With special guests
- Steve Moxon and
- Sue Price.
Steve Moxon’s ground breaking book The Woman Racket, published this month; will fundamentally alter the contemporary debate about gender. Don’t miss this fascinating interview. A decade of research has gone into the book, which claims to be the first to draw on the recent scientific findings re the actual root of sex difference - males acting as the ‘genetic filter’ for the whole lineage - and of all of the other research showing hitherto unexpected and massive human sex differences; with major implications for our view of men and women. “Most importantly, we now know that there is no ‘dominance’ interaction of any kind between the sexes, so the notion of men having ‘power’ over and ‘oppressing’ women is a non-starter,” he says. “Right from first principles, and evident in all of the social research, it is axiomatic that not women but men - rather, the majority of (necessarily lower status) men - must always be the principal disadvantaged sub-group in all societies. This properly scientifically based analysis, when it filters through, will mean the complete discrediting of ‘political correctness’ and effectively the end of it. The book has had glowing praise from Bruce Charlton, the evolutionary psychologist at the University of Newcastle (UK), and was previewed as part of a two-page profile of Moxon in The Evening Standard (London) and by The Independent (UK).
Moxon says it’s time to admit we got the whole men-women debate spectacularly wrong.
He writes:
It was the now late, great and controversial American novelist, Norman Mailer, who likened feminism to McCarthyism, christening it ‘the woman racket’. He thought it more like a fad, but really it’s the latest twist to a perennial privilege.
That women are downtrodden and men rule the roost is the line we’ve all swallowed for decades now. It’s the crucial underpinning of ‘political correctness’, because with the abandonment of ‘the working man’ as a worthy victim, PC needed a new majority to get all worked up about. Without women there would be only ethnic minorities and homosexuals. What if it turned out that actually women were not hard done by after all?
It so happens that’s just what recent science has uncovered. It is anyway fairly obvious if you take off the feminist tinted glasses we all now wear, and look at how most men are faring, rather than just focusing on the ‘top dogs’. There are always overwhelmingly men at the top, but that’s because men battle each other so fiercely, not that women are somehow done down. If that were the case, then how come at the bottom you find only men? And why do we view men in the middle as relative failures when we don’t see women in this way? If we were looking objectively, we’d see that most men make a good fist of it. So why the prejudice?
The answer stems from why there are sexes. They evolved because it made biological sense to divide individuals into either those involved in the time and energy consuming business of developing/ having/ rearing baby, or those involved in acting as what you could call the ‘genetic filter’. We can’t survive without either. Obviously, we’re nowhere without babies to replace the old and the dead, but because of relentless accumulation of gene copying errors, it is just as important that men function as a ‘duff’ gene disposal device cum ‘design and test lab’ for new genes.
The upshot is that men rush about testing themselves against each other - not infrequently to destruction - but ultimately against Mother Nature herself. Many fall by the wayside in some way, leaving those without the ‘duff’ genes and/or with some fabulous new ones, to be the higher status guys that women are correspondingly ‘designed’ to choose to have babies with. The whole system of the renewal of life works much better if you have this division of labour that leaves women just to get on with it whilst men are put through the mill. This is why men on average die several years earlier than do women.
It’s why the sexes are profoundly separate. Biologists had anthropomorphically assumed that the males of animals are ‘dominant’ - higher in the ‘pecking order’ - over females. Both sexes were thought to co-exist in a unisex dominance hierarchy, yet it’s easily seen that pecking orders are always same-sex. There isn’t the ‘power’ relation between the sexes that feminists insist there is. Quite the opposite. Our prejudices and morality are based on the ‘policing’ of men through psychological ‘cheater detection’ mechanisms, so that they don’t try to get away with anything more than to what their rank entitles them: most especially regarding women. We ‘do down’ men, but because females are biologically more valuable, women we ‘big up’.
So how do we see this separation as we live our lives today? Now that men and women more usually work together, and it’s insisted that men and women are the same, we pretend that la difference is waning. In fact, the sexes always polarise. From toddler age, boys play with other boys, and girls play with other girls; boys wanting team games, whereas girls go around in twos and threes. Boys have quite rigid pecking orders even before school age, and this is completely different from the friendship network that girls have. Males have to climb the greasy pole, but females have only to pick the males off it, and simply look good. What does not happen is competition across the sexual divide. It would be pointless - and actually counter-productive, for both sexes.
Surely though, men and women readily compete with each other at work for promotion. Ah, but it doesn’t feel the same as competing against your own kind. It’s not ‘psychologically salient’. That’s when the real competition begins. Experiments show that when the sexes get together they just want to display to each other.
We can see why it is that women so hate women bosses. The workplace is modelled on ‘man world’: a hierarchy. Putting the female personal network into a hierarchy is incongruous. (That’s why when you look into the ‘prestige’ ratings of jobs, if you ask men or women to rate ‘housewife’, it comes in half way up the scores - way above the equivalent job of laundry worker, and ‘househusband’ comes at the very bottom). Men climb the greasy pole because that gives them status, which is what women look for in a man.
But what do men look for in a woman? Fertility: beauty, youth. The woman on reception is no less attractive than a woman on the board for all her lack of effort, but the few who move up the workplace hierarchy can better put themselves in the path of high status men. Women intuit all this, and look very suspiciously at these unusual women, as though they are cheating in some way. Women find far more natural the relationship of male boss and female underling, because it’s the natural essentially sexual (in the widest sense) way the sexes get on. The separate hierarchies of the sexes serve to rank each sex according to their value as sexual partners - their ‘mate value’. For the reason that what makes someone attractive is totally different for men and women, essentially though status is the measure of man, it is not of woman: it is instead signs of fertility (youth/beauty). Consequently, it seems, women don’t aspire to status per se, which is why - and this is a remarkable fact - the proportion of women in full-time continuous work today (that is, with the same orientation to work as the great majority of men have) is the same as it was 150 years ago.
Of course, a small minority of women indeed are careerist. Other than to better put themselves in the path of high status men, work can become an end in itself, especially when it draws on sex-typical predilections.
The surprise is that the ‘pay gap’ is only 20%. In fact, a ‘pay gap’ this small can only be explained by sex discrimination against men. Wherever you look, it is the majority of (lower status) men who are disadvantaged. Most domestic violence is actually female-on-male. The virulent resistance to this truth (that research has long starkly revealed) is testament to the depth of anti-male prejudice. It hardly needs pointing out that not females but males are let down in education; that not female but male cancer patients are neglected; that fathers but not mothers are denied proper contact with their own children.
It’s the same story of wrongly supposed social injustice to women in recent history, though we can’t see it because we inappropriately place on the past the values that have grown from modern contingencies, and miss that by the standards of the day life was clearly organised to preference women. When you properly look at child custody and marriage in centuries past, the law here is all about men never being allowed to divest their responsibilities. Even the standard social history of the vote is hopelessly false. Women from time immemorial could vote in their local communities, which was the locus of their affairs until early last century when for the first time national politics moved beyond ‘imperial’ concerns — war and the taxes to pay for war, that clearly directly concerned only men. The scandal was always the tiny proportion of men who were eligible to vote, which never topped 50% in practice, even in 1918 when women were first enfranchised.
Never before in this or in any culture has understanding of the sexes (by the chattering classes at least) been more spectacularly wrong. The view here is a counterblast, but it is set to become mainstream, and sooner than you think.
The science reveals current conceptions of the sexes to be hopelessly wide of the mark; notably that women are a disadvantaged sub-group worthy of special consideration (as in PC orthodoxy), and that men somehow ‘oppress’ them. The truth could hardly be further from this. Science shows that in neither humans nor any other species is there any such thing as inter-sexual dominance (‘power’) or meaningful competition, and that the major disadvantaged sub-group in all societies necessarily is that of the majority of (lower status) men. If any findings could be said to be ‘bombshell’ then these are.
The line Moxon takes takes is not to add men to the PC list of ‘victims’. We’d all be ‘victims’ then - many in more than one category. “Instead, I argue, we need to revoke victim status for women,” he says. “In short, we need to ‘get real’ and admit that the ‘chattering classes’ got sex spectacularly wrong. This would be another great angle for a piece, of course. I could instead look at various ways in which men and women cross paths - notably at work - and the radical new understanding of what’s actually going on. There are huge insights here re discrimination, perceived harassment, why women much prefer male bosses, etc, etc … all highly instructive for guys in getting to grips with the mating game!
“The upshot is that the core of sex difference is not in ability as such, but in motivation (a perspective that independently has been discussed in a notable paper this year by US psychology professor Roy Baumeister). Men compete much more intensely compared to women, and in a radically different way, for different ends. This is very apparent in the profoundly contrasting shapes of the distribution curves according to sex that you find regarding almost any attribute you care to measure. Males tend to polarise between high flyers and dunces, whereas women tend to group in the middle.”
You can find details and extracts of the book at http://www.imprint-academic.com/moxon
Also Sue Price, from the Men’s Rights Agency joins us to talk about the new Child Support Agency scheme to go through old income tax records in an attempt to bring some additional pennies into its coffers.
We had planned to talk with John Flanagan from the Non-Custodial Parents Party, who, while not wanting to take away from the indigenous people at the parliamentary apology last week, went down with placards to Canberra to make the point that there is very little if any difference between the abuse being measured out to fathers who are having their children arbitrarily removed from them by the operations of the country’s most despised legal institution The Family Court of Australia (unfortunately John couldn’t make it on the show this week).
As Dads On The Air has repeatedly said: it will be a very long time before our politicians say sorry to the victims of this appalling institution, but perhaps at last our state and federal politicians will begin to accept and acknowledge the appalling pain that the removal of children from their parents creates for both parents and children alike.
Here’s some of the views and people supporting Flanagan’s stance: South Australian Independent MLC Ann Bressington:
“This apology is long over due and marks a truly significant occasion not just for Indigenous families but also countless non-indigenous families whose children have wrongfully been removed,” Ms Bressington said. Ms Bressington said thousands of families had been destroyed through the wrongful forced separations imposed upon them by the Family Court and even Child Protection authorities.
“What is important to learn from the Bringing Them Home Report is that when government authorities acted in the belief that they were doing these children a great service in fact did no more than destroy a vital cultural, spiritual and familial support system for either a negligible or even non-existent advantage,” Ms Bressington said.
“The Report tells us that children who were removed experienced no greater benefits in their health, educational or employment outcomes or earning potential.
“It was a heavy toll for families parents and children alike, not to mention the community - to bear for something that was a repugnant social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong. But we have not learned and we will not learn until we make peace and restitution for all those families needing closure and healing”.
Ms Bressington said this was demonstrated by her office being flooded on a daily basis by predominantly non-indigenous families whose lives are being torn apart through the reckless and indifferent conduct of child protection authorities and Family Court judges playing God with the lives of helpless and unwitting children who cannot speak for themselves and whose parents try, often in vain, to fight the wrongs being committed against them. The Non Custodial/ Equal Parents Party will be holding a similar vigil at Canberra’s Parliament House to highlight the plight of our Fatherless Generation who are awaiting validation and an apology also.
“Anyone who believes strongly that we should not apologise to the indigenous community should read this report and ‘walk a mile’ in someone else’s shoes,” Ms Bressington said.
“Only a few months ago my office was contacted by a desperate non-indigenous, single mother who had 6 out of eight children forcibly removed with absolutely no explanation from government child protection authorities; no finalised court case to justify departmental actions; no legal aid; no opportunity for the mother to hear of or to rebut allegations against her; no opportunity for siblings to have contact with each other before their new living arrangements had been ordained by Families SA. This is the legacy we leave every Australian child if we do not make good on an apology”.
The Fatherhood Foundation also commended the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for saying sorry to the Aboriginal children stolen from their fathers and mothers but what about the current stolen generation?
Warwick Marsh, of the Fatherhood Foundation said, “It is very sad that aboriginal children were removed from their fathers by white authorities, but what about today’s stolen children, both black and white, who have been forcibly removed from the care of their fathers by Australia’s Family Law Court. Over a million children live apart from their biological father.
“Both the previous government and the current government rejected the commonsense solution of a presumption of equal shared parenting in the event of family breakdown. We call for an apology to the children of Australia who have been so grievously affected by its ideological hatred for fathers.”
Dr Robert Kelso, who has lectured in Public Policy and Ethics and who has conducted research on the effects of Family Law Act in Australia, agrees with Mr Marsh “The Family Law Court is the most divisive court in the nation’s history. The court has failed to protect aboriginal children and its associated entities such as the Child Support Agency have produced one of the highest rates of male suicide and male unemployment in the western world.”
It is good that the Prime Minister should say sorry to the Aboriginal people, but he should also say sorry to Australia’s children for the denial of contact and love of their father. He should also say sorry to the children of Australia for the destruction of their family unit and the loss of their economic future.
The Prime Minister should also say sorry to the children of Australia for denying them contact with their extended family, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Justice is not too much to ask
How much longer must our children wait?