The Woman Dilemma
By: Teresa D Hawkes
Tags: Patriarchy, Matriarchy, Feminism, Freedom, Peace

The Woman Dilemma

The NYTimes columnist above argues that Feminism has failed women.

Is she correct, or do the problems women face originate in our biological role in the context of a whole-Earth culture that claims and has always claimed only males are responsible for all good things that come to the living and females are just domestic servants, chattel, and wombs to bear children into this world?

The actions of females are inconsequential in this framework. Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed men desired but did not need women, while women desired and needed men. Since men cannot reproduce without women, Rousseau made a fundamental biological error in his estimation of women, entirely aside from what we do and have always done to bring the next generation into existence.

Rousseau’s claims about female worthlessness except to serve whatever a male wanted are based in his male supremacist culture in which females were de facto slaves. Even our function as child-bearers and rearers was secondary to whatever our master wanted.

To restate, elite male narcissism, which often veers into sociopathy or psychopathy, has dictated the structure of society for as long as we have records. Only men count, only what they want must be delivered, only what they think is true is true, only they should be rewarded for the work all of us do to make society possible, with the man at the top receiving greater than 95% of all rewards generated by the whole of society. Those rewards never trickle down very far.

This is the culture that has failed women throughout all of written history.

In this framework, men conquer through many forms of war and women endure.

If we want to stop failing women, we have to reshape the culture that mandates we be failed.

We can start with the biological basis of human life here on Earth, that pale blue dot among the Stars of the Milky Way.

Let’s do some biology-based talk about being a woman and mother on Earth.

Biological Value

Humans live in groups which are ecosystems for the individuals that comprise those groups. Think about the groups you belong to. Your natal family. Your friends. Your work colleagues. Your bowling group. Your sewing group. Your online gaming group(s), your political group. What other groups?

How are women and girls treated in each of your groups? What expectations are put on them? What rewards and punishments accrue to them based on their behaviors versus the fact that they are female? Another way to ask this is: what effect does being female have on positive and negative evaluations of any given female’s actual behaviors?

What behaviors are uniquely female?

Bearing a child in her body from conception to birth.

2. Being able to feed that child with the products made by her own body.

Females can do every other thing males do except inseminate a female: we can farm, make war, be educated in any field to excellence, adapt to changing circumstances, run governments, run businesses, run healthcare, and run families among other capacities.

All other limitations on or acceptance of female behaviors are culturally constructed and enforced by those with the ability and will to do so. That would be men. Men can and have beat us into submission and gang and ganged up on us as a group to subordinate us to their wills on pain of various kinds of death, including the death of the body.

This is how men have failed women.

Reproduction is the Equalizer

Animals (humans are animals) must reproduce themselves through time. We have divided animals into specific groups comprised of individuals who can mate and reproduce. We call these groups species. If reproduction stops for any reason, that species goes extinct.

It is clear that men and women need each other or we can’t reproduce our species through time. Because we need each other, male supremacist ideologies have always been wrong about the relative value of females and males and the independent agency needed by women to perform their biological role. The biological role of being a mother and grandmother are lifelong arduous tasks that require intelligence, compassion, empathy, spirituality, and the life skills necessary to birth, nurture, raise, and guide children throughout their lives to be able to bear and raise the next generation in unbroken line into infinity.

Thus, females and males are equally valuable and equally necessary. In the old matriarchies, females controlled the resources necessary to produce the next generation such that they could produce the next generation, etc.

In patriarchy, males own all resources which they chiefly use to conduct war and business to enrich themselves and their leader. They sequester all earnings from these activities and give whatever they wish to the production of the next generation. They hold the well-being of mothers and children hostage to various forms of deprivation of food, housing, education, and healthcare in return for subjugation to male will, any male will.

Thus, as it is now and has been on Earth for as long as we have records, the key life question women on Earth have to ask themselves is how poor they are willing to be in order to avoid dealing with a man in your face every day and every night? Sure, some men are endurable or enjoyable, but many men are ruthless masters with no capacity to perceive the humanity of the woman or women they are afflicting. Further, if you have no agency with respect to your needs and wants and this is a hereditary condition, you are a slave regardless of the niceness of your cage. COVID-19 has shown us how close women always are to falling back into de facto slavery to men.

To change this, women will have to evolve around this situation. We have to stop acceding to our cruel and violent children, men.

We will have to be willing to be poor and help each other.

We will have to find men who are not interested in being our masters, but those who are interested in being our companions in this life here on Earth among the Natural world and its other living inhabitants.

Only we can start and keep this ball rolling. It took thousands of years to forge and impose Patriarchy’s chains. It will take thousands of years to undo the damage.

Women are tough and resilient. We care more about the next generations than we do filling up a bank account at any cost.

We need to run this planet for the sake of future generations.

We must keep walking in the brave, selfless footsteps of the women who have gone before us until we create a society built around bringing the next generation into healthy lives in which they pursue self-development and contribution to a society that propagates the human race into a distant future that only the end of this iteration of the Universe will bring to an end.