showed photographs of nine women in a grid with the statistic that one of these women will get breast cancer. Yet this statistic is based upon women who live to an advanced age, ironically close to the average male expiration date, and is not true of the general female population. Moreover, in a case of clear hypocrisy, prostate cancer kills about as many men as breast cancer kills women, yet it receives comparatively little attention and funding.

There have been, in recent years, a lot of cries that too many test subjects, for studies of health problems such as heart attacks, have been men, the presumption being that the data gained have benefited men disproportionately. Of course, heart attacks strike men far more than women, yet, even in the face of an apartheid-like holocaust of our male population, concern is placed not on lowering the likelihood of male heart attacks and thus beginning to level the two genders, but rather on a perceived bias in the heath care profession towards men and against women, in spite of the obvious evidence of vastly different outcomes, and concern is placed instead on female heart attacks, concern accompanied by media coverage and research funding.

The ultimate evidence that the discrepancy between male and female lifespans is the result of institutionalized discrimination within the health care profession, and lack of social planning of that profession in a way that would equalize the effects on the two, is that advances in health care have demonstrably favored women disproportionately. In the past, before the advent of modern medicine, women lived shorter lives than men, largely due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Left without health care, left in a so-called "state of nature," men are indeed the stronger sex, not only physically but in terms of life expectancy. Women had a disability in terms of their lifespans, and modern medicine has more than compensated for that. It is uniquely the result of modern medicine that men live shorter lives than women instead of the other way around. Medical concern and research given to pregnancy and childbirth, unlike (say) heart attacks, solely benefit women, and such concern and funding have been -- and continue to be -- phenomenal. Utterly lacking is anything approaching the same long-term levels of attention and funding given to solely male issues, such as prostate or testicular cancer, or the debilitating effect of constant production of sperm on the body, suggested at least as early as the nineteenth century when it was found that insane asylum inmates who were castrated even as adults lived about a decade and a half longer. We are in massive need of attention to male health, and the demonstrable and incontrovertible evidence is that modern medicine has vastly disproportionately favored women.

Today, in America, the realities of sex are far different than the popular conceptions. Women are considered an oppressed "minority" in need of special protections, yet are demonstrably a majority with vast, institutionalized preferential treatment -- in fact, routinely oppressing the real minority, men. Sexist images against men can be seen in our movies and on our T-shirts, as well as throughout our media. When a man has his dick cut off, large groups celebrate and the media, when not laughing about it, uses it to discuss not violence against men of feminist hatred but how feminists really have great reasons to hate men. We care more for a woman being threatened or attacked than a man being tortured or killed. We inflate or manufacture statistics of female suffering and those who point out such inflation or lies are denounced as misogynistic. Women likely make more than men for the same work, yet great attention has gone to improving women's status further. Our school system is failing our boys and there is a growing institutional gender gap, yet we promote female academic success as if the case were reversed. Our sexual harassment law, in apartheid-like fashion, empowers any women the power, as a woman, to damage or destroy the career of any man. Any man having sex with a woman may be considered, at her discretion, to have raped her. Male ejaculate into a vagina is considered female property, and the law enforces her ownership of that ejaculate through abortion law, yet insists that men pay for that female property through child support, too often a form of welfare for women instead of children, a clear case of men being denied the rights yet still saddled with the responsibility. In addition, our legal system discriminates against men in their ability to have custody or even see the children for whom that same system insists they take responsibility, having been denied their rights. Under the law, men are more likely to be found guilty, given stiffer sentences, suffer horribly and far worse than women while imprisoned (or even under arrest), and are less likely to be paroled or have their sentences reduced. Men die at far greater rates, the discrepancy in their lifespans not only amounting to a holocaust but demonstrably the product of discrimination against them from the medical establishment (without which women would naturally die at greater rates), while concern is placed in the very context of this holocaust on female well-being as if the roles were reversed.

And so, the question must be asked, is this a patriarchy? We have men in the majority of our governmental positions, but for whom are they making decisions? Qui bono?

The term "patriarchy," as it is presently used, is a misnomer. It is a mask to hide the truth and avoid deeper considerations. We live in a society deeply oppressive and discriminatory against men. We have men in positions of power, but they make decisions to benefit women. Their hearts too sob for women suffering in prison and are indifferent to rape and torture of men in prison. Their hearts too sob for women suffering from breast cancer and are indifferent to male death.

To say that a society is a "patriarchy" say nothing except what sort of genitals lie between the legs of those in positions of power. It is important to note as a historical fact, but says nothing about the society at hand. We assume, in our modern bias, that all individuals are fundamentally self-interested, but this has never been true nor is it today. Men in charge may clearly discriminate against men and favor women, even to heinous and holocaustic degrees. We assume, and thus equivocate between "patriarchy" as men in positions of power and "patriarchal" as oppressive to women, yet the two are obviously radically different things.

Surely the feminist notion of "patriarchy" and "patriarchal" are a deeper concern than using the terms to designate what genitals lie between the legs of government officials. We have no useful term for a society in which blacks or whites, Christians or Muslims, hold such positions, nor do we need one: we instead mention such facts and speak instead of racism of religious oppression and intolerance. Gender is a more fundamental difference than race; we are born with a certain set of genitalia, but race is a much more subjective, fluid business. It may be that, as has been observed by lawyers who specialize in jury selection, that men tend to care more for and go lighter on women while women tend to care more for and go lighter on men: a female jury is more likely to convict a female for killing their children, while men are more likely to be understanding, or believe they are being so, of the pressures involved -- and vice versa. The same phenomenon may be seen in many more quotidian contexts, as in women being tougher on women romantically mistreating men and men being tougher on men romantically mistreating women. Perhaps this phenomenon is a symptom of having been through the experiences of our gender and not having fallen prey to temptations that the other gender can only imagine and hope to navigate morally; perhaps this phenomenon is also a symptom of heterosexual competition, in which we have less sympathy for our competitors than those whom we romantically love. Whatever the cause, such a phenomenon goes against the assumption that, at least so far as sex is concerned, we defend our own. Thus, it goes against the notion that men or women can be assumed to enforce policies that favor their own sex.

If feminists miss this subtlety, their definition of "patriarchy" as an answer to "quo bono?" surely communicates more than patriarchy as a description of rulers' genitals. And it is this definition that should preserve, that can be taken as a profound statement. The fact that feminists are incorrect in the profound statement they choose, equivocating between the two definitions, should not prevent us from learning from their analysis of gender, from their use of "patriarchy" to denote a deeper meaning.

Understood in this light, defined the only way that signifies anything about the culture being ruled, we do not live in a patriarchy -- or anything approaching it.

Qui bono?

Women. Again and again, even when philosophically contradictory. In culture. In education. In the workplace. In law and punishment. In medicine. In all these areas, men are distinctly second-class citizens -- and in many cases a distant second class at that.

This is a matriarchy.

And with these words our understanding of gender is transformed. Let us hope it is never put back into its simple world of equivocation and assumption, into its simple lack of awareness of the tensions between declarations of powerlessness or victimhood and the power or dominance usually necessary to make them.

Let this simple phrase echo as a cry through the ages. It was said here, now.

It is a matriarchy in which we live.

Demonstrably.

Open your eyes now, lest history do so for you, and your children and your children's children condemn you all the more.

Gilmore, David D. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. Binhamton, New York: Vail-Ballou Press, 1990.

Kessler, S. and W. McKenna. Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. See pages 24-29 for the Berdache.

Peoples, J. and G. Bailey. Humanity, third edition. St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing Corp., 1994. See pages 256-257 for the Berdache.

Sommers, Christina Hoff. Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Sommers, Christina Hoff. The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Hoff-Sommer's follow-up to Who Stole Feminism? addresses the rarely-addressed fact that contemporary American society, through feminism, is not only failing our boys but raising them to be pathological.

NOTES

This essay was first serialized as Apollonian Bacchanalia #26-27 on persiancaesar.com. Apollonian Bacchanalia #26, published on 8 October 2002, contained the preface and chapter 1; it was given the following description: "The first part in a world-altering essay (no shit), beginning with "The Case of David Gilmore" and his Manhood in the Making." Apollonian Bacchanalia #27, published on 14 October 2002, contained chapters 2 and 3; it was given the following description: "Beginning here, the world is no longer the same. This section addresses the present state of gender in American society."