Validheshun

"Remember me? I used to live for music

Remember me? I brought your groceries in

Now it's father's day and everybody's wounded"

Leonard Cohen - First We Take Manhattan

Say you're the average human female at some indeterminate point in history. You've got this big hairy beast at your disposal. In return for permitting him to (potentially (he doesn't need to know about last night)) impregante you, he owes you... everything. Every day you pack him out the cave door to return with spoils and win you higher esteem within the tribe. The means are his business, and if he gets caught you can maintain deniability while he hangs for "his" crimes. He is an extension of your larder. He might lose some toes to frostbite, have a snakebite turn necrotic, be clawed and bitten and bludgeoned and lose an eye or ear and he will quite likely die in a contest to the death with some other man for dominance or the tribe's territory, for the right and privilege to supply you with the lifestyle to which you've become accustomed. You will weep at his funeral, and remind your new hairy brute every day just how much more of a man your last one was, for his devotion unto death.

For most of history, this would warrant not a single disputing thought, partly because nobody's brain can handle a single thought beyond "don't eat the red berries" or pretending fairies in the clouds are going to make you immortal. The idea that a thinking being, every bit as existentially competent as yourself, exists to die for you... just is. That's how the world works. That's how it's always been. And besides, it's so easy to hate him. He's uglier than you. His voice sounds more gutttural. He's not permitted to seek sympathy by maintaining infantile attention-seeking behavior into adulthood, like crying.

Then comes the industrial revolution. No longer need every ape spend every day staving off starvation. Safer streets. Maybe you can take care of yourself, participate directly in public life without a human shield. Working outside the home no longer means working away from shelter. Acquiring resources directly becomes ever more attractive a proposition. But what about your hairy beast of burden(s)? You no longer strictly need him to protect and provide for you, but do you really want to let him go? You might even, occasionally, feel uneasy when notions of human rights don't mesh with his disposability, that every dirty, dangerous or otherwise unpleasant job is still done by the hairy brutes while you're sitting in an air-conditioned office shuffling papers, and if a war breaks out you'll be sitting at home getting ready to cry at his funeral.

But what are you gonna do?

Slap on a helmet and jump in the trenches?

Break your neck falling off a roof or girder during construction?

Stave off frostbite and strain against a hernia unloading trucks in the dead of winter?

Deny yourself his salary, your rightful uterine tithe?

You're not stupid, right? You're a smart girl. Why give up your original advantage just because you've gained others? The beast is too useful as a beast to be allowed to run free. All you need is a moral dodge.

There must be a way to have your cake and eat it too, maintain your half of the old status quo...

Lucky this one political movement out there keeps gaining steam, proclaiming the beast you abuse is worthy of nothing but abuse, and it's sounding sweeter with every twinge of conscience at seeing all of society's resources pour along your side of the gender divide. The beast is bad. He is unworthy of your sympathy. You shouldn't worry about his difficulties, its sensibilities, his dangers and fears, because it's guilty of crimes against you. Crimes. Crimes do you hear!? Because the beast was the one taking action (while you just took advantage) then it must be guilty of all the world's ills, just by existing. It owes you. It deserves to suffer, expiating its original sin by assuming every danger and hardship. It deserves your abuse. Really. Truly. Trust us. Put the beast back in its place. Doesn't it feel right? Empowering? Don't you deserve to be taken care of? And protected? After all, such a monstrous creature must be kept in line, for the safety of the better half. In fact, you know what, he's part of an immortal conspiracy to oppress you, and all the favors, all the care, all the protection and support he has bestowed upon you are only tricks, no matter how tangible - but your intangible "love" for the disgusting piece of slime, your "emotional labor" makes you a martyr, and entitled. To everything. Up to and including his death.

Sounds good, don't it?

Sounds real good.

 

Everyone, including its critics, mistakenly classes feminism as an upsurge, as at worst misguided utopianism, with any harm it might cause framed as a question  of whether it has "gone too far" by overplaying some sort of idealism. I would contend it is in fact an undertow, the most conservative viewpoint short of primitivist farming communes, reasserting the primeval flow of labor, resources and sacrifice from the disposable half of the species to the child-bearing half by fabricating constant pretexts of guilt by which men must be obligated to cede in favor of women. Feminism's popularity is explained at least in part as governments' need to guilt half the population into accepting poorer conditions, and conversely as the other half of the population's psychological necessity for self-justification in clinging to their subsidized diplomas, housing or sinecures, their alimony checks and the all-male military draft.