The most fundamental fact about a society is its kinship system—whether the reproductive unit is headed by the male or the female. Americans are fortunate in being able to compare the two systems. In every large American city there is an area where the female kinship system predominates—the ghettos, where most households are headed by women. These are the high crime, high delinquency, high illegitimacy, high poverty areas, the areas where the "First Law of Matriarchy" prevails: "Women control our own bodies"—where "adultery is a human right," where "you have a right to your own morality," to take off your mask of the Perfect Wife, of the Angel in the House, the area where Mom is enormously in charge of her life and can say "I don’t care. I have to do something about my own life."

Women don’t like to live in these areas, but they prefer the lifestyle which creates them, where they have "sexual options," and independence from men. Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs have been quoted on the welfare system which keeps these areas afloat: "[O]ne reason for the stigmatization of welfare, and hostility to it, is undoubtedly that it offers women independence from individual men and hence a certain measure of potential sexual freedom." This creates "male fears of women’s sexual independence."

Feminist Evelyn Reed, looking nostalgically back to the Stone Age, complains how the patriarchal system which created civilization also imposed sexual regulation on women:

Dispossessed from their former place in society at large, they were robbed not only of their economic independence but also of their former sexual freedom.

They lost some of their poverty ("economic independence") by acquiring male providers, who raised their standard of living, but who insisted in exchange on their sexual loyalty, what Engels called "the world-historic defeat of the female sex." "Many women," says feminist Alix Pirani, "want to be liberated from stifling male domination, want greater sexual freedom and self-determination, but have yet to realize fully what is happening when they grant that to themselves, what the meaning of that freedom is." They have to realize that acceptance of sexual law-and-order is the price they must pay for the economic and status advantages conferred by patriarchy. Linda Hirschman has been quoted: "They force women into marriage with social pressures such as the withdrawal of welfare"—implying that society should subsidize alternatives to marriage so that women can afford to be promiscuous.

This sexual de-regulation is what Betty Friedan means when she speaks of "break[ing] through sex discrimination and [creating] the new social institutions that are needed to free women from their chains." Especially from the chains of marriage when it is stable, when it permits men to have families. This really does require the "chaining" of women—requires them to keep their marriage vows as it requires men to keep theirs. Women who can’t endure the chains can’t be kept from leaving, but they can be kept from taking their children with them. Feminists would like us to think that motherhood is sacred but wifehood is "sex discrimination," which hangs chains on them. The chains need to be replaced by "new social institutions"—female promiscuity and its corollary, state subsidization. "Adultery is a human right," we are now told, a claim which when made in behalf of women eliminates their major contribution to marriage, destroys the legitimacy of children, undermines the security of property and the motivation of men’s labor. Briffault’s Law—that women will not associate with men—will therefore feel free to be promiscuous—in the absence of a male-supplied benefit—is why society must guarantee the stability of the father’s role.

A different view of women’s sexual obligation was formerly stated in the Book of Common Prayer. The bride was asked to give her troth, while the groom was merely asked to pledge his. Feminist Bishop Spong, makes it a grievance against the patriarchalism of his Episcopal Church that this distinction continued to be made well into the 1970s. The woman’s greater gift made the family possible—her acceptance of greater sexual responsibility, that which entitled her to be provided for. The husband cannot claim a right to be supported by his wife on the ground that he pledges his troth not to procreate offspring with other women. In marriage she gives the greater gift—but in divorce she retracts her greater gift. If she gains custody of the children, the usual case, she not only retracts her troth, she retracts the whole shtick. She reveals that in promising to give her husband a family she was waving a fraudulent contract at him. Her offer of a family would have had value only in a patriarchal society where the law supports the male kinship system and guarantees the father he cannot be deprived of his children. So the wife didn’t give her troth after all, only pretended to. But the husband is not privileged to withdraw his "pledged" troth; his pledge has to be worth more than his wife’s gift; he must keep giving support money—otherwise the judge would not place the children in the mother’s custody—would not, in other words, enforce the female kinship system.

Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs tell us that "Early writers on sex, Barbara Seaman and Shere Hite among others,"

insisted, at least implicitly, that sex should have no ultimate meaning other than pleasure, and no great mystery except how to achieve it. They realized that for women to insist on pleasure was to assert power, and hence to give an altogether new meaning to sex—as an affirmation of female will and an assertion of female power.

For men to insist on responsible sexual behavior is to assert that sex does have a meaning beyond pleasure, that its regulation is needed to preserve the patriarchal two-parent family and ordered society. This is to recognize that those women who seek to affirm female will and female power are enemies of patriarchal society.

The old meaning, which in one form or another was always submission to male power, could be inverted.

These are no small achievements—the re-making and the reinterpreting of sex….The more decisively sex can be uncoupled from reproduction, through abortion and contraception, the more chance women have to approach it lightheartedly and as equal claimants of pleasure.

They believe women can and should behave less responsibly—and thereby marginalize men. Bishop Spong feels the same way. "Twentieth century innovations in birth control—what Madonna Kolbenschlag calls ‘the great emancipator’ of women—doomed the old sexual economy":

With the resulting equalization of the sexes, what was sauce for the gander became sauce for the goose. All of those outlets that male-dominated society had set up to protect and control the female, while accommodating the male’s desire for additional sexual outlets, were called into question….The woman, having been imprisoned for centuries inside a male-dominated system, discovered sexual freedom and socio-political equality simultaneously.

Equality, the feminist shibboleth. How unfair that women are paid less than men. How unfair that women are held to a higher sexual standard than men. Only when these two disadvantages are removed will feminists cease their clamors. This will be when men have no role, when patriarchy is abolished, when women are married to the state. "The changes necessary to bring about equality," says Ms. Friedan,

were, and still are, very revolutionary indeed. They involve a sex-role revolution for men and women which will restructure all our institutions: child rearing, education, marriage, the family, medicine, work, politics, and economy, religion, psychological theory, human sexuality, morality, and the very evolution of the race.

They involve, in other words, a return to matriarchy, a ghettoizing of society, the adoption of feminist Carolyn Shaw Bell’s program for "a special tax to pay for the total welfare benefits of families headed by women, and sufficient to increase these benefits so as to wipe out the income differential between poor children with only a mother and well-off children with two parents. The tax would be leveled on all men." In other words patriarchy ought to finance its own destruction by paying women to breed fatherless families—the ghetto pattern, but with higher payments.

Bishop Spong can hardly contain his glee when he contemplates the destruction of the patriarchy:

The sexual revolution was on. The forces of change gathered, the pace accelerated, the tide became inexorable. Women’s suffrage; increased educational opportunities for women; coeducational colleges that refused to oversee private behavior;…the social mobility, assisted by ever-improving transportation systems, which increased anonymity; the entry of women into the work force; the opening of executive and professional ranks to women—all these combined with effective birth control to change the shape of history. These were the forces that dismantled the patriarchal control system, and the reasons why the moral norms of a bygone era are not holding.

These developments are reasons why the male kinship system requires to be reinforced by mandatory father custody. Bishop Spong, like all feminists, wants to get rid of this "imprisoning of women inside a male-dominated system." But this "imprisoning" is what creates the two-parent family, fatherhood, the male role and patriarchal civilization. Unless women accept this "imprisoning" they have no claim on men, and men must not allow them to have custody of their children. "By godly decree," Spong says,

the role of woman in the past was clear. She was to be the keeper of the hearth, the rearer of children, obedient and loyal to her husband. If she did not marry she was viewed as a failure, called pejoratively "an old maid" and generally pitied. Before marriage, at least in the dominant strand of the social order, she was expected to be chaste. Elaborate control or chaperone systems were developed to guarantee that chastity.

To guarantee their chastity—and therefore their bargaining power and therefore their place in "the dominant strand of the social order," where they want to be and where their families want them to be, and where other less chaste and less fortunate women envy them for being. This strand of the social order became dominant because it regulated sexuality, thus assuring that males belonging to this strand had families. The woman’s loyalty to her husband is the sine qua non for the husband’s meaningful participation in reproduction, and for his transmission of his achievements and his estate to his children. Without his status as family head he is in danger of becoming a drifter and a beachcomber and disrupter of society. As a family head he has a motive to become a stable and productive member of society and to raise his wife’s and children’s standard of living by 73 percent. As a family head he will be able to bequeath his entire estate to his children rather than dissipating it in supporting an ex-wife who will clamor for an ever greater share of his assets—called (after there is no marriage) "the assets of the marriage."

The legal system views the wife’s sexual loyalty to her husband ambivalently: (1) it is of such trifling importance that its withdrawal deprives the husband of nothing; (2) it is of such portentous importance that even its former existence creates a permanent obligation upon the ex-husband to continue subsidizing the ex-wife so she can afford to deprive him of his children, home, et cetera.

Bishop Spong fails to see that women’s claim to this bargaining power depends on her chastity and on patriarchal society’s enforcing of this chastity, without which her man is cut off from meaningful fatherhood. Woman’s virtual free ride ("Society asks so little of women") is given her not in return for her waxing the floors and making peanut butter sandwiches for the Cub Scouts (trifles upon which Ms. Friedan appropriately poured ridicule) but for her sexual loyalty to her husband (upon which Bishop Spong inappropriately pours his ridicule) and that when she withdraws her loyalty by divorce or sexual promiscuity she should forfeit not only her free ride but the custody of the children whose father has hitherto paid her bills in the mistaken belief that her loyalty was trustworthy and that she was actually giving him the family she is now taking away. Divorce and automatic mother custody destroys the father’s family; it ought to destroy the mother’s bargaining power. Automatic father custody will restore the patriarchal family and make women realize that their bargaining power within the patriarchal system depends mostly on their sexual loyalty.

Without father custody the woman is not really giving her husband anything. If she can revoke her apparent gift, as she now does in sixty percent of marriages, the gift’s value is reduced to zilch. Today’s society is betraying patriarchy by trying to convince women that they don’t need bargaining power because they can rely instead on the state’s power to coerce their ex-husbands ("We will find you. We will make you pay.")

For men to share in the reproductive function of women’s bodies they must have some benefit to offer women, as indicated by Briffault’s Law. It is one purpose of the institution of marriage to secure this benefit for the woman. Feminists think that merely taking marriage vows secures this benefit and that prolonging the marriage serves no additional useful purpose, such as providing children with fathers or such as providing fathers with motivation.

The emancipation of women is the reason why the ghettos live in squalor and violence. As George Gilder says:

The key problem of the underclass—the crucible of crime, the source of violence, the root of poverty—is the utter failure of socialization of young men through marriage.

Bishop Spong thinks otherwise: "The patriarchal assumption that everyone needs to be married," he says, "has become inoperative, and the single population has risen dramatically in our time." So has the prison population, consisting largely of single males who are the offspring of single females. So has the number of "children who grow up in divorced families [and] are not climbing the economic ladder as high as their parents did." The larger society is beginning to follow the matriarchal ghetto pattern where, as Jared Taylor says, "Young blacks are half as likely to be working as young whites."

The spread of this pathology to the larger society is aided by males who make themselves superfluous by subsidizing the destruction of their families through alimony and child support payments to ex-wives, thus liberating them from sexual regulation by accepting slavery for themselves. The liberated women are not grateful. Neither are the children. William Tucker cites a recent experience of David Blankenhorn talking to "an ordinary school in Indiana where 30 percent of the graduating class was pregnant with illegitimate children":

When he began counseling an auditorium full of students about the virtues of intact families he met a wall of animosity. Boys complained their fathers had never been around to help them. Girls solemnly proclaimed themselves capable of raising babies without men. Each of these declarations was met by thunderous applause from the assembled teenagers.

If nothing else, Blankenhorn’s experience shows how, once the culture of illegitimacy gains a foothold, it is difficult to control.

Mothers’ imagining themselves capable of raising babies without men is why fathers are never around to help. The boys who complained of their fathers’ absence are at least aware that they have fathers, though they are unaware that their absence is probably owing to their mothers’ desire to be sexually unregulated like their female classmates.

Most women chafe against and resist the confinements of marriage and sexual law-and-order. "Suddenly," says Gloria Steinem,

there are no more excuses for all the prejudices, injustices and rigid social stereotyping that women face every day in every part of our lives. Those wrongs traditionally have been defended because someone thinks they’re "good" for the economy, or the family, or the nation’s social fabric. But nobody can claim that they’re good for the women who are damaged and demeaned by them.

What’s good for women must be defined by women themselves…particularly the fundamental right of reproductive freedom.

She writes as though reproduction is something affecting only women, not men, not children. Women do not yearn to impose sexual law-and-order on men; many of them yearn to get rid of it and claim their "fundamental right" to be promiscuous. As Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs say on page 67, women will tolerate ghetto poverty in preference to sexual regulation. Listen to feminist Madeline Lee complain about "trying to overcome in a single generation the accumulated weight of ages of repression, double standards, and antisex, antiwoman thinking":

I’m sure there are women who have truly integrated their feminist understanding with their unruly psyches and successfully sloughed off the remnants of repressed childhoods [read: sloughed off patriarchal socialization] but the women I spoke with were not among them. Nevertheless, what rang clear and consistent through all their individual stories was the determination that they were not going to be responsible for transmitting repression and confusion [read: transmitting patriarchal socialization]. Even if it’s difficult, they feel they should be open about their own bodies, tolerant of sexual diversity, encouraging of their daughters’ explorations…. You have a right to your own morality.

When she speaks of mothers’ "eagerness to free our daughters from old constraints and limitations," she is talking about getting rid of the patriarchal system and stable marriage. Gilder imagines they try to impose these on men. He says:

For in general, civilization evolved through the subordination of male sexual patterns—the short-term cycles of tension and release—to the long-term female patterns.

Women have had to use all their ingenuity, all their powers of sexual attraction and restraint to induce men to become providers. Society has had to invest marriage with all the ceremonial sanctity of religion and law. This did not happen as a way to promote intimacy and companionship. It happened to ensure civilized society.

"The problem," says Gilder, "resides in the nexus of men and marriage. Yet nearly all the attention, subsidies, training opportunities and therapies of the welfare state focus on helping women function without marriage. The welfare state attacks the problem of the absence of husbands by rendering husbands entirely superfluous."

In order to relieve the pain of the poor, says Gilder,

our society must come to recognize that their problem is not lack of jobs or lack of money but moral anarchy originating with the establishment and most sorely victimizing blacks.

OK, but the moral anarchy does not originate with the establishment; it originates with liberal women, motivated by a desire to get rid of patriarchal control and get back to the "natural" kinship system in which the reproductive unit is headed by the female. The establishment is merely their willing handmaiden. The greatest share of the establishment’s culpability belongs not to the welfare system but to the legal system, whose divorce courts routinely replace father-headed families with mother-headed ones. Most of these female headed households result not from promiscuous girls breeding illegitimate children but from the demands of wives who feel, with Ms. Friedan, "I don’t care, I have to do something about my own life":

Ordinary women—wearing masks so they wouldn’t lose custody of their children, or be faulted for speaking out in divorce cases still in the courts—spoke their full bitterness at the reality of the divorce crisis.

Ms. Friedan had become a best selling author and had assured custody of her children, so she could afford to let it all hang out. Ordinary women were obligated to keep up the pretense expected by Gilder and the judges—--that they still believe in "the family"—the pretense of Mrs. Thatcher and Dr. Blankenhorn that it was the husband who "abandoned" the family.

Ms. Friedan scorns the "masks" women wear to perpetuate the feminine mystique,

the benign-destructive masks of pseudo- and real power that women acquired in the modern American family, hiding their socioeconomic dependency…role-playing and the torturous stifling masks imposed by that excessive dependence…see through those old masks and feel the burden, and want the out that equality could give you before it is too late…what a relief to take off my surgical mask!…her economic dependence, her denigration of herself…her own real feelings behind that mask of superficial sweet, steely rightness….They took it out on themselves and covertly on husbands and children….Locked in those iron masks, we finally choke with impotent rage…

One senses the powerful feeling behind this—Ms. Rich’s "enormous potential counterforce." This is why we have a sixty percent divorce rate. The swallowing of this rage is the burden which patriarchy imposes on women for the benefit of children and men and civilization. There is no other way in which the male can be intruded into reproduction, no other way of bringing about the switch from the female headed matriline of dogs, cats and cattle to the patriarchal family. The human male who cannot offer his female a benefit in exchange for her acceptance of sexual regulation must either give up hope of having a family or must impose "Islamic discipline" on her. If, as is the case in America and Western societies, the legal system refuses to recognize that it is part of the patriarchal system and supposes instead that it ought to go along with the feminist program because it is more "natural," there will be matriarchy and its pathology. Briffault’s Law will operate to destroy families if females think the benefit offered by males is insufficient, or if females suppose they can make themselves economically independent of males, or suppose that the legal system will deprive the male of the benefit and award it to the female without his consent—by giving her custody of the children. The evidence offered for this in the Annex of this book is but a small portion of what could be given.

Ms. Friedan rattles on:

The bitterness, the rage underneath the ruffles, which we used to take out on ourselves and our kids and finally on the men in bed, is out in the open now, scaring us in its scorching intensity, goading men to exasperation and despair. And now the men are letting it hang out too: how they really feel about female parasites, the dead weights, alimony, the sexual nothingness of the manipulated breadwinner.

Isn’t that precious? She wants her readers to suppose that ex-husbands who are coerced into sending support money to Mom are beneficiaries of the feminist revolution, since they are no longer manipulated breadwinners. She believes that.

Ms. Friedan’s "masks" are the roles which society expects men and women to adopt, which make civilized living possible. A judge is expected to behave like a judge, a soldier is expected to behave like a soldier, a wife and mother is expected to behave like a wife and mother. Acceptance of such roles requires discipline. Immature and irresponsible people dislike discipline. This is the attraction of matriarchy.

Ms. Ehrenreich shares this dislike. She writes on the dust wrapper of Ms. Heyn’s Erotic Silence of the American Wife that "women are sexual beings and that, for women as well as men, sex is a fundamentally lawless creature, not easily confined to a cage." Therefore what? Therefore we must either let it run wild or we must impose regulation upon it. The former is the feminist program, the latter the patriarchal program, which attempts to channel sex and reproduction within families. Gloria Steinem writes on the same dust wrapper, "Because patriarchy has restricted women’s bodies as the means of reproduction—and then assumed these restrictions to be ‘natural’—we have little idea what female sexuality might really be. Dalma Heyn shows us a new reality and a tantalizing hint of the future—and neither women nor marriage will ever be the same."

Women will no longer share their reproductive lives with men. This is why fathers must have custody of their children.

The restrictions are not "natural"; they are artificial, like the internal combustion engine. The female kinship system is natural, like the flow of a river. It just happens. The male kinship system is like a hydroelectric dam placed over a river. It harnesses the power of sex, "confining it to a cage." "Everything connected with civilization," as Lord Raglan says, "is highly artificial," nothing more so than confining reproduction within patriarchal families. It was this innovation, made only a few thousand years ago, which made patriarchal civilization possible. The "natural" system of reproduction, as Judge Noland understands, is the earlier female-headed reproductive unit of the barnyard.

The feminist movement, let it be said again, is an attempt to restore this female-headed arrangement—by appealing to the Mutilated Beggar principle—by arguing that the mess it creates is so great that it must be offset by a government Backup System for aiding single mothers, for discriminating against males and patriarchal families for the benefit of females and matriarchal "families."

Removing Ms. Ehrenreich’s "cage" does exactly what she says it is intended to do: it makes women "fundamentally lawless creatures."

How about the "masks" worn by lady firepersons who are incapable of lifting a ladder or a two-hundred pound man or climbing a six-foot fence and who prove their upper body strength by performing push-ups from their knees rather than from their toes as men are required to do? Why aren’t these masks—besides being incapable of duping anyone, besides being a threat to the public safety, besides demoralizing the men who must accept the increased risks and responsibilities imposed by working alongside incompetent females—why aren’t they just as much "playacting" as the masks worn by the Perfect Wife or the Angel in the House?

The demoralization in the armed forces and service academies is notorious. "In the past ten years," acknowledged Ms. Friedan in 1981, "more than half the West Point graduates have resigned as army career officers, as the first women graduated from West Point in 1980, take up careers as army officers." If women are capable of soldiering, soldiering confers no status on men.

Phyllis Schlafly speaks of the "mountain of evidence that women are not performing equally with men in military service today," evidence acknowledged even by West Point spokesman Col. Patrick Toffler, who was supposed to testify that sexual integration was a success. "During five hours of cross-examination under oath," says Mrs. Schlafly, he revealed a lot of things that West Point has heretofore concealed."

Col. Toffler admitted that West Point does not require the same physical performance of female cadets that it requires of male cadets. He admitted that West Point has dual standards for males and females, that women cadets do not pass the same physical tests as men, and that if they perform the same task, the women are given higher grades. Female cadets are allowed to hold leadership positions based on their padded scores….

Col. Toffler admitted that West Point has a sexual quota system for the admission of women cadets and for their assignment after graduation (such as to the engineers). "Those quotas have got to be met," he said. The women cadets do not compete with the men, but compete only against each other for designated female quota slots….Military policy permits no negative comment about the performance of women.

A later piece by Mrs. Schlafly quotes a woman soldier: "We can’t carry as much or stand up to the pressures and conditions. Whoever tells you we can, don’t believe him." "Those who tell you we can" are military spokesmen like Col. Toffler who are compelled to speak through the preposterous "masks" assigned by politically correct pols and bureaucrats to proclaim the feminist party line which they know to be untrue. Mrs. Schlafly quotes an Israeli general as saying: "We do not do what you do in the United States because, unfortunately, we have to take war seriously."

The reply to the Israeli general might be: "In the United States, there is another war which politicians must take seriously, the War Against Patriarchy. This war must be fought by falsifying what everyone knows to be true and asserting what everyone known to be false."

Ms. Friedan’s attempted evasions are worthy of comic opera:

Now one woman cadet interrupted with a question for the male cadet: "Tell the truth, do you really want to go into combat? Does anyone really want to go into combat? she asked with a quiet passion. "You do what you have to do. It’s your duty, it’s miserable and awful and terrifying and you’d be crazy to want to do it. But you’ve had the training, you can be trusted to do what has to be done. You can trust yourself to do the job."

Talk about masks. This female cadet is putting on an Emperor’s-New-Clothes performance bordering on the grotesque. The man "does what he has to do" because his failure to do so will brand him a coward and get him court-martialed. The woman knows she doesn’t have to do what the man does because timidity is feminine—and her commanders know it and won’t place her where she will have to "do her duty." The pretense (when it is a matter of winning a parlor intellectual argument rather than winning a battle) is not just less honest than a woman’s pretense of being a Perfect Wife or an Angel in the House; it is destructive of the whole purpose of the military. Ms. Friedan knows this as well as everybody else, but she doesn’t object to masks when they serve the bad purpose of undermining the patriarchal system.

On August 18, 1976, [writes Brian Mitchell], a detail of American soldiers was pruning a tree in the Joint Security Area separating North and South Korea when they were suddenly attacked by a truckload of axe-wielding North Korean guards. Two officers were killed. Nine other soldiers were wounded.

Major General John Singlaub, chief of staff of U.S. forces in Korea, decided to take limited military action. United Nations forces in the South prepared for the worst. Forces moved into positions and air forces were called in from Alaska and Japan.

As soon as it became clear that the alert was no ordinary training exercise, commanders throughout Korea were flooded with requests from female soldiers for transfers to the rear. War was more than these women had bargained for when they had joined the Army. Most fully expected to be evacuated in the event of hostilities, but when the question was raised at higher headquarters, Singlaub nixed the idea immediately and ordered all soldiers to their posts.

Later, when the emergency was over, Singlaub learned that his order had not been strictly obeyed. Many women had abandoned their posts near the border and headed south on their own. Some turned up later in units well to the rear. Others reported for duty with dependent children in tow, since their arrangements for child-care did not cover the event of war. In some instances, male noncommissioned officers had left their posts temporarily to tend to the safety of their wives and girlfriends in other units.

Was anyone surprised? Of course not. Everyone knows that women soldiers are a joke, like women policemen and women firemen. The male future soldiers at West Point and the Citadel and the Virginia Military Institute actually enjoy playing their roles and many, perhaps most wives and mothers actually enjoy playing at their maternal roles, as they did when they were children and played house and played with dolls.

"Since women are not without aggression," says sociologist Steven Goldberg, "it is necessary…that they be socialized away from depending on aggression to attain their ends." Otherwise they will face too much frustration. But besides this there is "the need for societal efficiency":

Men are not stronger and more aggressive than women because men are trained to be soldiers, nor do women nurture children because girls play with dolls. In these cases society is doing more than merely conforming to biological necessity; it is utilizing it….Societies conform their institutions and socialization to the sexual directions set by physiological differentiation, first because they must and second in order to function most efficiently.

An army made up of women soldiers or even one diluted with a relatively small number of them as ours is, is inefficient. Everyone knows this. The purpose of making these women "soldiers" is to enable politicians to buy the women’s vote. They function as taxpayer-supported camp-followers and comfort girls.

A predictable consequence of the success of the feminist program is an increase in violence. Richard Gelles and Murray Straus, who specialize in the study of violence, write: "One skeptical reader of our study noted that he was seeing more child abuse now than ten years ago. Since he also reported that he sees a largely minority, single-parent, and poor population, this is not surprising." The matriarchal areas are the areas of high crime, high violence and high child abuse. Confucius said that problems ought to be settled by patriarchal authority exercised within the family. Patriarchal authority is what feminists hate. They have discovered that they can earn their own money, withdraw their loyalty from their husbands, and make their appeal to judges instead, knowing that the judges, co-opted into the War Against Patriarchy, will do right by them. Unfortunately, Gelles and Straus buy into this feminist phutzing:

Our own research has found that paid employment of married women helps rectify the imbalance of power between spouses, and provides women with the economic resources they need to terminate a violent marriage.

Also to terminate a so-so marriage or a boring marriage or a marriage like Marcia Clark’s in which the husband is insufficiently stimulating intellectually, or a marriage less attractive than an adulterous adventure such as Ms. Heyn’s heroines have their fun with.

Rectifying the imbalance means destroying hypergamy, destroying the husband’s economic provider role, undermining his motivation, perhaps provoking him into anti-social behavior. Gelles and Straus say "Violence is less common when the wife is at home than when she works,"—when the balance is not rectified.

If she becomes an ex-wife she needs him to make "compensatory payment" so that she may remain dependent on him without being under obligation to him. This enables her to remove her mask and, as the saying is, to stand on her own feet.

Removing the mask reveals beneath it a second mask—that of the helpless little lady whom somebody (a judge?) must help. "As long as women have less power," writes feminist Professor Ira Reiss,

they will feel the need somehow to please and attach themselves to those more powerful creatures called men, and sex will serve as a commodity in that pursuit.

As long as women have less power they will support the family and the patriarchal system. "Many women," says Reiss, "have learned that they can be free sexually but will still not be treated equally by men." Of course not. To be "free sexually" is to be promiscuous, of value only to men who want a superficial relationship. "Several feminist writers," he continues, "have noted the clash between sexual equality and inequality in social power." If women gain the right to "equality"—the right to be equally promiscuous—they will be treated as the "bad" women they are, and will lose much of their "social power." He quotes Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs:

For women, sexual equality with men has become a concrete possibility, while economic and social parity remains elusive.

Their "sexual equality" (= promiscuity) removes the bargaining power which the acceptance of sexual regulation entitles them to by enabling them to offer men families.

"Where there is inequality of power," says Reiss, "men can pressure women into sexual encounters and sex can be easily used by women as a lure and a means of trying to balance power differences that exist." Reiss uses "equality" to mean equal promiscuousness, as though promiscuity were a privilege men coveted for themselves and denied to women. If women are promiscuous men can more easily pressure them into sexual encounters because they have little to lose. But a chaste woman has a great deal to lose and cannot easily be pressured into sexual encounters. Chastity gives her power.

"A woman who behaves as a sexually and economically free person," says feminist Riane Eisler with truth, "is a threat to the entire social and economic fabric of a rigidly male-dominated society." And she adds with equal truth: "Such behavior cannot be countenanced lest the entire social and economic system fall apart." Men have thus far supposed that the sex war can be ended by appeasement—by paying support money to ex-wives, by giving women men’s jobs and men’s wages so they can "support their families"—which is to say so they can deny families to men.

One feminist book after another reflects women’s resentment of the patriarchal regulation which makes families possible. Feminist Dalma Heyn is fascinated by this resentment:

I am now more than ever interested in the extraordinary power of transgression for women. And extramarital sex…is the single most emphatic form of transgression against a historical framework that has defined and confined women, and still does.

This is the big grievance. They want to be freed from the "historical framework" of patriarchal marriage. Ibsen’s Nora felt the same, but in the age of Victoria it was inappropriate to say she wanted to be promiscuous, so she talked about going away to find herself, to "grow" as the saying is. Ms. Heyn’s heroines are more straightforward:

After many years of marriage, women feel "old" but not "adult"—while in their affairs, they feel "adult" but not "old."…Stepping out of the role of wife, with its implications of selflessness and obligations to fill others’ needs, into the role of a sexually joyous and self-interested person—risking societal pressure and the possibility of hurting a beloved husband—infused these women immediately with a sense of competence and satisfaction, as though they had emerged from a trance to find that their personalities had been returned to them.

This is the triumph of the female kinship system—in the words of Ms. Eisler, gaining "sexual independence: the power to freely choose how and with whom to mate."

Feminist political scientist Jane Mansbridge says she found in interviews with low income welfare mothers that they prefer AFDC over dependence on men, and don’t view welfare as dependence because it gives them and their children independence from the control of men who were not good for them.

It is worth reminding ourselves of the process by which patriarchy was created, thus described by feminist Gerda Lerner:

The appropriation by men of women’s sexual and reproductive capacity occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society….Surpluses from herding were appropriated by men and became private property. Once having acquired such private property, men sought to secure it to themselves and their heirs; they did this by instituting the monogamous family. By controlling women’s sexuality through the requirement of prenuptial chastity and by the establishment of the sexual double standard in marriage, men assured themselves of the legitimacy of their offspring and thus secured their property interest.

On what better, more socially useful motives could men act? They sought to benefit their children (also their wives) by insisting on the Legitimacy Principle, that children must have fathers, that women should accept sexual regulation and live in families. Men sought to secure their property to themselves and their heirs—to benefit their children. Divorce deprives the children of most of this benefit in order to confer a portion of it on the ex-wife and to de-control her sexuality. This is the purpose of the feminist/sexual revolution—to get rid of stable marriage and return to the female headed reproductive unit.

Dear Abby similarly and regularly contributes to the undermining of patriarchy. Here is a letter she receives from a father named Thomas Mulder:

DEAR ABBY: I was so moved, and felt such appreciation for your Father’s Day column. I would like to acknowledge what a valuable message it carried. You said:

"A 21-gun salute to the divorced father who has never uttered an unkind word about the mother of his children (at least to the children) and who has always been johnny-on-the-spot with the support check."

Abby, those words brought tears to my eyes as I sat quietly reflecting on the seventh year I have celebrated Father’s Day without my children. It struck me as amazingly sad that in seven years of being there for my children—and always providing child support—I’ve never received a thank-you. My morale has been worn down over the years by the stereotyping of divorced fathers as "deadbeat dads."

Abby, if I never get a "thanks," I’ll survive. Reading the public thanks in your column for a principle I’ve upheld not only for the sake of my children, but for the sake of fathers and children everywhere, is a powerful remedy for the sadness I have carried. For any recipient of support out there who has thought of saying "thanks," but never did—I’d bet it wouldn’t hurt.

May I offer a sincere "you’re welcome" from a loving, supportive dad?

THOMAS MULDER

Abby’s reply:

DEAR THOMAS: You may—and thank you for the thank you. How sad that those unsung heroes—divorced dads who never miss a payment—are all too often unappreciated. It would be so easy to just walk away and not fulfill the responsibilities to their children. Yet you, and many like you, sacrifice to see that your children are fed, clothed and educated.

You are to be commended for loving your children enough to be a responsible father.

All so magnanimous. Thomas Mulder speaks of "the principle I’ve upheld." What he has upheld is matriarchy, to which he has contributed his children and his income. All he gets is the satisfaction of being a wind-up toy for feminism, imagining himself to be a great guy. He is being masochistic and it is the knowledge on the part of judges that the world is full of beautiful, noble, magnanimous—and masochistic—men like Thomas Mulder that causes them to routinely discriminate against them. If Thomas Mulder is so noble and magnanimous, why didn’t the judge place his children in Thomas Mulder’s custody? He didn’t because he knew he could depend on Thomas Mulder’s magnanimity and he couldn’t depend on his wife’s magnanimity to perform corresponding services for him and the kids if he placed them in his custody. The wife would simply have laughed at him. Thomas Mulder asked for what he got, which was injustice in the service of the War Against Patriarchy. The judge replaced his father headed family with a mother headed one because he supposed it was natural to do so. Also the easy thing, the thing that all judges do and have done for a century. The judge probably knows that families headed by fathers produce better behaved, higher achieving children but he can’t see that he ought to keep the father as family head rather than promote the female kinship system.

Thomas Mulder’s ex-wife’s support check depends on Mulder’s belief that he is doing the right thing. But the use of children of divorce as Mutilated Beggars has become so obviously exploitive, so clearly a means of enabling Mom to throw off sexual law-and-order and expel her husband, so manifestly a makeshift for enabling judges to continue ignoring the damage they inflict on children and society that fathers like Mulder ought to realize that their true responsibility is to end this family destruction by taking custody of their children. He should be thinking "You don’t own me!—I’m tired of wearing the chains hung on me by my ex-wife and her weakling catspaw judge." Gloria Steinem tells women they are female impersonators. Fathers who send support money to the ex-wives are father impersonators clinging to a fragment of the male role. "Women," says Betty Friedan, "have outgrown the housewife role." Men have outgrown the ex-husband role which accepts and finances automatic mother custody.

"I would die," said feminist Susan B. Anthony, "before I will give up the child to its father." Why might not Thomas Mulder say "I will die before I will give up my children to their mother and pay her so she can afford to hold them as hostages? "The male legal ownership of children," says Phyllis Chesler, "is essential to patriarchy." Quite so; and since patriarchy is essential to civilization, Thomas Mulder is betraying his children, patriarchy and civilization when he contributes his kids and his money and his loyalty to the female kinship system.

"Our culture," says Wade Horn, "needs to replace the idea of the superfluous father with a more compelling understanding of the critical role fathers play in the lives of their children, not just as ‘paychecks,’ but as disciplinarians, teachers, and moral guides. And fathers must be physically present in the home. They can’t simply show up on the weekends or for pre-arranged ‘quality time.’"

Thomas Mulder and the millions of other ex-husbands who accept the role of court-assigned "paychecks" are complicitous in betraying their children and in turning society over to the evils of matriarchy.

Daughters say they don’t want to live the kind of lives their mothers led. What will Thomas Mulder’s sons say—or Marcia Clark’s or Adrienne Rich’s or any of the tens of millions of other sons deprived of their fathers? If they have any sense they will say that they don’t want to live the kind of life their fathers led. Thomas Mulder’s case is one more victory in the War Against Patriarchy, a war partly fought and lost on the battlefield of Thomas Mulder’s own mind. He imagined himself to be doing a good thing in paying for the wrecking of his family, much as Indian wives once regarded suttee as a good thing: it was an honor to immolate themselves on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands. The custom ended when the widows woke up to the silliness of what they were doing and when society stopped expecting it.

Why should fathers give up their children, and pay to do so, as they are now expected to do? So that Dear Abby and President Clinton will approve of them? So that society can continue its roller coaster ride into matriarchy? Father custody is the only way to give society the three things it most needs, the stability of families, the restoration of fatherhood and the restoration of childhood, whose loss is now herding kids into gangs and delinquency and premature sexuality.

Relief agencies in third world countries are given the Thomas Mulder treatment. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Relief groups face crises of conscience as more and more workers are attacked. When food and supplies meant for the needy are stolen by warring gunmen, agencies must ask if they’re doing more harm than good."

One relief worker puts it this way:

"A Liberian warlord said to me one day, ‘I can starve a village until the children die, and then you will come with food and medicine which I will take, and no one can do anything about it,’" recalled American aid worker Martha Carey. He was right, said Carey, who was stunned to find one village in which children had starved, families had been massacred, and survivors begged: "Don’t bring food, don’t bring anything, it makes things worse. Just go and leave us alone."

No one can do anything about it, says the warlord, who is in the driver’s seat, as Thomas Mulder’s ex-wife is in the driver’s seat. How about men raising their consciousness? How about the Thomas Mulders of America waking up and putting a stop to the silliness of paying their ex-wives to destroy their families and drag their children into the female kinship system and ghettoizing society?

Juveniles [says Horn] are the fastest growing segment of the criminal population in the United States. Between 1982 and 1991, the rate at which children were arrested for murder increased 93 percent; for aggravated assault, 72 percent; for rape, 24 percent; and for automobile theft, 97 percent….The teen population is expected to grow by 20 percent over the next decade, and this is precisely the generation most likely to be reared without fathers. The prospect has led many sociologists, criminologists, and law enforcement agencies to conclude that shortly after the turn of the century we will see an adolescent crime wave the likes of which has never been seen before in this country.

Feminists regard the reversion to matriarchy as progress. Female de-regulation in one generation means poorly socialized children in the next, troublemaking boys and promiscuous girls and second generation illegitimacy. This will continue as long as judges suppose mothers ought to have custody of children and fathers like Thomas Mulder are willing to pay for it.

"Today things have changed," says feminist Lynette Triere:

Not only is the neat, assured definition of marriage being questioned, but more broadly, women are reexamining the boundaries of what they have been taught to expect out of life.

What they now expect, she says, is not merely "new depth" but also "new breadth," which must be interpreted to mean more of the sexual promiscuity which characterizes the female kinship system:

Despite the continuing media emphasis on adolescent male sex fantasies, mature women are finding new depth and breadth in their sexual experience. Discarding tired molds that required accepted behavior at designated ages, women are discovering their own individual time clocks whose accuracy depends on how they feel about themselves. They are learning to express their wants and need no apologies. Many have found that their original choice of a partner all those years ago no longer works out. If it was not wrong at the beginning, it certainly is now.

This mystification about "tired molds that required accepted behavior" and "individual time clocks whose accuracy depends on how they feel about themselves" is simply a declaration of female independence from the male kinship system. Ms. Triere is saying the same thing as Dalma Heyn’s adulteresses, who are reborn and released. The same thing as Riane Eisler when she says women have begun to reclaim their own sexuality—by de-regulating themselves. "Women during the last three decades have not only been talking and writing more openly about sex; as women have begun to gain more personal, economic, and political power, they have also more openly, and far more actively, been engaging in sex."

This, says Ms. Eisler, is a "struggle against the assertion of male entitlement to their bodies…the right to be seen by oneself and others as belonging to oneself rather than someone else…the right to self-determination."

Male entitlement, she says, without indicating whether the male is a husband or a non-husband, thus implying (as Ms. Hoggett implies) that marriage is meaningless, that society operates under the female kinship system. If marriage is meaningless, there is no basis for a female claim to entitlement to the male paycheck. If marriage is meaningful and the sharing by the male in the reproductive life of the female ("male entitlement to their bodies") has as its quid pro quo the sharing of the female in the male’s paycheck, then the withdrawal by the female of her sharing implies the withdrawal by the male of his. His sole obligation is to the children he has procreated, who accordingly belong in his custody.

"The day of the kept woman is over," says Ms. Triere. The kept woman is the woman who accepts sexual regulation, who allows a man to have a family, who allows her children to have a father. The kept woman is entitled to be subsidized by a husband. If she repudiates her kept status, she makes a family impossible and, properly, denies to herself the benefits of the patriarchal system. If she is given these benefits anyhow by a divorce court judge, Briffault’s Law comes into operation: the male can no longer give her the benefit he formerly gave her, since she has already taken it from him; accordingly "no association takes place."

"Women’s reproductive freedom" now is interpreted to mean freedom to take a man’s children and paycheck. It must be re-interpreted to mean the loss to women of their children and the benefits patriarchy bestows on good women, "kept" women.

Since the 1960s feminists have been assuring us that divorce and illegitimacy didn’t mean "the family" was breaking down—it was merely undergoing development, adapting to social changes such as feminism. There are, they explained, many forms of "family." When President Carter called a White House Conference on the Family, the first thing the feminists attending it did was to re-name it the White House Conference on Families--meaning that the female kinship system is just as good as the male kinship system, meaning that a lesbian getting herself impregnated with a turkey baster is entitled to the same status and benefits as any other "family."

The case of William Hetherington illustrates how far the legal system will go in capitulating to the feminist war against patriarchy. Hetherington’s wife deserted him and their children to run off with a boyfriend. Later she broke up with the boyfriend and, facing the prospect of losing custody of her children and losing the status accompanying such custody, she proposed to Hetherington that they should be reconciled. The reconciliation provided her with the opportunity of accusing him of marital rape, of which he was duly convicted. Hetherington has now languished in prison for over eight years for a "crime" of which he is innocent. The prolongation of Hetherington’s incarceration serves only the bad purpose of saving the reputation of the judge, Thomas Yeotis, from the exposure of his weakness of character and his wish to play shabby chivalric games.

Judge Yeotis said he wanted to make Hetherington "a symbol to all mankind"—by demonstrating that a wife who accuses her husband of marital rape must be a victim in need of rescuing. Before such a politically correct judge all the woman needed to do was dab her eyes with kleenex and wonder what a poor little weak woman like herself would do if she didn’t have a big strong judge like Yeotis to protect her. The big strong judge’s chivalry didn’t cost him a thing. He passed that cost on to Hetherington in the form of a sentence of 15-to-30 years in prison for the crime of having had sex with a wife who had deserted him and their children to run off with; a boyfriend—and then proposed a reconciliation.

The message Judge Yeotis sent to all mankind was not that rape was a bad thing but that judicial genuflecting to feminist pressure was a good thing, that he hungered for feminist approval and was willing to ignore his oath of office to get it.

Until recently in rape prosecutions it was customary for the judge to read Sir Matthew Hale’s admonition that the jury ought to "view the woman’s testimony with caution. Rape is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved and harder to be defended by the party accused though never so innocent." No more. Feminists tantrumed at the suggestion that a woman might commit perjury, and the legal system, always their obedient servant, suppressed Sir Matthew Hale’s commonsense admonition. "Woman," said Blackstone, "is the favorite of the law."

"In the struggle for survival we tell lies," says feminist Adrienne Rich, "to bosses, to prison guards, the police, men who have powers over us, who legally own us and our children, lovers who need us as proof of their manhood." (

In 1987, Joseph Gallardo of the state of Washington raped a ten-year-old girl, was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, after which he was deemed to have paid his debt to society and was released. There is a difference between sentence of three years and a sentence of 15-to-30 years, a difference suggesting that Hetherington’s offense is five to ten times more serious than Gallardo’s.

The marriage contract has always been understood as a sex contract. If it were not, marriage would be meaningless—which is perhaps the real intention of the feminists who clamored for the new law outlawing marital rape. It was Hetherington’s misfortune that he came to trial at a time when the issue of "marital rape" was being publicized by feminists as a grievance against the patriarchal family and men in general. One result of this agitation was the; passing of a law which, in effect, declared that marriage gave husbands no right to cohabit with their wives. Black’s Law Dictionary, a standard reference work, calls rape "the act of sexual intercourse committed by a man with a woman not his wife and without her consent." The new law has the effect of removing the words "not his wife" from this definition, thus making the status of the husband identical with that of a non-husband.

This is a logical corollary to the often-stated feminist demand that a woman has the right to control her own sexuality—in other words that not only does a husband have no more right to have sex with his wife than any other man, but that the wife has the right to cohabit with a non-husband (commit adultery) regardless of her marriage contract. Such an interpretation of marriage makes marriage meaningless and strikes a deadly blow at the core of civilized society.

The new law is anti-male, of course. It is also anti-marriage, anti-family and anti-woman. The woman’s primary contribution to the marriage is her willingness to share her reproductive life with her husband and thereby enable him to have a family. The woman’s willingness to make this offer and the man’s willingness to make the complementary offer to love, honor, protect and provide for the resulting family are what make civilization and social stability possible. The condition of the ghettos shows what happens when the marriage contract becomes meaningless or irrelevant. The new Michigan law tells the woman that she may renege on her marriage vow at any time. It makes her incapable of entering into a stable and enforceable marriage contract on which a man—and children and society—can depend. Granting the woman the right to renege on her contract makes the contract worthless and deprives the woman of most of her bargaining power in the marriage marketplace. It is hard to imagine anything more damaging to society—or to women.

The contract is worse than useless. If it had not been for the contract Hetherington would be a free man. If it had not been for the contract Judge Yeotis would not have put on his grandstanding. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that since the passage of this law the most dangerous place for an American husband to be is in the marital bed

A mere adulterer like President Kennedy or President Clinton or Dalma’s ladies, or a mere rapist like Joseph Gallardo would never be treated as Hetherington has been treated—adultery is no longer against the law (is it?) just as sex with one’s wife is now against the law if the wife wishes it to be.

The Book of Common Prayer formerly declared that marriage was (among other things) "a remedy against sin." One must wonder whether the lawmakers who hurriedly passed the law under which Hetherington was condemned considered what its consequences would be in terms of family breakdown, divorce, adultery, incest and domestic violence, consequences which include the sins against marriage was formerly deemed a remedy.

The injustice of the treatment given Hetherington is acknowledged by the offer made to him to commute his sentence to time served if only he would admit guilt by plea-bargaining—and thus save face for Judge Yeotis and "the system." This is what the case is all now about—covering up the sleaziness of what has been done to Hetherington in the hopes that the public will become bored with hearing about it or that it will somehow go away.

Feminist Barbara Seaman thinks that "the sexual morality of an individual is and should be a private matter, for it has no bearing on the general welfare if she conducts herself responsibly." The de-regulation of the female, the repudiation of patriarchy and the replacement of sexual regulation and marriage by matriarchal promiscuity and divorce or adultery are the real feminist goals. Ms. Seaman thinks that women will start taking charge of their own sex lives—will, in other words, transfer society from patriarchy to matriarchy. Ms. Heyn has the same idea. She focuses on the personal, but the political is in the background:

I am saying that for all these women I interviewed, sexually exclusive marital relationships were made joyous only when they first killed off that Perfect Wife, and shattered this rigid institutional cage in which she flourished and which imprisoned their sexual selves.

The cage is patriarchy. They were joyous only when the goal of matriarchy is to be achieved, when they were no longer sexually exclusive, when "women control our own bodies," when "you don’t own me," when, as Byllye Avery says, "the definition of ‘family’ must change," when it is acknowledged that "a woman’s right to have a baby without having the father around is what feminism is all about."

Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs have the same idea. How they hate sexual regulation, marriage and family and long-term commitments upon which children and fathers and society must depend. Thus speaks the eternal feminine. "You don’t own me! You don’t own me!"

These writers tell us: "We are drawn, as women have been for ages [emphasis added], to the possibility of celebrating our sexuality without the exclusive intensity of romantic love, without the inevitable disappointment of male-centered sex, and without the punitive consequences."

Of course. The Saturday night bash, the Oktoberfest, the New Year’s Eve party, the Mardi Gras—escape from responsible sexuality, especially from the regulation of female sexuality upon which the whole fabric of patriarchal society depends. They want no male-centered sex—no sex in which the male has any meaningful role. No sentimentality about children. Sex without much reference to reproduction.

In Greek antiquity, women’s hatred of regulation was manifested (among other ways) by their worship of the god Dionysus, an importation from Thrace. Hear the Oxford Classical Dictionary:

[Thracian religion] was crude and barbaric before Greek influences transformed it. There is evidence of primitive animal-worship, human sacrifice, magical ceremonies, orgiastic rites….Dionysus was their greatest god and their chief contribution to Greek religion. He was a god of vegetation and fertility, worshipped in wild, ecstatic rites….[T]he Thracian and Macedonian women were especially devoted to his orgia. The cult swept over Greece like wildfire….The cause was its ecstatic character which seized chiefly on the women. They abandoned their houses and work, roamed about in the mountains, whirling in the dance, swirling thyrsi and torches; at the pitch of their ecstasy they seized upon an animal or even a child, according to the myths, tore it apart and devoured the bleeding pieces. [The maenads who worship Dionysus] roam through mountains and woods and lead the life of animals. They are beyond all human concerns, conventions and fears. Dionysus inspires them with strength so that they can uproot trees and kill strong animals. They also hunt animals and devour their raw flesh….(pp. 764, 288, 528)

More about these wild-Id forces in Chapter V. Patriarchy bottles up these forces in women in order that males may be equal sharers in reproduction, may create families, the institution which puts the power of sex to work. But the wild forces are always roiling, surging and striving to surface. It is especially necessary to control them in women, who must accept the burden of sexual regulation if children are to have a second parent. Therefore God says to Eve "He shall rule over thee." The contemporary feminist movement is a manifestation of the same women’s passion to get rid of the hated patriarchal regulation and the second parent. The worship of Dionysus which swept over Greek women like wildfire three millennia ago manifested women’s passion to get rid of the same hated patriarchal regulation. Today they have the law and its machinery on their side, supporting the female kinship system—buying the women’s vote—attempting arduously to create through public policy some inevitably inadequate substitute for the real thing—from day care, to the WIC program, to programs "to make ‘deadbeat dads’ come across with the monthly check." But no law can "compel the enormous sacrifices, from working overtime, to taking a second job, to mortgaging the house to pay for college, that married fathers routinely make for their children, but which divorced fathers seldom do." The law cannot handle the problem by seeking alternatives to the family. Wayne Doss, director of the Bureau of Family Support for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, is "concerned that if custodial mothers are allowed to sue state and county agencies for failing to collect their support money from deadbeat dads it will quickly become an unmanageable program." Anything to replace the family is unmanageable. Wives must accept sexual regulation and husbands must refuse to subsidize wives or ex-wives who refuse to—and take custody of their children themselves. "In California and nationally," says the Los Angeles Times, "increasing enforcement of child support orders is a major part of the effort to reduce welfare rolls." It won’t work. It will increase welfare by increasing divorce and it will increase male rolelessness and demoralization and crime and dope-addiction and the rest of the pathology mentioned on pages 12.

"The crackdown on non-custodial parents who fail to supports their children," says the Times, is immensely popular politically":

The President’s denouncement of such parents during his State of the Union Address met with the loudest cheers of any of his proposals that evening.

[According to Clinton] The government will "say to absent parents who aren’t paying their child support: ‘If you’re not providing for your children, we’ll garnish your wages, suspend your license, track you across state lines and, if necessary, make some of you work off what you owe,’" Clinton said. "People who bring children into this world cannot and must not walk away from them."

Do the deadbeat dads walk away or are they expelled? Mostly the latter. If Clinton’s program is put into practice, it will be easier for wives to expel more of them. What is Clinton saying to a young man who contemplates marriage and the creation of a family? What does he say to a wife who is getting bored with her husband and who reads in Ms. Heyn and Ms. Bakos about the attractions of promiscuity and adultery and a woman’s sacred right to control her own sexuality? He tells both of them that if a woman goes through a marriage ceremony she is thenceforward entitled to a free ride at her husband’s or ex-husband’s expense. He is also telling single promiscuous women that they need not go through the marriage ceremony at all—that their unchastity is all that is required to qualify them for the free ride. He is making war on patriarchy and the family and promoting the female kinship system. This is why he is "immensely popular."

Despite marked increases in establishing paternity [continues the Times] child support collections from fathers whose children receive welfare benefits have stayed constant or increased only gradually in most states.

In 1992, state governments collected child support payments from only 832,000, or 12%, of the 6.8 million absent parents whose children received Aid for Families With Dependent Children. Comparatively, the collection rate in 1988 was 11%, or about 621,000 of 5.7 million absent parents.

The collection rate increases by 1% while the number of absent fathers increases 34%. Is it not obvious that the way to save families and money is to stop exiling fathers? Telling mothers that they are entitled to the fathers’ money and that the government will collect it for them will increase the amount of family breakdown, female unchastity, illegitimacy and the social pathology indicated on pages 12.

When custodial parents are on welfare [continues the Times] the child-support enforcement system collects directly from the non-custodial parent and gives the custodial parent $50 a month—in part to encourage them to cooperate in naming and tracking down the other "parent." The rest of the money is used to offset the welfare payment.

So the father has the satisfaction of knowing he is also subsidizing the Welfare System which promotes matriarchy and makes him superfluous. The woman’s cooperation will make men more leery of commitment, will exacerbate the War of the Sexes. The message is "Women are dangerous." They no longer need share their reproductive lives with a man in order to lay a claim on his money. The government now works to subsidize and to compel men to subsidize matriarchy and the Promiscuity Principle, illegitimacy, marital breakdown, family destruction and the rearing of children in fatherless homes.

The idea is to make males more responsible; the effect is to make females less responsible:

To be eligible for AFDC, the government requires mothers to name the father so they can track him down and order him to pay child support. But many mothers claim that they do not know the father’s identity—or they give a false name.

In South Carolina, in the first 11 months of 1993, for example, 37% of the 2,840 fathers named were excluded by genetic testing.

The females have gained the feminist goal of living in the female kinship system; but their sexual promiscuity is incompatible with civilized living. Government ought not to encourage it and fathers ought not to subsidize it.

The wild Id-forces in men are also dangerous, also in need of discipline. The family has hitherto been the means for imposing this discipline, but women, correctly seeing the family as their disciplinarian too, their enemy, the creator of the hated patriarchal system, are willing that men should be liberated from all family restraints other than economic obligations. Today, as feminist Carolyn Heilbrun says, women "have to a great extent stopped internalizing the [patriarchy’s] idea of what women’s lives should be." Meaning women have got rid of the internal restraints formerly imposed by the patriarchal family. Her idea is that while women emancipate themselves from the sexual loyalty which gives men their role as fathers, men will maintain their patriarchal discipline and keep performing their provider role. The result, beginning in the 1960s, might have been predicted: an explosion of moral anarchy, divorce, illegitimacy, and sexual confusion, educational failure, drug culture, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Central Park wildings by fatherless boys.

Freud thought women had little sense of justice, this being, he supposed, "connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life." To this opinion feminist Betty Friedan attempted the following reply:

Victorian culture gave women many reasons to envy men: the same conditions, in fact, that the feminists fought against….[They were] denied the freedom, the status and the pleasures that men enjoyed….She would, of course, have to learn to keep her envy, her anger, hidden: to play the child, the doll, the toy, for her destiny depended on charming man. But underneath, it might still fester, sickening her for love. If she secretly despised herself, and envied man for all she was not, she might go through the motions of love, or even feel a slaving adoration, but would she be capable of free and joyous love?

Ms. Friedan speaks of high-aspiring women who envy high-status men for their conspicuous achievement. Such men are also envied by most other men. Apart from such overachievers, Ms. Friedan might see much reason not to envy men. Speaking of men in general, Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, has this: He "cares for thee and for thy maintenance, commits his body to painful labor both by sea and land to watch the night in storms, the day in cold, whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe, and craves no other tribute at thy hands but love, fair looks, and true obedience, too little payment for so great a debt."

"Her destiny depended on charming men," depended, in other words, on "love, fair looks, and true obedience," which Ms. Friedan thinks undignified and insincere. Women should not have to put on such a show to "earn" the economic and status advantages men confer. Why cannot women stand on their own feet, earn their own economic security and status and thereby be enabled to love "freely and joyously" rather than in exchange for conferred economic benefits doled out by a man?

She could earn her own economic security, but she would find it hard to find a man interested in being the recipient of her free and joyous love outside of one-night stands, because the man would have no domestic security with her, no bargaining power. He would know she could dump him when she was no longer in heat, when she no longer felt like giving her love freely and joyously. Then, as the fivefold-greater divorce rate of employed women shows, she might exercise her privilege of discarding him as Betty discarded Carl, as Adrienne Rich discarded Alfred, as Marcia Clark discarded Gordon. What do such high-achieving women need husbands for?

Society today is less energized than it was during the era of the Feminine Mystique following World War II, when America’s industrial plant, already the wonder of the world during the war, doubled in just twenty years, when the GNP grew 250 percent and per capita income increased 35 percent between 1945 and 1960.

Those were the years of which Joseph Satin said "Never had so many people, anywhere, been so well off"—the pre-feminist years, when families were stable, before "they redesigned our concepts of sexuality and gender equality."

Of these years sociologist David Popenoe writes:

For a short moment in history, fatherhood again became a defining identity for many men….For many American citizens, the fifties were an enormously peaceful and satisfying period. The future looked bright indeed….

Yet the era suddenly ended, the birthrate plummeted, and the dramatic "social revolutions" of the three decades following the fifties—the sexual revolution, the divorce revolution, and the women’s liberation movement—were launched. All three of these revolutions had as their primary aim the de-regulation of female sexuality, in other words the undermining of the male role and patriarchy. Women’s achieving, or partially achieving, economic and sexual independence wrecked the patriarchal golden age, a wrecking abetted by the divorce courts which deprived millions of men of their children.

"As women went into the labor force," continues Dr. Popenoe,

young men in large numbers rejected domesticity and even the masculine ideal. The laid-back and family-rejecting hippie became a model for many men and all "rigid gender roles" became something to be eschewed at all costs. Marriage fell out of fashion, replaced by the rapidly growing phenomenon of living together outside of marriage. After an historical moment of glory, the modern nuclear family came apart at the seams.

"Compared with their children, moreover," writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead,"

the postwar generation had much lower levels of divorce. Thus divorced baby boomers may benefit by drawing upon the social and emotional capital generated by these unions over forty or fifty years. However, Generation Xers, the children of the divorce revolution, may not be able to count on a similar lifeboat from their parents.

The ongoing feminist victory over patriarchy hinges on automatic mother custody in divorce. Mom is the "primary caregiver." This is true while the baby is allowed to gestate unaborted within Mom’s womb—though the pro-life bumper sticker truly reminds us: "The most dangerous place in America is a mother’s womb." Mom is responsible for all abortions and most infanticides, intentional or unintentional. "If the mother is unmarried, the risk of death to her infant more than doubles," says Maggie Gallagher. The law supposes that if it gives Mom custody and if Dad keeps paying the bills things will work out—and besides there’s welfare.

Mom functions best as caregiver when the children are infants. But infants become children—who need Dad more and Mom less. Take another look at page 26 tk, where Dr. Blankenhorn tries to persuade the fatherless Indiana schoolchildren to grow up. They stomp their feet and refuse to listen. They "grow up" to be Clintons and Lewinskys, both father-deprived, both trying to "play adultery," as little kids play house. Think of Princess Diana, "The Queen of Hearts"—continually seeking sympathy with suicidal gestures, continually seeking advice from her astrologers, her fortune-tellers, her New-Age mystics, her tarot card readers, her mediums and psychics and clairvoyants—another messed-up kid, abandoned by her mother, strung out on eating disorders, bingeing and purging. Poor kid.

Think of the most famous of all feminist tracts, Ibsen’s Doll’s House, about a wife named Nora who walks out on her husband. Mother Nora knows that her husband will continue to take care of the children: "How am I equipped to bring up children?" she asks her husband Torvald. When Torvald indignantly says, "Before all else, you’re a wife and a mother!" she replies: I don’t believe that anymore." She leaves carrying no obligations with her: "I won’t look in on the children. I know they’re in better hands than mine":

NORA: Listen, Torvald—I’ve heard that when a wife deserts her husband’s house just as I’m doing, then the law frees him from all responsibility. In any case, I’m freeing you from being responsible. Don’t feel yourself bound, any more than I will. There has to be absolute freedom for us both. Here, take your ring back. Give me mine.

To the modern reader this seems to mean You don’t need to feel yourself responsible to provide for me—or for the children. "There has to be absolute freedom for us both" seems to mean that a family consists of two people without children. But this is not Ibsen’s meaning. Taking back the rings does not de-procreate the children. The children belong with their father: Ibsen accepts the nineteenth century legal axiom that they are by law his children, that the father, not the mother, is the primary caregiver. Women have come a long way since Ibsen’s time. Torvald loses his wife. Today he would also lose his children, probably his home, any meaningful father’s role, his income, and much of his property.

A Doll’s House is properly considered a feminist breakthrough, a pioneer statement of women’s right to independence. But few Victorian women would have imitated Nora, since it was obvious that she would be unable to pay next month’s rent. It was necessary for the wife not only to gain independence, but to regain dependence either on her ex-husband or on the taxpayer, through welfare or through "earned income tax credit" or some other means. In other words, it was necessary to get rid of the patriarchal system and switch over to the matriarchal system, in which the mother takes custody of the children. It is this custody which entitles her to subsidization.

Unlike today’s husband who loses everything, Torvald loses only his wife. He is still the head of what is left of his family. This is to say Ibsen still accepts the patriarchal family, based on the male kinship system. Today’s feminist might look back on A Doll’s House as a breakthrough to the feminist movement but Ibsen still accepts the father-headed family. More about this in ChapterIX.

"Nonresidential fathers," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead,

tend to lose their incentive to put more money in their children’s household. Some may actually reduce their workloads or refuse opportunities for better jobs, either out of resentment at the postdivorce arrangements or out of a sense that their extra earnings would not result in more time or better relationships with their children. Thus far, stricter legal control and enforcement of paternal obligations have not been very successful in putting more money in children’s family households; during the 1980s intensified federal, state and local government efforts to boost child support payments increased the percentage of women receiving payments by less than 3 percent.

Society must persuade its young men to assume the responsibilities of fatherhood by guaranteeing to them the rewards of fatherhood. Judge Noland must be made to realize that the biological marginality of the male role in reproduction is not a reason for discriminating against males, not a reason for depriving them of their children, but a reason for strengthening their role and thereby strengthening the family—strengthening it principally against its most powerful enemy, women’s hatred of patriarchy, women’s resistance to sexual regulation, women’s preference for the female kinship system, a preference expressed most commonly as the demand for economic independence from men.

Stella Payton, a black woman, writes a defense of welfare for mothers because "all welfare mothers have children.’ In an essay titled "First, Take Care of the Children," she has this:

I never thought I’d be on welfare. I am an articulate, intelligent, college-educated woman. I had many plans for my life. Being on welfare was not on the list. But getting there is easier than you think.

It’s easier because sexual promiscuity and the female kinship system are easy, are natural—and patriarchy, which would have kept her off welfare, is artificial and women hate it because it makes them behave themselves.

In 1992, my life took a turn with an unplanned pregnancy. When I refused to have an abortion, my son’s father vanished. After Alex was born, I started looking for work again. I had no idea finding a job in my field would be virtually impossible….With no child support, affordable child care or insurance, and only part-time work, I had to go on welfare.

Single women ought not to have pregnancies. Pregnancies ought to take place within marriages. Ms. Payton needs a husband and Alex needs a father, but this would interfere with her right to control her own sexuality—her right to be promiscuous. If her boyfriend had been a husband and had had what Ms. Eisler calls "inflexible lifelong sexual bonds" with her, there would have been no welfare problem. Ms. Payton’s unchastity marginalized her boyfriend and he knew it—knew he could not be a real husband or a real father and therefore he "vanished." Sensible of him; but Ms. Payton wants her readers to think it was a rotten thing for him to do—getting a poor female pregnant and then abandoning her. It would have been a rotten thing if she had been willing to give him a stable family, but what she wanted was what Ms. Eisler calls a "healthy amount of spontaneity and sexual experimentation," which resulted in a fatherless child. Ms. Payton asks society to "take care of the children"—so she and moms like her will not need husbands. Result: Alex becomes a Mutilated Beggar.

Welfare reform is easier when everyone becomes responsible. Let’s form partnerships to provide safe, nurturing and affordable environments for our children and at the same time rebuild community relationships between government, families, churches and businesses.

The partnership which would provide the responsibility, safety and nurturing environment is marriage; but her real plea is not that "everyone becomes responsible" but that she may be irresponsible, may be privileged to live in the female kinship system where marriage is interchangeable with cohabitation and single motherhood, where fathers are not heads of families but where mothers are heads of families entitled to tell the fathers to get their asses out of her (or his own) house—and who are obligated to send support money to keep Mom off welfare. Ms. Payton, in other words, doesn’t want a husband around to share parenting with her, and since she is female, and since "children belong with their mother," she is the boss, in charge of her kids, married to the state, a ghetto matriarch. She wants to deprive her son of a father by making "everyone"—everyone besides herself—responsible, so that she need not put up with a husband. The "families" she speaks of are fatherless ghetto matrilines whose men President Clinton promises to hunt down ("We will make you pay"). The "partnership" she wants is not a family but a means for getting along without a family, of financing a fatherless family, a network where "everyone" becomes responsible. Everyone except the father. Alex’s father didn’t "vanish"; he knew, like Charmaine’s boyfriend, that he had to get his ass out of Stella’s house because in the matriarchy where Stella wanted to live fathers have no authority.

The two people who really need to be responsible, her boyfriend and herself, refuse to be; she wants no part of the chains of marriage and he knows he cannot be a father with an unchaste woman. So Alex will go through life with no father and will face the problems listed on pages 13f of this book.

This is matriarchy. This is why we have ghettos. Getting there is easier than you think.

Judges must be made to realize that the biological marginality of the male role is not a reason for discriminating against males, not a reason for depriving them of their children, but a reason for strengthening their role and thereby strengthening the family—strengthening it principally against its most powerful enemy, women’s hatred of patriarchy, women’s resistance to sexual regulation, women’s preference for the female kinship system, a preference expressed most commonly as the demand for economic independence from men.

Marriage is less romantic than economic. It is held together not by what Betty Friedan calls "free and joyous love"—code language for the female kinship system—but by the husband’s willingness to work and the wife’s willingness to work things out, by her sexual loyalty based on (among other things) her realization that her custody of her children and her sharing of her husband’s paycheck are at stake. If wives want to feel "reborn," to "see things in color," to experience "this feeling of being awake rather than asleep," to believe that sex was "a creative thing…a talent—like, I don’t know, painting or writing. You develop your talent, that’s all. You don’t let it languish—that’s what our parents did"—if wives want this excitement—and don’t have to pay the price of losing their children and Dad’s paycheck to get it—they will have a powerful motive for adultery or divorce. This is why the divorce rate is sixty percent and the illegitimacy rate thirty percent, why Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs say "All the old prohibitions and taboos would have to give way to the needs of the sexually liberated woman."

If Carl Friedan believed that Betty married him to experience "free and joyous love," he discovered that such love was unstable when Betty walked out with his children. Tens of millions of other American men have discovered the same. Let’s "take off the masks," as Ms. Friedan likes to say: the notion that marriage ought to be based on free and joyous love is an affectation made so that one of the spouses, usually the wife, can later complain that love has vanished and that its absence justifies doing what Betty Friedan did to Carl.

Free and joyous love between a man and a woman is an undependable basis for a child rearing institution. One of Ms. Friedan’s promiscuous friends illustrates:

She is currently involved with two married men in two different cities. Over the last week she has seen both, spent two intense days with one, several with the other, but does not quite know when she’ll see either one again. This has been going on for several years. Neither has any interest in leaving his wife, nor would she really want to marry either one of them.

She just wants to experience free and joyous love, like Dalma’s ladies.

One of the great gifts of patriarchy to women was the feminine mystique, thus described by George Gilder:

This intuition of mysterious new realms of sexual and social experience, evoked by the body and spirit of woman, is the source of male love and ultimately marriage. In evoking marriages love renders the woman in a way transparent: the man sees through her, in a vision freighted with sexual desire, to the child they might have together.

Gilder understands the idea of Briffault’s Law—that the male must supply the female with a benefit if he hopes to associate with her:

This vision imposes severe social conditions, however. For it is a child that he might have only if he performs a role: only if he can offer, in exchange for the intense inner sexual meanings she imparts, an external realm of meaning, sustenance, and protection in which the child could be safely born.

He fails to see, however, that society is failing to create the supports which will allow the male to perform his role and be an equal participant in reproduction:

In the man’s desire, conscious or unconscious, to identify and keep his progeny is the beginning of love. In a civilized society, he will not normally be able to claim his children if they are born to several mothers. He must choose a particular woman and submit to her sexual rhythms and social demands if he is to have offspring of his own.

But if he chooses a particular woman by marrying her he has only a forty percent chance of having offspring with her, since he faces a sixty percent divorce rate and the assurance that the judge will award custody of his children to his ex-wife. Gilder understands that all societies are built on the tie between parents and offspring. But whereas biology informs the female that her tie is dependable in any sort of society with any sort of sexual arrangements, and that accordingly women need not have the long-term sexual horizons Gilder claims for them, both biology and experience inform the male that his tie is precarious and requires that he both take long-term views and also create a society which guarantees his role by guaranteeing the legitimacy and inalienability of his children. American men are now discovering that this guarantee, once dependable, has been removed and that society is abandoning the male kinship system and returning to matriarchy. It is returning likewise to the patterns of short-term, compulsive sexuality which Gilder associates with males, but which are in fact associated with matriarchy and savagery, with Indian reservations, ghettos and the barnyard. "The central truth of marriage," says Gilder is "that it is built on sex roles." Gilder also knows that while the female role is a fact of nature, the male role is a social creation, which society must support. Our society refuses that support and Gilder goes along with society’s refusal:

[H]e is sexually inferior. If he leaves, the family may survive without him. If she leaves, it goes with her. He is readily replaceable; she is not. He can have a child only if she acknowledges his paternity; her child is inexorably hers….The man’s role in the family is thus reversible; the woman’s is unimpeachable and continues even if the man departs.

No, no, and no. Gilder is describing and uncritically accepting the female kinship system. The male kinship system—patriarchy—rests on the following contrary principle, stated by (though protested by) John Stuart Mill:

They are by law his children.

Gilder can’t take this seriously and supposes no one else can. But the rejection of this principle is what the whole sexual crisis is about—it’s really a conflict over the kinship system. The law is responsible to make fathers heads of families and to guarantee their headship by awarding them custody of their children in cases of divorce. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the law in patriarchal society exists primarily to make fathers heads of families—for imposing patriarchy. It is the law’s betrayal of the family which has created the existing sexual mess. Lawmakers and judges get things backwards: they suppose that a biological fact requires their services and a social creation such as fatherhood does not. Their mistake is why we have a sixty percent divorce rate, why our families are in ruins.

Gilder tries to blame men for the existing mess, accusing them of disloyalty to marriage. Men do not initiate three-quarters of divorce actions. Men do not write books with titles like The Good Divorce. They do not proclaim, with Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs, that "the symbolic importance of female chastity is rapidly disappearing….It is not only that women came to have more sex, and with a greater variety of partners, but they were having it on their own terms, and enjoying it as enthusiastically as men are said to."

Gilder poses as the champion of poor, poor females and laments their victimization by male villains:

The only undeniable winners in the sexual revolution are powerful men. Under a regime of sexual liberation, some men can fulfill the paramount dream of most men everywhere: they can have the nubile years of more than one young woman.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson sees such role differences as a double bind that women have to overcome. She quotes Supreme Court Justices O’Connor, Kennedy and Souter’s defense of abortion: "The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives," and comments: "At issue is whether women will be able to decide whether and when to conceive and carry to term. When women have that option, enshrined in law, and accessible without financial risk or social stigma, the hold of this bind will have been broken." Broken for the woman, but her husband will bear a fivefold greater risk of divorce and loss of his children, a risk that can only be removed by a guarantee of father custody.

The family must be stabilized. Society cannot live with a sixty percent divorce rate and a thirty percent illegitimacy rate. Feminists tell us "It’s never going to happen"—"Women have come too far to surrender the range of possibilities opened up by a sexual revolution." The Annex to this book, the frenzy of the Greek women worshipers of Dionysus (page 48 tk), and of the Birmingham women we will meet on page 126 tk, Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey’s warning that all women are potential nymphomaniacs who must be controlled by rigid family bonds if civilization is to exist (page 168)—these things prove women’s yearning to be liberated and promiscuous, a yearning which only patriarchal socialization keeps them from acknowledging. They are convinced that the feminist movement will bring about their liberation by altering the kinship system from patriarchy to matriarchy, thus freeing them to be as sexually indiscriminate as other mammalian females. In the face of this determination only one thing can stabilize the family: placing the most powerful bond in nature—that between the mother and her offspring—on the side of family stability by guaranteeing fathers custody of children. It worked in the nineteenth century. It will work today and nothing else will.

"There is," says lesbian feminist Lillian Faderman, "a good deal on which lesbian-feminists disagree….But they all agree that men have waged constant battle against women, committed atrocities or at least injustice against them, reduced them to grown-up children, and…a feminist ought not to sleep in the enemy camp." This claiming of victimhood is to be understood as a cover-motive for claiming the right to reject patriarchal socialization. No women were ever less victimized than American women at the time feminists launched their movement. After World War II, wrote Margaret Mead in 1959, "something did happen to men as fathers. The GIs came home to be the best fathers—from the standpoint of their young children—that any civilized society has ever known." They also created the greatest prosperity any society has ever known. This was prior to the unleashing of the sexual revolution, which, as Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs inform us (truly) was a revolution in the sexual behavior of women.

"A feminist ought not to sleep in the enemy camp." In primitive matriarchal society this goal is achieved by exogamy, which will be discussed in Chapter XI and which is thus interpreted by Sjöö and Mor:

In the early small kin-group structures, the custom of exogamy had led women to take mates from outside the mother-clan, so the childbearing women were always the cohesive group within the community—their mates tended to be visitors, blood-strangers to the matrifocal group.

Elise Boulding tells us that "Evidence from some of the earliest [Neolithic] village layouts suggests that adults lived in individual huts, women keeping the children with them. Marriage agreements apparently did not at first entail shared living quarters….He could easily be sent away if he didn’t please his wife, or his wife’s mother. Older men (and sometimes young men) would have a thin time if their wives sent them away and they could not persuade any other woman to take them in."

Just like the Washington, D. C. ghetto, where Charmaine tells the father of her twins to get his ass out of her house. Just like sixty percent of today’s marriages, where wives hire lawyers at their husbands’ expense to have a divorce court judge like Robert Noland do the same thing.

Exogamy minimizes the father’s ties to his family. Too many women like it; it permits them to be unchaste, to reject patriarchy and sexual regulation. The exiled boyfriends are sexually second-class citizens.

According to Bruno Bettelheim, all men’s initiation rites were originally based on men’s desire to imitate, to participate in, women’s mysteries—menstruation and childbirth, overwhelming magic events (magic because of their periodicity as well as their blood-power). "Nowhere," say Sjöö and Mor, "can we find any rites or mysteries in which women have tried to imitate a male process or function; this alone tells us about the source of original mana or power. All blood rituals derive from the female blood of menstruation and childbirth."

The feminine mystique. At the level of biology men envy women. It is the genius of patriarchy to put this envy to work, to use it to make men overachievers and producers of wealth and civilization. In a successful patriarchal culture, such as ours formerly was during the era of the Feminine Mystique, this creativity and productivity of males became so spectacular that the envy was reversed and feminists like Betty Friedan told women they should envy men, emulate male-style achievement and not just "live through their bodies." So now we do have "women trying to imitate male process or functions"—lady soldiers, lady policepersons, lady firepersons making themselves at least as ridiculous as males practicing couvade. The intrusion by females into the Citadel and the Virginia Military Institute is a very feminine attempt to prove that "Women are not inferior," the proof being that the males are forbidden to laugh at them.

Feminists Sjöö and Mor, unlike Ms. Friedan, believe that women ought not to imitate men and should live through their bodies. "For over two thousand years," they say,

Western biblicized women have been undergoing conditioning out of our natural powers and wisdoms; we grow up learning to disregard the effects of our own rhythms, which are cyclic like the moon’s, the tides, the seasons. We learn the habits of ignoring them, denying them, trying to forget or overcome them, as we live under the rule of the man (without and within), who conceives of time as something that can be ordered and processed in mental-mechanical categories, regardless of the body’s or the earth’s phases.

Talk about the feminine mystique! "Women’s menstrual blood," they say,

always was, always is of the essence of the creative power of the Great Mother. Blood is the physical counterpart of the mystical life force spiraling throughout the cosmos, nourishing the universe, sustaining its breathing in and out, its manifestations and dissolutions….[W]e now have no menstrual ceremony of any kind. Menstruation is just each woman’s private affliction, or annoyance; it has no positive value or function. We cannot withdraw into contemporary menstrual huts, to listen to our bodies, minds, and needs, to establish contact with our cyclic and primal cosmic selves, to experience ourselves as sacred animals.

Ms. Friedan’s pitch was the opposite: "Don’t you want to be more than an animal?" A better way to spend a life, she tells her readers, is "mastering the secrets of the atoms or the stars, composing symphonies, pioneering a new concept in government or society…splitting atoms, penetrating outer space, creating art that illuminates human destiny, pioneering on the frontiers of society."

"Men know that women are an overmatch for them," said Dr. Johnson. Hypergamy (women marry up, men marry down) and the feminine mystique give them a status which men must earn, ordinarily by work and self-discipline and high achievement. This is why men earn more money than women. Let’s say it again: The male’s willingness to earn something he can offer the female in exchange for her sexual loyalty is what creates families, creates the wealth of society, and its stability. Patriarchal civilization depends on the male’s ability to buy a woman’s sexual loyalty. Too many men today lack this ability and remain underachievers ("Me? Marry him?"). "Marrying a man with an unstable work history or low wages is not a good formula for avoiding welfare," say Christopher Jencks and Kathryn Edin. "More than half the women who marry such a man can expect their marriage to end in divorce and to collect little child support."

Patriarchal civilization also depends on society’s ensuring that the contract binding the woman’s sexual loyalty to the man’s economic loyalty is enforceable. The law presently permits the woman to rob the man of his money card on the grounds that it is less essential than the woman’s motherhood card and that she is accordingly privileged to revoke her sexual loyalty. This is how matriarchy is created—when the woman can love "freely and joyously," where she is in control of her own sexuality and need not share it with one man in a stable marriage.

In Old Testament times, the struggle to impose the patriarchal system was projected into the conflict of religions in Palestine, a conflict between the older worship of the Great Mother and the newer worship of Yahweh or Jehovah. According to Bishop Spong,

Yahweh’s principal rival was identified most frequently in the Bible by the name Baal. Baal was the male consort to the female deity Asherah. The religion of Asherah-Baal was a nature religion—a fertility cult tied to the cycles of the seasons and the fecundity of the soil and womb. This goddess-god couple was worshiped in local shrines with explicitly sexual liturgies that included both male and female prostitutes….Baal worship…was intensely sexual, with the vital power of reproduction honored as the source of life. In the Yahwist tradition the masculinity of God was all important—Yahweh had created nature and was the Lord of nature.

This is untrue, and Bishop Spong knows it to be untrue. The Bible nowhere represents God as having gender, as a sexual being like the Great Mother. Bishop Spong speaks of "the biblical insistence on the totally masculine nature of God and the corresponding assignment of divine (i.e., male) prerogatives to men, who alone, the myth argues, are created in the image of this God." God’s image, in which humanity is created, is not male but male and female (Genesis 1:27; 5:1-2). It is not the masculinity, but the asexuality or androgyny of God which is emphasized. This is in fundamental contrast to the Great Mother who was really sexist, as Rosalind Miles explains: "We think today of a number of goddesses, all with different names—Isis, Juno, Demeter—and have forgotten what, 5000 years ago, every schoolgirl knew; no matter what name or guise she took there was only one God and her name was woman."

The female deity [says Spong] was identified with nature and sought to call people into harmony with nature.

Part of this harmony has been described by Ms. Miles: "the immortal mother always takes a mortal lover, not to father her child but essentially in exercise and celebration of her womanhood."

The female kinship system had the support of religion. The reproductive unit was female-headed, as in today’s ghettos, a sexual imbalance against which the patriarchal religious system of Yahweh directed itself:

Given the intense rivalry of these two traditions, it stands to reason that the Hebrew Bible, written by the Yahwists, would have an overwhelmingly male bias. If the followers of Yahweh were engaged in a struggle to destroy the fertility goddess, who was Yahweh’s primary rival, would they not be prone to denigrate any value or contributions that might be associated with a female deity? Would not women, vital to a fertility religion as representatives of the mother goddess, also be devalued by the Yahwist tradition? This is exactly what happened, and it is out of this struggle that the biblical writers adopted the pervasive anti-female bias that permeates every page of their Scriptures. This anti-female bias not only won the day among the Hebrews but also passed uncritically into Christianity. Through Christianity that male bias has spread throughout the Western world.

Bishop Spong asks "Does this sexist prejudice in the Bible reflect the mind of God?" He answers by appealing to the opposite sexist prejudice of the Stone Age and early civilizations:

Anthropologists seem certain that the first deity worshiped by human beings was a goddess, not a god. Reverence was given to the deity as the mother of all things living, and she was identified with the earth or the soil….The primary analogy by which these creatures understood human life was sexual, and for that reason the woman, the obvious bearer of the new life, was primary….Men were quite secondary. Out of the womb of the earth mother came plants and the other gifts of life. Into the womb of the earth mother at burial went her children and her products; the vital life force of the divine mother had ceased to be present in them. Because the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth had not yet been discerned, the women of the tribe held the real power.

"Power." "Men were quite secondary." Talk about sexism. Bishop Spong has no objection to the sexism of the rival matriarchal religion he writes about, where "God was conceived in primarily female images," and he doesn’t want his readers to know about the Great Mother’s unladylike behavior, thus described by Ms. Miles:

In her darkest incarnation the bad mother did not simply wait for people to die, but demanded their deaths. The Persian Ampusa, her worshippers believed, cruised about the world in a blood bubble looking for something to kill. Here is the Hindu Great Mother Kali:

She is luminous-black. Her four limbs are outstretched and the hands grasp two-edged swords, tools of disembowelment, and human heads. Her hands are blood-red, and her glaring eyes red-centered, and her blood-red tongue protrudes over huge pointed breasts, reaching down to a round little stomach. Her yoni is large and protuberant. Her matted, tangled hair is gore-stained and her fang-like teeth gleam. There is a garland of skulls about her neck; her earrings are the images of dead men and her girdle is a chain of venomous snakes.

These Mother Goddesses go by different names, but they are all really one, "the female deity…identified with nature [who seeks] to call people into harmony with nature." They all reject the "overwhelming male bias" of the new God Yahweh. In Canaan her consort Baal was worshipped with "horrible orgies of unrestrained sensuality" and the invasion of this worship into the temples where Yahweh was worshipped explains the "sexist" prejudice which Bishop Spong complains of.

Ms. Miles continues:

Overemphasis on the good mother, procreative and nurturing, also denied the bad mother, her dangerous, dark and destructive opposite…. Wedded as we are to an all-loving, all-forgiving stereotype of motherhood, it is at first sight difficult to reconcile [the] terrifying image of bad mother with the good. But both "life" and "death" sides of the Goddess come together without strain in her primary aspect, which is in fact not motherhood pure and simple, but her sexuality. As her primary sexual activity she created life; but in sex she demanded man’s essence, his self, even his death.

Bishop Spong makes his pitch to feminists and homosexuals, so he has no reason to emphasize these not-so-nice things.

Ms. Miles again:

Here again the true nature of the Goddess and her activities have fallen victim to the mealymouthed prudery of later ages. Where referred to at all, they are coyly labeled "fertility" rituals, beliefs or totems, as if the Great Goddess selflessly performed her sexual obligations solely in order to ensure that the earth would be fruitful. It is time to set the historical record straight. The fruitfulness of crops and animals was only ever a by-product of the Goddess’s own personal sexual activity. Her sex was hers, the enjoyment of it hers, and as all these early accounts of her emphasize, when she had sex, like any other sensible female, she had it for herself.

Sexual promiscuity, in other words, was part of the matriarchal system, and this had the consequence of cutting men off from meaningful participation in reproduction: "men were quite secondary." As Judge Noland and other judges tell us, children belong with their mother. The only way men can get themselves into the act is if every mother is a wife and marriage is a binding contract. Today’s feminists fight against allowing marriage to have this meaning—or much meaning at all: a woman has the right to control her sexuality regardless of contract. Too bad the divorce courts agree with this. This is the difference between patriarchy, which allows children to have fathers, and matriarchy, which permits Mom at her pleasure to get the father’s ass out of her house and let her boyfriends in. "The suddenness with which marriage has been overthrown," says Maggie Gallagher, "is breathtaking." This means the suddenness with which the male kinship system has been overthrown.

In every culture [continues Ms. Miles], the Goddess has many lovers. This exposes another weakness in our later understanding of her role as the Great Mother. That puts a further constraint on the idea of the good mother….[S]he was always unmarried and never chaste. Among the Eskimos, her title was "She Who Will Not Have a Husband."

"Women," says Spong, "are discovering they are free to leave a destructive marriage." Also free to leave a boring marriage in which no fault is even alleged. Also free to take the Old Boy’s children, his home and his paycheck and to create a destructive female headed household generating the pathology listed on pages 12 She is free to leave the patriarchal system and enter the matriarchal system with her children. Patriarchy denies women this freedom because abundant experience proves they misuse it. Their ordinary motive is not to escape a destructive marriage but to escape from boredom and sexual regulation. This is the significance of the most emphasized feminist slogan: "a woman’s right to control her own sexuality." Consider the fury with which the Birmingham women make this demand (page 126 tk). Glance at the Annex of this book. Perpend Barbara Ehrenreich’s words "Women are sexual beings and…for women as well as men, sex is a fundamentally lawless creature, not easily confined to a cage."

It must be confined to a cage if children are to have two parents, which overwhelming evidence shows to be the best arrangement for them. Society’s major purpose, compared to which everything else is almost trivial, is the proper procreation, rearing and socializing of its children. Spong says he is "no longer willing to acknowledge the claim that morality has been frozen in an era that primarily served the dominant male." It primarily served those whom Spong never bothers to mention—children. The male role is dominant because male dominance is universal and because male headship of families is made necessary by the marginality of the male role. Nature formerly made the female the head of the reproductive unit; but social heredity, we now realize, is a part of nature. From the evolutionary point of view this is a new development and women don’t like it, don’t like to be de-throned from their monopoly of parenthood. Patriarchy has given us civilization, has transformed the world for the better. Ms. Boulding may express her admiration of the freedom of Indian squaws, but she wouldn’t care to live on a reservation. Feminists admire the self-sufficiency of black matriarchs, but they wouldn’t like to live in the ghetto. Their preference for the lifestyle which creates the ghetto is the reason why they must be regulated, why "He shall rule over thee," why fathers must have custody of children in divorce. Patriarchy must deny women the freedom to ghettoize society.

"Does the group of people for whom marriage is an asset," asks Spong, "have the right to impose the standard that enhances their lives upon those people who have chosen a different path?" Yes. The group of people for whom marriage is an asset are most importantly children. Children must not be made the victims of parents, especially mothers, using the magic wand argument, "It’s better for the kids to go through a divorce than to live in a home where parents fight all the time." In most cases the home with fighting is better for children than the female headed home which replaces it. This is the view of both children themselves and of sociologists. Social policy, like laws, ought to be framed for the general case, not the hardship case. Hard cases make bad law and bad social policy. "Children," say Wallerstein and Blakeslee, "can be quite content even when their parents’ marriage is profoundly unhappy for one or both partners. Only one in ten children in our study experienced relief when their parents divorced."

[Children] have a very primitive, very real fear of being left on their own. A child’s immediate reaction to divorce, therefore, is fear. When their family breaks up, children feel vulnerable, for they fear that their lifeline is in danger of being cut. Their sense of sadness and loss is profound. A five-year-old enters my office and talks about divorce with the comment "I’ve come to talk about death." Children feel intense loneliness….Children do not perceive divorce as a second chance, and this is part of their suffering. They feel that their childhood has been lost forever.

Women are free to leave a destructive marriage "without ruining their lives." Because women hate patriarchy, women will choose divorce more often than men; but it is a choice which still causes them much suffering because, as Wallerstein and Blakeslee say, "divorce places an extraordinary if not terrifying burden on mothers." But regardless, they are too much concerned with their own lives, too little concerned with their children’s. "In our study," they say,

about 10 percent of the children had poor relationships with both parents during the marriage. This number jumped to a shocking 35 percent of children at the ten-year-mark. These children were essentially unparented in the postdivorce decade, and in fact many of them were called upon to take care of their parents.

Hatred of patriarchy leads many women to suppose shaking it off through divorce means they will be better parents:

Unfortunately, many women in unhappy marriages assume that divorce will enable them to become happier, better mothers. But I find little evidence of that. Mothering does not improve by virtue of divorce. In only a few families did the mother-child relationship in the postdivorce family surpass the quality of the relationship in the failing marriage. As a matter of record, the opposite occurred more frequently. At the ten-year mark, over a third of the good mother-child relationships have deteriorated, with mothers emotionally or physically less available to their children.

Bishop Spong would rather not hear such facts, because he knows feminists don’t want to hear them, and because he is taking a ride on the discontents of these feminists. "Further," he says, "women who want children may opt to raise them as a single parent. Marriage is no longer the universal vocation." This is the feminist party line, rebellion against patriarchy, and the Legitimacy Principle. "Should they be forced by the expectations of society into marriage for the sake of companionship and for the gratification of sexual needs?" Yes, they should. Otherwise they deny their children fathers and they deny higher status to "good" women who accept regulation and give men a meaningful role. Spong is writing of educated and economically independent women who "have it all" and therefore need no husbands. Briffault’s Law makes them unmarriageable unless the man has assurance of custody. Without this assurance, he is likely to be uncommitted and irresponsible. With it, the mother becomes marriageable and is motivated to be responsible, to accept the two-parent patriarchal system, so necessary for children.

Here’s feminist Judy Mann, who rejects patriarchy:

In recent years, much of the anti-feminist drumbeat has been the attempt to regulate women’s reproductive freedom.

Not just recent years. This has always been the central idea of patriarchy: without the regulation of women’s reproductive freedom there is no male role and society reverts to matriarchy.

Somewhere in adolescence [says Ms. Mann], our daughters are silenced….They become uncomplaining and compliant. They learn to wait. Carol Gilligan and her associates describe how girls drive their perceptions of reality underground. The work of these researchers evokes a powerful image of a turbulent subterranean river in women’s psyches while their surface behavior adapts to the social imperatives to "be nice" and not to be "rude" or "disruptive."

This turbulent subterranean river is always at work to undermine the patriarchal system, to get men’s asses out of the house so women and girls can be free. But as feminism brings this counterforce to the surface there is a problem with the reaction of the threatened male:

All-pervasive cultural influences such as rap music trash women and celebrate male dominance over them. But how many adult women have listened to this music and found out what our daughters and sons are listening to? How many of us have had the energy at the end of a working day to vet the musical tastes of children? I am speaking of both boys and girls here for a very good reason: The recurring themes of violence against women in this music send a destructive message of permission to boys as well as a message of submission to girls.

It is a crude message, but it comes from the heart. We must pay attention to it.

Consider the lyric from the rock group Guns ‘N Roses in which they sing of murdering a former lover and then burying her in the backyard so they will not miss her. Should anyone be shocked that a fourteen-year-old boy who listens to sadistic lyrics about women turns into a fraternity house gang-bang rapist a few years later?

A lot of male energy is mis-channeled into hostility. Better it should be put to work to create families and pursue the arts of peace—but that would be patriarchy.

Violent themes against women are a Hollywood staple. Violence against women is the norm on many television shows and rental videos. Our daughters and sons still come of age listening to an obbligato of primitive violence directed against women. Would we tolerate this kind of culturally sanctioned violence against African-Americans?

One wonders whether Ms. Mann has read From Reverence to Rape, describing the treatment of American women in the movies coincident with the rise of feminism. Aside from which much of such violence comes from African-Americans, males who have been denied a more civilized outlet for their energies, a fact which feminists (and their hangers-on like Bishop Spong) don’t wish to be told. These African-American males are the most obvious victims of the matriarchal system—though with the progress of feminism they are being joined by "the coming white underclass."

"Mandatory economic dependency for women, as a class, has ended," says Bishop Spong. There is no feminist movement to abolish mandatory support obligations on ex-husbands, however. There is nothing mandatory about getting married. It was formerly supposed to be mandatory to stay married—to keep marriage vows. Bishop Spong now assures women that this keeping of vows has become non-mandatory, thereby informing men that a woman’s vows are untrustworthy. He imagines that this deprivation of bargaining power benefits women.

Shame and guilt have less influence on women’s sexual behavior than they used to. A woman need worry less about her "reputation." But this means that her offer to share her reproductive life with a man is less valued. Formerly, her sexual loyalty was her principal offering, that which enabled her husband to have a family and her children to have a father. So Bishop Spong and the feminists who celebrate women’s independence are de-valuing the most valuable thing a woman has to offer a man.

Betty Friedan tells her readers that "Women have outgrown the housewife role" and that more of them ought to want "a real function in our exploding society"—meaning more ought to have elitist careers. "The main barrier to such growth in girls," says Ms. Friedan, "is their own rigid preconception of woman’s role, which sex-directed educators reinforce, which they refuse either explicitly or by not facing their own ability, and responsibility to break through it."

The main barrier, in other words, is not patriarchal oppression: "[A]ll the rights that would make women free in society, were won on paper long ago….I say the only thing that stands in women’s way today is this false image, this feminine mystique, and the self-denigration that it perpetuates. This mystique makes us try to beat ourselves down in order to be feminine, makes us deny or feel freakish about our own abilities as people. It keeps us from moving freely on the road that is open to us."

Ms. Friedan’s elitist feminism and Sjöö and Mor’s ecofeminism agree on the grand goal, that women shall be sexually independent of men—which leaves men in limbo and creates a matriarchal ghetto.

The Bible has been called the most patriarchal book ever written. As pointed out, it reflects the struggle between the two kinship systems, projected onto two religious systems, the patriarchal one worshiping the Hebrew god Jahweh or Jehovah, the matriarchal one worshiping the goddess Asherah and her consort Baal. "The asherah," say Sjöö and Mor,

was the Neolithic Goddess (Inanna-Ishtar, Astarte-Ashtoreth-Asherah) or the symbol of the Goddess. It was a conventionalized or stylized tree, perceived as she, and planted therefore at all altars and holy places. The asherah represented the Goddess as Urikittu, the green one, the Neolithic mother-daughter of all vegetation, of agricultural knowledge and abundance. Yahweh’s absolute hostility to the asherah was the political hostility of the nomadic-pastoral Hebrew people, or their priesthood at least, to the settled matriarchal cultures and their Goddess beliefs. It became a psychological hostility to the entire living earth, doctrinalized in the biblical texts:

You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods: on high mountains, on hills, under a spreading tree. You must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles [asherahs], set fire to the carved images of their gods, and wipe their name from that place. (Deuteronomy 7:5ff.)

This is how the male kinship system made war against the female kinship system in Old Testament times. The target was not primarily altars, pillars and trees but the licentious worship associated with them, the anarchic female kinship system and its promiscuous, orgiastic and meaningless sexuality, the lifestyle which tried to keep sex shallow and merely recreational, an endless series of Saturday night bashes rather than the organizing principle of society which made stable families and permanent fatherhood necessary. "The constant fight against matriarchal religion and custom," say Sjöö and Mor, "is the primary theme of the Old Testament. It begins in Genesis, with the takeover of the Goddess’s Garden of Immortality by a male God, and the inversion of all her sacred symbols—tree, serpent, moon-fruit, woman—into icons of evil."

The war between the two kinship systems has never ended and never will. There was a time before the war a few thousand years ago when Mom was in charge and Dad a mere boyfriend. The creation of patriarchy elevated the boyfriend to fatherhood and made fatherhood permanent. It was a turning point in evolution. The human race was henceforth to be propagated by two parents rather than one or one-and-a-half. The male parent must be more than a boyfriend if children are not to be disadvantaged. Society must be organized to ensure that children have the second parent—must be organized patriarchally.

The feminist view is the opposite. As Helen Diner says, "A free disposition over one’s own person is an original right in a matriarchal society." "The Great Mother," says Ms. Miles,

originally held the ultimate power—the power of the undisputed ruler, that of life and death. Where woman is the divine queen, the king must die. Mythologically and historically, too, the rampant sensuality of the Great Goddess and her taste for blood unite in the archaic but undisputed practice of the killing of the king. "King" is in fact an honorary title for the male chosen to have intercourse with the Queen-Goddess in a simple reenactment of the primal drama subsequently described by historians and anthropologists as "the sacred marriage," with the male "acting as divine consort" to the Goddess.

Making Mom the primary caregiver weakens the male provider role and produces the consequences noted on pages 12. It attacks one of patriarchy’s traditional supports, religion. According to feminist Riane Eisler, what the religious right "would impose on us is a religious form of fascism in which the ultimate strong man is a wrathful divine father who countenances neither freedom nor equality [and] would also impose on us…strict and, if ‘necessary,’ violent control over women and women’s sexuality, since this control is both a symbol and a linchpin for all other forms of domination and control."

The control is ordinarily nonviolent, but it is good PR to represent it as threatening to become violent. The alternatives are accordingly said to be sexual fascism on the one hand (Chinese foot-binding, female circumcision, chadors) and on the other hand total sexual de-control of women. Ms. Eisler describes this alternative as follows:

But if we succeed in completing the cultural shift from a dominator to a partnership social and ideological organization, we will see a real sexual revolution—one in which sex will no longer be associated with domination and submission but with the full expression of our powerful human yearning for connection and for erotic pleasure.

This de-control, or "free love," or recreational sex is the motivator of the female kinship system, as the desire for families is the motivator of the male kinship system. It has, as Ms. Eisler says, its own religious dimension. In Old Testament times it provided the attraction of the Canaanite worship on the High Places, denounced by the Hebrew prophets ("horrible orgies of unrestrained sensuality"). It provides the attraction of Bangkok’s brothels and the gay bath houses in San Francisco’s Castro District. It was one of the attractions of early Christian Gnosticism. "Orgiastic sex rites," says homosexual Arthur Evans, "appeared among some Gnostics and scandalized traditional Christians. Roman authorities used these practices to discredit Christianity as a whole. Traditional Christians consequently condemned the Gnostics and denied any connection with them."

In the fourth century Ms. Eisler’s "real sexual revolution" was represented by Messalianism: "The Messalian doctrines were the extreme expression of the longing to comprehend mystical revelation through sensual experience."

"Women were the chief priests of the old religion," says Evans. "The material substructure of the old religion was a matriarchal social system that reached back to the stone age." "In Asia Minor," he continues,

we find "the Great Mother of the Gods," who was associated with animals, sex and nature….Her priests were both women and men. The men castrated themselves, grew long hair, and wore the clothing of women….The Great Mother of the Gods was worshipped with sacred orgies. Participants of the rituals played flutes, castanets, cymbals, and drums, calling these the "strings of frenzy."…Homosexual and heterosexual acts of all kinds took place at these rituals. As one academic (a tight-assed homophobe) puts it, there were "revolting sensual rites, the presence of the hermaphroditic element."…A man who wanted to become a priest of the Great Mother attended the orgies, and in an ecstatic and frenzied trance, castrated himself….This castration was entirely voluntary, and was undertaken only by those who wished to be initiated as priests.

It’s all so beautiful, so meaningful. But does it create a stable society? The sexually marginal male will never be more than a drifter or a mere boyfriend unless society gives him a family to head, to channel his energies into. Ms. Eisler writes interminably about "partnership," but her term excludes the partnership essential to the patriarchal system, that which gives fathers their role, stable marriage.

She says:

I should clarify that by sexual empathy, caring, responsibility, and respect I do not mean inflexible lifelong sexual bonds….[S]ex in lifelong marriages has all too often been marked by lack of respect, empathy, responsibility, and caring. And what we today call serial monogamy (that is, a series of committed relationships rather than a single exclusive relationship till death) along with a healthy amount of spontaneity and sexual experimentation, are not inconsistent with caring, empathic, and mutually responsible sexual relations.

It goes without saying that in such "spontaneous" arrangements the mother retains custody of the children and the father retains responsibility to subsidize her. What Ms. Eisler describes is matriarchy. The basic objection to the matriarchal pattern is that it damages children. According to the National Health and Education Consortium,

A majority of children from broken homes suffer from limited cognitive development and psychological and physiological disturbances, and are unable to form close attachments.

According to Valerie Riches, Director of Family and Youth Concern, Oxford,

The fact is that the files of relevant government bodies are bulging with evidence that broken homes mean more battered children. Research has shown that it is 20 times more dangerous for a child if the natural parents cohabit rather than marry. It is 33 times more dangerous for a child to live with its natural mother and her boyfriend than with the natural parents in a marriage.

"The sacred status of womanhood," says Ms. Miles, "lasted for at least 25,000 years—some commentators would push it back further still, to 40,000 or even 50,000. In fact there was never a time at this stage of human history when woman was not special and magical."

Mythologically, the ritual sacrifice of the young "king" is attested in a thousand different versions of the story. In these the immortal mother always takes a mortal lover, not to father her child (although children often result) but essentially in exercise and celebration of her womanhood. The clear pattern is of an older woman with a beautiful but expendable youth—Ishtar and Tammuz, Venus and Adonis, Cybele and Attis, Isis and Osirus….The lover is always inferior to the Goddess, mortal where she is immortal, young where she is ageless and eternal, powerless where she is all-powerful, and even physically smaller—all these elements combine in the frequent representation of the lover as the Goddess’s younger brother or son. And always, always, he dies.

This is ancient history which we read about in The Golden Bough. It is also the eternal feminine, though since the triumph of patriarchy, it has gone underground and become the "enormous potential counterforce" always at work to undermine the male kinship system and to restore the female kinship system where Mom occupies the driver’s seat and is "enormously in charge of her life." This is why Genesis has God say "He shall rule over thee."

Historic survivals of the killing of the king [continues Ms. Miles] continued up to the present day. As late as the nineteenth century, the Bantu kingdoms of Africa knew only queens without princes or consorts—the rulers took slaves or commoners as lovers, then tortured and beheaded them after use….[W]hen God was a woman, all women and all things feminine enjoyed a higher status than has ever been seen since in most countries of the world.

This is sexism. What a triumph for the new patriarchal system of Yahweh that it was able to deconstruct it and control the "rampant sexuality of the Great Goddess and her taste for blood"—to put sex to work, as the hydroelectric dam puts the power of the river to work. This is the great achievement of patriarchy, which is based on female chastity and meaningful marriage which enables men, hitherto marginal, to participate as equals in reproduction. The great achievement of women’s liberation is to return to the unregulated sexuality of the Stone Age and the Canaanite High Places. This achievement has been made possible by the acceptance of female promiscuity ("a woman’s right to control her own sexuality") and by the incomprehension of divorce court judges who mindlessly reiterate that "the children belong with their mother."

The Old Testament is the record of the patriarchal victory, which today’s woman’s liberation movement is reversing. "[W]hat does it mean," asks Bishop Spong, "in the midst of a sexual revolution, when people call on the church and world to return to the sexual morality of the Bible? Both the religious and ethical directives of the Bible were formulated out of a patriarchal understanding of life, with the interests of men being primary. Are we willing to return to these destructive definitions of both men and women? Do we desire to hold up the biblical image of dominance and submission as the Christian model for male-female relations in our time?"

Emphatically, yes. The "enormous potential counterforce" of women’s resistance to sexual regulation must be contained or there will be matriarchy and the pathology of the ghettos. "He shall rule over thee" because otherwise women will not submit to sexual law-and-order.

Throughout the course of evolution the female has been head of the reproductive unit. But human evolution has reached the point where a second parent is necessary if the pathology of matriarchy is to be avoided. The father’s role is the weak link in the family biologically—if biology is interpreted to exclude social heredity. The meaning of the patriarchal revolution is that social heredity has become part of biology and that the role of the father who transmits much of this social heredity must be stabilized by being given social, legal and religious support. This is why patriarchal society exists. Much of this support is artificial, even trivial, but the father needs all the help he can get. Hence male headship of families. Hence the transmission of the father’s surname to the wife and children. Hence "Mr." Precedes "Mrs." on the envelope, followed by the husband’s given name and not the wife’s. And so forth—the things which feminists point to as "oppression."

Male dominance is universal as Professor Steven Goldberg has shown in his book The Inevitability of Patriarchy. Most women want their men to be more dominant, not less. According to the psychologist Karl Menninger for every woman who complains to her shrink that her man is a brute, there are a dozen who complain that he is a wimp.

"What does it mean to return to the sexual morality of the Bible?" It means putting a stop to the sexual revolution. It means restoring the stability of marriage—making it something more than cohabitation. It means giving children fathers who cannot be exiled by judges who haven’t the foggiest notion of the suffering they inflict.

Bishop Spong asks, "If the Bible has nothing more than the letter of literalism to offer to our understanding of human sexuality today, then I must say that I stand ready to reject the Bible in favor of something that is more human, more humane, more life giving, and, dare I say, more godlike. I do believe, however, that there is a spirit beneath the letter that brings the Bible forward in time with integrity."

In other words, forget the plain patriarchal message of the Bible and read into it the contemporary feminist flim-flam. After all, we are "in the midst of a sexual revolution." Why fight it? Bishop Spong points out correctly, that the Bible is filled with reflections of the ancient war between the old fertility religion and the newer patriarchal religion of Yahweh, and he points out some of the consequences of the victory of the latter:

A shift from the deification of the land to assigning man the responsibility for subduing it.

The dawning of human self-consciousness, of separation from the co-consciousness of savage mentality—the beginning of human thought and therefore human history.

The achieving of a new level of humanity in which will replace instinct as the primary motivator of human behavior.

Emergence of the ego that "dared to stand against…instinct."

Freedom from "total immersion in nature," symbolized by the journey of Abraham.

The understanding that the deity is not exclusively female, that God was no longer circumscribed by the reproductive processes of nature.

The creation of most of the major religious systems—"direct by-products of this process of re-definition."

The abolition of human sacrifice.

The regulation of female sexuality, which makes responsible male sharing in

reproduction possible.

Emphasis on the cultural as opposed to the merely biological significance of religion.

An end to tribalism.

The origin of reflective thought and history.

Following this, Bishop Spong triumphantly asks whether "in the midst of a sexual revolution," we want to go back to this? Of course we do. The contemporary sexual revolution is undermining all these accomplishments, which is why we must get rid of it. Bishop Spong calls these accomplishments "destructive." They are destructive only of things which need to be destroyed: unregulated sexuality, fertility orgies, sacred prostitution, co-consciousness and mindless reduction of human life to the merely biological level where it functioned during the half million years of childhood known as the Stone Age. They are constructive of the patriarchal system, the greatest of all human creations, the great cultural fabric built on the firm biological foundation of female sexuality, once that sexuality is made to submit to the regulation that enables males to participate in it.

Women’s sexuality must be regulated because men must be made partners in reproduction. A glance at the Annex shows that women do not submit willingly to such regulation. Hence the joy of Ms. Heyn’s adulteresses, their sense of release in getting rid of "those nice-girl games," of being re-born, of doing bad and feeling good, of feeling adult but not old in their affairs, rather than feeling old but not adult in their marriages. Hence the sixty percent divorce rate. Hence the books by feminists defending and encouraging divorce for women.

Bishop Spong says "Divorce has become part of the cost that society must pay for the emancipation of women." Women should not be emancipated; they should be regulated, as men should be. Emancipated women are divorce-prone, adultery-prone, likely (with present divorce arrangements favoring mother custody) to drag their children into the female kinship system and inflict its pathology on them. Emancipated women are ghettoizing the larger society as their black sisters have created the ghetto of the inner city.

"An early reversal of the high divorce rate," says Spong, "would require, I believe, suppression of the growing equality between the sexes." "Equality" is an endlessly repeated feminist slogan: women earn less than men. Of course they earn less. This is what gives men their role as family providers, which, in turn, is what stabilizes society. It is the absence of this male role which creates the chaos of the ghettos and barrios. Men’s greater earning power is why women marry them and form families. Women who earn as much as their husbands make poor wives; they want few children or none, they are divorce-prone and adultery-prone.

If Spong were asked to show that women living in a patriarchy are less than equal he would probably compare the earnings of women and men within the patriarchy. What he should compare is the living standards of women in the patriarchy and the living standards of women in the matriarchy, in a female-headed household—compare the living standard of wives which has been raised 73 percent by marriage with the living standard of ex-wives which has been lowered 73 percent by divorce. Spong thinks divorce contributes to the "growing equality between the sexes." Where is the equality for the woman facing the "feminization of poverty," for the woman tied to humiliating dependence on support payments from an ex-husband or from welfare? "Women with young children, according to Wallerstein and Blakeslee,

especially if they are driven into poverty by divorce, face a Herculean struggle to survive emotionally and physically. The stress of being a single parent with small children, working day shift and night shift without medical insurance or other backup, is unimaginable to people who have not experienced it. No wonder some women told us that they feel dead inside.

A wife might claim she is entitled to "equality" on the grounds that her services to her husband were equal to those of him to her. An ex-wife can make no such claim. Her demands are based on her status as a Mutilated Beggar—and the like status she inflicts on her children thanks to automatic mother custody.

Woman’s yearning to be back in the driver’s seat is shown by the Annex to this book. The dark matriarchal forces will never give up their war against patriarchy, against evolution. There will always be feminists and their allies—sexual anarchists and homosexuals, ACLU types in the Law, Bishop Spong types in the Church, Kinsey types in schools and universities, Murphy Brown types in the media—making war against sexual law-and-order and the father-headed family. Today’s feminism is to be understood as matriarchy’s counterattack against patriarchy and the family. Its program is to sexually de-regulate women in the name of "equality," "plurlalism," and "multiculturalism," to destroy the family and restore the female kinship system. The sixty percent divorce rate and the thirty percent illegitimacy rate means this program has already succeeded, most of its success having occurred in just the last three decades. The responsibility of patriarchy now is not just to hang on, but to reclaim its lost territory, to re-establish the family as the reproductive unit of society by re-establishing the father as its head.

In this war the enemy’s primary weapon is female sexual disloyalty--adultery or divorce-with-mother-custody. Dalma Heyn has been quoted:

Adultery is, in fact, a revolutionary way for women to rise above the conventional—if they live to do so. The injunction against it—always absolute—is still strong and the stakes are still high, as legions of once-adulterous and now-divorced women whose standard of living has been drastically lowered can attest.

Ms. Heyn prefaces her book with the following passage from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, which will be further discussed on page 149 tk.

[Hester] assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relationship between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

This surer ground will be supplied by the contemporary feminist/sexual revolution and its recognition of the naturalness of sexual promiscuity and the breeding of fatherless children. Thus will women regain the status they lost by giving up sole parenthood to share parenting with fathers. Free at last.

The era when Hawthorne was writing The Scarlet Letter was the era when Alexis de Tocqueville was visiting America and writing his classic Democracy in America, in which he said that "In America, a single woman can undertake a long journey in safety," as indeed Hester and Pearl do in Hawthorne’s narrative. Today, now that feminism and the de-regulation of female sexuality have created the ghetto and are re-creating the larger society in the image of the ghetto—the brighter future Hester and Hawthorne and Ms. Heyn and feminists yearn for—a single woman cannot jog in Central Park in safety. If she tries, she may find herself beaten and gang-raped by a posse of fatherless punks who grew up in matriarchal homes created by the sexual de-regulation of their mothers.

"What we have here," says Ms. Heyn in her promotion of female sexual de-regulation,

is women saying again and again that their sexuality, which had been so disempowering inside the confines of conventional goodness [read: inside the patriarchal family] had, outside it, become empowering. They are saying that their love, inside marriage, had made them feel disconnected and devitalized, while outside it, in relationships they created for pleasure alone, they felt neither idealized nor debased. Their sexuality had "come alive" as surely and inexorably as they themselves had.

For pleasure alone. Not for the proper procreation and socializing of children in two-parent homes. Ms. Heyn provides the explanation of women’s hatred of the sexual regulation which patriarchy requires of them. They empower themselves by escaping from the patriarchal rules. Feminist psychologist Carol Tavris thinks women are victims of "socially imposed low self-esteem" by being taught to imagine that "whatever’s wrong is women’s fault—sick, diseased women at that. Until women begin to look outward to the roles, obligations and financial realities that keep them stuck instead of always looking inward to their own faults and failings, their low self-esteem is bound to continue. And so will comforting theories that blame women’s problems on sickness rather than powerlessness."

Ms. Heyn’s solution for these women—adultery—is "empowering" because it makes women’s sexuality "for pleasure alone," thus striking a deadly blow at procreative sex, the stability of families, the enemy, patriarchy. The Erotic Silence of the American Wife means her adultery.

Ms. Heyn cites Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life as complaining that a woman’s story ends with her wedding:

But examine the romance plot closely and you will see that after you cut to the chase—marriage—it is Mr. Right’s story that continues, not our heroine’s. After her implicit goal of becoming a wife is reached, her story is over. Once inside the little cottage, the moment after becoming a wife, as Carolyn Heilbrun points out, "the young women died as a subject, ceased as an entity," was left there languishing on the page, without a voice, hardly a heroine at all, relegated to a plot that cannot thicken. This story that goes nowhere for her is, nevertheless, the only plot written for a woman’s life, just as happily ever after (that is, monogamous marriage) is the only ending that certifies her success as a woman in this society.

It is Mr. Right’s story that continues. In other words maternity and woman’s maternal functions are an anti-climax which interferes with Mom’s making a real contribution to society such as men make, such as Mr. Right makes. Ms. Heyn thinks women might make a better contribution by forgetting their marriage vows—then they don’t "die as a subject" but keep on having adventures, all the more fun if they are forbidden.

"The plot cannot thicken" because the plot makes very little sense apart from children and family, apart from the patriarchal system which gives it meaning. Elizabeth Adams, the Hollywood madam, defended her call girl business not on the grounds that it gave her girls an alternative to marriage—to dying as a subject and ceasing to be an entity—but because she was educating her girls so that they qualified themselves to make excellent marriages into the best families. Bernard Shaw made the same defense of Mrs. Warren’s profession, which enabled the whore-mother to give her daughter a superior education and qualify herself for success in patriarchal society. Most of the call girls working for Sydney Biddle Barrows, the Mayflower Madam, "looked forward to being married someday."

Ms. Heyn thinks it too bad that adulterous wives in literature come to a tragic end—Anna Karenina, Tess, Hester, Madame Bovary: "Unlike the classic tragic hero, whose pride or folly dictate a suffering which then redeems him, the tragic heroine need not have a fatal flaw to warrant her tragic ending: Tess is neither proud nor foolish; neither is Anna. Their suffering comes from without rather than from within; it arises out of the insistence of a social order rather than from any character defect."

The social order is called patriarchy and it makes civilization possible. These adulterous women are violating its rules, designed to safeguard the family and the reproductive role of fathers—remote considerations, in feminist thinking, in comparison with their desire to get out of the patriarchal system and get back to the matriarchal system which de-regulates them.

It is highly advantageous to a woman to be a sex object and for society to have her be, for it is thus that men are motivated to be achievers and to create wealth and social stability and to benefit their children—and their wives. But the advantages can best be derived from a husband whose stable motivation (and therefore work performance) is assured. The focus on what sexual adventures the wife desires and believes herself entitled to is irrelevant to the man’s motivation—except as it works to undermine it. For a woman to seek sexual pleasure marks her as an easy lay, which is too threatening, too disruptive to patriarchy, which must channel male sexuality into marriage, thereby getting society’s work done and giving children two parents and the best home environment. Society gets no work out of men (or women) by making men into sex objects. A woman cannot be motivated to support a family adequately because she loves a man or has a sexual adventure with one. But society can use the woman as a sex object to motivate a man to support a family, to pay taxes, to buy real estate, to create a stock portfolio—to contribute to society rather than disrupt it. It is for this reason that female sexuality must be regulated.

This regulation breaks down if the man loses control over his paycheck and loses custody of his children, as happens in the divorce court, or when the woman marries the state and lives off welfare and affirmative action benefits. Many women prefer this, and (this needs to be repeated) will accept a drastic lowering of their (and their children’s) standard of living to gain this sexual freedom. Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs have been quoted on women’s preference for even "penurious" sexual freedom over "marriage and dependence on one man."

Virtually automatic mother custody explains most of women’s divorce-proneness, the ongoing erosion of marriage and the plight of our children, their sexual confusion, their miserable educational performance, their turning to violence and drugs. They see the destruction of so many families and fear they have little hope of families of their own. They fear commitment and their fear is realistic.

Feminists view the attaining of sexual independence for women as a proper object of social policy. But it would be a disaster for women—as well, of course, as for men and children. Women need reminders of how they benefit from patriarchy—how breaking its rules will result in economic suffering and loss of status. In spite of which, many women will choose to break the rules. Ms. Heyn tells of Amanda:

Amanda, living alone and talking about the "mess" she made of her life as a result of her affair, tries to figure out why she is not depressed about it:

I’m alone. I’m not seeing either man. I have no money. And what I feel—I feel released. I know I should feel regret, but what I really feel is reborn.

And Paula:

I did the worst thing in the world, the worst thing for a woman in this entire culture. And you know what? It was the best thing I ever did. It opened my eyes to so much…it opened my heart.

The women began seeing everything "in color" and feeling more "alive." This is the way women are—or anyway too many of them. This answers Freud’s question, "What does a woman want?" Ms. Heyn thinks "that women don’t really know what they want, or don’t say what they need, or don’t say what they mean, or don’t mean what they say":

Those who have noticed the difficulty women have in speaking about what is most precious to them—love and sex—may also suggest that the silence is not cultural but inherent; that women, even when they know what they want, will not speak of it because they are "secretive" or "manipulative" or "tricky." They not only lack a voice, these explanations imply, they lack much more: a morality; a self; a soul.

They lack patriarchal morality, civilized morality, morality which can be the basis of family life. Some of them seek meaning in a puerile revival of cults of the Stone Age Great Mother. According to Riane Eisler, "a new genre of women’s writings about sex is gradually beginning to emerge: writings that link sex with a full-bodied spirituality imbued with erotic pleasure….What they deal with is the reclamation of nothing less than women’s ancient sexual power—and with this the powerful archetype of the prehistoric Goddess….Most invoke the ancient Goddess as the source of erotic power, although a few like Carter Heyward, still write of her as God. But whatever term they use, their focus is on resacralizing both woman and the erotic—which they define as inclusive of, but not exclusive to, sexuality—and on the erotic as empowering."

Feminist Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey tells us that "To all intents and purposes the human female is sexually insatiable…." Dr. Sherfey believes, according to feminist Barbara Seaman, "that every girl born has the capacity to become a veritable nymphomaniac." Even if Sherfey is right, however, continues Ms. Seaman,

I think that most of the women who opt for marriage and family life will continue, sedately and perhaps a little sadly at times, to "will themselves" satisfied. A mother’s attachment to her young is very strong and not easily jeopardized.

This is why father custody will stabilize the family and society.

On the other hand, there is no question that a new life-style is emerging for educated women in civilized countries. The world is pretty well filled up, and the men who rule it are coming to view babies as a threat to their own survival. The pressures on women to marry and reproduce are rapidly diminishing, at the same time as their solo economic position is improving.

Seaman wrote in 1972, when overpopulation was the big scare. Today "civilized countries" suffer from a below-replacement level birthrate. Men in them don’t view babies as a threat to their survival; their fear is that they can’t have families—that women, with the help of the divorce courts, are imposing a matriarchal society upon them. If men knew that every woman is a potential nymphomaniac, and if she could become economically independent with the help of affirmative action policies, he would know the improbability of his becoming a breadwinner for a family. He would be in danger of becoming a demoralized underachiever (like the young men of the ghettos, like the young men described by Judith Wallerstein on page 98 tk). What men are really afraid of is that women are willing to forfeit the advantages patriarchy has hitherto bestowed on them in exchange for their acceptance of patriarchal regulation. According to Ms. Seaman,

Anthropologists have clarified that in some cultures, even today, the vast sexual capacity of the female is taken for granted. Their field work in primitive cultures lends extremely convincing support to the historical thesis that the forced suppression of female sexuality was somehow necessary for the development of "higher civilizations."

Ms. Heyn speaks of women

being thrown into the central dilemma of relationship they had encountered both at adolescence and in marriage: how to speak honestly about their deepest feelings but not be "bad"; how to say what they desired without sounding "wrong" to desire it; how to speak about sex without displeasing me and being punished somehow.

Such women would do well to keep quiet about their "deepest feelings" since speaking honestly about them would reveal that they are enemies of the patriarchal system upon which they depend. They are bad; their real, albeit unexpressed, aim is to reject patriarchy. Their deepest feeling is a yearning to be promiscuous and to employ this promiscuity as a means to restore the female kinship system and mother-right—"a woman’s right to control her own sexuality" and therefore her right to disregard her marriage contract.

The success of feminism has caused this "right" to be taken for granted. Formerly a woman had the right to contract to share her reproductive life with a man who depended on the contract and on society’s enforcing of it. Today, women insist that they also have the right to break the contract, to deprive the man of the children procreated under it. They see the corollary of a woman’s right to control her own sexuality as her further right to demand that the law shall nullify her obligations under the contract while still enforcing the man’s economic obligations under it. How long will men continue to permit this subversion of their marriages and their families?

Ms. Heyn probably sees herself as promoting the liberation of women. She might consider the condition of women in Eastern lands, where, as William Robertson Smith says, men cannot trust them and accordingly impose purdah on them or wrap them in black cloth and keep them out of sight. Sexual liberal Dr. Alex Comfort, suggests that there is a strong case for treating sexuality as Indian and Arabic works have treated it, like ballroom dancing. The regulation of female sexuality in Indian and Arabic societies is far more strict, indeed cruel, because of the lack of inner controls of shame and guilt such as Ms. Heyn and Dr. Comfort wish to remove. The Arabic and Indian controls, Dr. Comfort says, are the result of treating sex like ballroom dancing. Arabic and Indian societies don’t practice ballroom dancing; they practice belly dancing. Ballroom dancing is found where there is a presumption of female chastity and the relations between the sexes are permitted to be sexually stimulating without undermining the patriarchal Sexual Constitution. Belly dancing is calculated to arouse and inflame the passions of lustful men—but its complement is harsh external restraints on females. Dr. Comfort may imagine Arabic and Indian women relish the Joy of Sex but he would not care to live in a society where women wear veils. "The passion of love," says Jacob Burckhardt of the Arabs, "is indeed much talked about by the inhabitants of towns, but I doubt whether anything is meant by them more than the grossest animal desire. No Arabian love poetry takes account of any other aspect."

"Convinced that [Saudi Arabian] women have no control over their own sexual desires," says feminist Jean Sasson, "it then becomes essential that the dominant male carefully guard the sexuality of the female. This absolute control over the female has nothing to do with love, only with fear of the male’s tarnished honor." Let’s say only with the male’s fear of matriarchy, a justifiable fear, which Americans ought to share.

It is the argument of the present book that men should ensure sexual law-and-order, not by imposing purdah upon women, not by wrapping them in black cloth, but by guaranteeing fathers custody of their children. The popularity of scores of books like Ms. Heyn’s and Dr. Comfort’s proves that feminists and parlor intellectuals seek to get rid of sexual regulation and restore matriarchy and sexual anarchy. Feminist Dr. Sherfey, was cited earlier as saying that women have as insatiable a sex drive as certain female primates:

Having no cultural restrictions, these primate females will perform coitus from twenty to fifty times a day during the peak week of estrus, usually with several series of copulation in rapid succession. If necessary, they flirt, solicit, present and stimulate the male in order to obtain successive coitions. They will "consort" with one male for several days until he is exhausted, then take up with another. They emerge from estrus totally exhausted, often with wounds from spent males who have repulsed them. I suggest that something akin to this behavior could be paralleled by the human female if her civilization allowed it.

The emphasized words mean in the absence of patriarchal control, the control lacking in Old Testament times when the fertility worship at the Canaanite high places involved "horrible orgies of unrestrained sensuality." This is what Ms. Eisler wishes to revive. She calls it "the reclamation of nothing less than woman’s ancient sexual power—and with this the powerful archetype of the prehistoric Goddess." This is being promoted by "a new genre of women’s writings about sex…writings that link sex with a full-bodied spirituality imbued with erotic pleasure."

The Hebrew prophets denounced this unregulated sexuality under the comprehensive term "idolatry." "What," asks Bishop Spong, "was the appeal of what the Bible calls idolatry? Wherein lay the power of this religious tradition that Yahwism never fully succeeded in suppressing?…If these traditions were in fact ‘nothing,’ as the words of the Yahwists asserted, why did the followers of Yahweh seem so threatened by them?" Answer: Asherah and Baal were a matriarchal sex cult; Jahweh was a patriarchal cult which channeled sex through families. Asherah and Baal made the mother the head of the reproductive unit, de-regulated female sexuality and encouraged sexual license; Jahwism made the father the head of the reproductive unit and imposed patriarchy. It’s the same difference which separates feminists and anti-feminists today.

One problem is that people like Bishop Spong do not feel threatened. The same-sex marriage ceremonies and homosexual orgies in front of the altar in St. Gabriel’s Church in Brooklyn described in the Penthouse article cited on page 183 tk was like old times—like the orgies at the Canaanite high places.. It might have given Bishop Spong pause but it probably didn’t.

It is the purpose of patriarchy to prevent this sort of sexual foolishness and to channel the energy it represents into the creation of families. This channeling is a primary responsibility of churches and the legal and educational systems—all of which are betraying this responsibility for the bad purpose of de-regulating sexuality and restoring matriarchy and its anti-social twin, homosexuality.

Debold, Wilson and Malave’s Mother Daughter Revolution is part of the attack on the patriarchal socialization of girls. "In the shadow of the wall," they say,

girls see the injustices in their worlds but have no recourse and few allies. The dawning realization of women’s subordinate position within the culture becomes more and more clear to them.… The unspoken threat is abandonment and exclusion… By shutting off what they know and feel, these girls buy continued closeness with their mothers and the other women in their lives. But as they do so, they know and feel that it is not fully real.

They gain the benefits patriarchal society bestows on good women. Of course it’s "not fully real." The female role is an eminently artificial thing, like the male role. So is civilization. Accepting the patriarchal scenario privileges women to belong to the upper tier of our two-tiered society. Patriarchal socialization converts female resentment into feminine charm and male violence into constructive labor. Both are artificial; their complementariness makes civilized life possible. Feminists suppose that women can withdraw their contribution to this entente and men won’t withdraw theirs. It hasn’t worked.

Barbara Katz Rothman writes a book called Recreating Motherhood which begins with this:

I recently had the interesting experience of trying to put together a very short family photo album for a celebration of the Bar Mitzvah of my son, Dan. A colleague had just done one for his daughter, and it seemed to be a lovely idea to copy.

My colleague began his with a family tree. I started but it got complicated, messy: we had divorces, deaths, remarriages, too many convoluted branches somehow.

The "flat generational lines" didn’t represent family to her, "So I scratched the tree idea, and went straight to the photos."

They were nurturing pictures, one after another. It wasn’t by lineage that I saw Dan’s first thirteen years, but by nurturance: people holding, greeting, caring, tending, teaching.

For me, the idea of nurturance as mattering more than genetics, loving more than lineage, care more than kinship, is not just an intellectual fancy. It’s really there, in my heart….I am not alone in this. More and more of us are choosing to live our lives this way, putting together families by choice and not by obligation.

The "new definition of motherhood, of relationships, of parents and of children" is the familiar feminist unwisdom. She has rediscovered the female kinship system and regards it as a wonderful new revelation. Ms. Rothman’s problem in putting together the photo album reflects the difficulty in describing "family" relationships in a society where fatherhood and family are rapidly becoming meaningless. Louis Henry Morgan was the discoverer of this alternative way of describing kinship, which he called the "classificatory system." Webster’s New International, second edition defines it this way:

classificatory system. Anthropol. A primitive system of reckoning kinship, found among American Indians, Australasians, etc., according to which all the members of any single generation in a given line of descent (as in a clan) are reckoned as of the same degree of kinship to all the members of any other generation. The system is contrasted with the descriptive system, in vogue among civilized peoples, which discriminates degrees of individual kinship in each generation.

The Descriptive System is found among civilized peoples, where families are headed by fathers. The Classificatory System is found among uncivilized peoples, whose "families" are headed by mothers—like the American Indians, the people of the Australian bush and the American ghettos, societies based on the female kinship system, where females reject sexual regulation. The latter is what Ms. Rothman is describing. It excludes males from meaningful sharing in reproduction. It is rapidly becoming the system of all American society as women liberate themselves from sexual norms and divorce court judges automatically give mothers custody.

Ms. Rothman favors the female kinship system because of its "nurturance," as feminists Sjöö and Mor do: "it creates a silent dialog of love and union between the mother and child….This is done by all animal mothers"—including of course Judge Noland’s cows. "The child’s bond with the mother," they say, "is both erotic and mystical, and thus a challenge to established power." A challenge, that is to say, to the sexual regulation imposed by patriarchy. It creates a silent dialog of love and union between mother and child but does nothing to create a similar dialog of love and union between father and child.

Maintaining sexual regulation is also a form of nurturance, as is paying the bills, these being fathers’ responsibilities—poorly performed in the female kinship system, which is why it requires more support from society’s Backup System--welfare, delinquency control, drug programs, affirmative action programs.

Feminists imagine this "new definition of motherhood" and the sexual revolution which brought it about are really new, a breakthrough achieved only since the feminist/sexual revolution, something which finally liberates women to the attainment of equality, freedom and justice. "I choose to live my life this way," says Ms. Rothman. Men cannot choose, not if women reject sexual regulation and have the support of judges in doing so. The genealogies Ms. Rothman mentions have no significance in ghettos, or in clans or on Indian reservations. The social system based on mothers’ "nurturance" is what creates ghettos, where fathers are allowed to hang around if they behave themselves. If Mom gets tired of them, they leave and find other girlfriends.

"Putting together families by choice and not by obligation," she says. But it is the mother who does the choosing. If she chooses, she gets rid of the father and takes his kids. Her choice "puts together" a family by dissolving it or preventing its formation. Two problems with this pattern are, in the present generation, paying the bills; in the following generation building enough prisons.

"In a mother-based system," says Ms. Rothman, "a person is what mothers grow—people are made of the care and nurturance that bring a baby forth into the world, and turn the baby into a member of society." Ms. Rothman thinks of herself as a feminist, but her emphasis on women’s maternal functions is the old feminine mystique which Ms. Friedan’s feminism wanted to get rid of. Ms. Rothman and Sjöö and Mor and the ecofeminists have brought feminism full circle back to women’s maternal functions.

I believe [says Ms. Rothman] it is time to move beyond the patriarchal concern with genetic relationships….[W]e need to value nurturance and caring relationships more than genetic ties….Stripped of all the social supports, is that genetic tie sufficient to define a person?

Nobody would say it was. What is claimed is the desirability (proved by the resulting social stability and productivity and improved quality of life) of maximizing the importance of the tie to the father. This tie is biologically tenuous, which is why it is important to emphasize its significance by titles, patrilineal surnames, ancestor worship, the patrimony, the landed estate—by creating the social heredity which fetalization, paidomorphy and neoteny have made necessary if the human offspring is to have a childhood, or a decent one.

Money is part of this social heredity. The father’s money card is one reason for the legal system to support the father in cases of divorce. The father’s role is the one for which biology does the least and therefore the one for which society must do the most. The primitive idea of kinship, says William Robertson Smith is "that those who are born of the same womb and have sucked the same breast share the same life derived from the mother….[T]he fact that rahim, womb, is the most general Arabic word for kinship shows clearly enough that the…kinship through the mother [is] the earliest and universal type of blood relation." Smith has been quoted previously concerning not only the Arabs but equally with "other races which have once had a rule of female kinship: Everywhere as society advances a stage is reached when the child ceases to belong to the mother’s kin and follows the father."

The reverse is likewise true: when a society is, like our own, in a state of retrogression there is likely to be a social pattern of the child ceasing to belong to the father and becoming solely attached to its mother. Which is to say, there is a correlation between social pathology and female headed households.

"In a better world," says Ms. Rothman,

in the world I would want us to have, there would be virtually no women giving up babies: contraception, abortion, and the resources to raise her own children would be available to every woman.

Ms. Rothman, like Ms. Eisler and the rest of the feminist crowd—like Barbara Seaman, like Betty Friedan, like Elise Boulding, like Lorraine Dusky, like Stephanie Coontz, like Dalma Heyn, like Merlin Stone, like Rosie Jackson, like Mary Daly, like Gerda Lerner like Judy Mann—like all these writers of bad books, many now entrenched with tenure in academe—is once again dusting off the hoary feminine kinship system and presenting it once again as a wonderful new discovery; and all the parlor intellectuals and media people are rushing to agree with her—writing about equality and progress and modernity and the rest. How sad that returning to the classificatory kinship system should be regarded as progress. How sad.

She is saying the same thing liberals and parlor intellectuals were saying a century ago. George Bernard Shaw spoke of "every woman bearing and rearing a valuable child receiv[ing] a handsome series of payments, thereby making motherhood a real profession as it ought to be." This is an AFDC program, but with more generous payments to women breeding fatherless children. Shaw was well aware of women’s hatred of the patriarchal system:

My own experience of discussing this question leads me to believe that the one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.

Like the black woman on the Donahue show a few years ago: "We want the right to have children without having husbands." They don’t think of husbands as providing benefits, so they don’t want to associate with them. Briffault’s Law. It’s natural for taxpayers to pay their bills, they suppose—this is what taxpayers are for. It’s natural for judges to destroy families and to deprive children of their fathers and to jail ex-husbands for not sending them support money. Shaw thinks it is unnatural for women to be made servants of men, but judges don’t think it unnatural for ex-husbands to be servants of ex-wives. Or rather slaves, for a servant must be paid, and an ex-husband can be forced to perform forced labor without pay. It’s natural because while women must be privileged to say "You don’t own me," men must say to their ex-wives "You do own me; I have a natural aptitude for the servile condition." A black woman, an unwed mother, is quoted by Rickie Solinger: "If your old man has been like my old man, you wouldn’t think not having him around was any great loss."

More in accord with the spirit of the female kinship system is not to marry at all but to shack up with a stud-provider who if he misbehaves can be told to get his ass out of the house. Either way, men have no rights. The ex-husband, especially if he earns a steady paycheck which can be garnished, may be kidded into supposing he is obligated to subsidize his ex-wife’s sexual independence. To the woman this is natural ("This money is certainly a reasonable and fair thing to expect") as stable marriage is not ("You have legitimate human needs that are not being fulfilled in this marriage. You are totally justified in using that as the reason for your desire to leave."). More and more men will drift from the role of husband and ex-husband into the less threatening, less responsible role of stud.

More and more unsocialized women prefer things this way; fewer and fewer women are being properly socialized. This change manifests the "enormous potential counterforce" which energizes the women’s movement. It is what feminist Mary Ann Mason means when she says "For many women the route to liberation from domestic drudgery [is] liberation from marriage." This is what feminist Robin Morgan speaks of when she says "I want a woman’s revolution like a lover. I lust for it." It is what feminist Margaret Sanger meant by saying "marriage is the most degrading influence in the social order." Because many women hate patriarchy, hate its regulation. They think that the worst thing for them to be is a "good girl," one who accepts the patriarchal system, one who allows a man to share her reproductive life, one who allows her children to have a father.

It was women’s discovery that the weakness of character of judges was an exploitable resource. Every judge thinks with Britain’s Lord Lane that "the law doesn’t seem to be about justice; the needs of children have to come first"—and the children must not be separated from their mothers.

Can we go back to that happy era when women were willing to be wives and mothers, to perform maternal functions as their grandmothers did, when the resulting family stability made more people more well off than they had ever been?

No, we can’t—for the reason explained by a woman named Angela Franco, writing on the Internet. She asked,

Are you trying to suggest that women should revert back to the behavior of the oppressed women in the past, be docile and quiet, let men do the working while we stay home and clean and take care of the kids? Because if that’s what you are suggesting, let me enlighten you a bit—it’s never going to happen.

It’s never going to happen as long as men continue to submit to the anti-male bias of the divorce courts and consent to seeing the institution of the family destroyed and society returning to matriarchy as the ghettos have done.

It’s never going to happen, but something else is going to happen, and the sooner the better. The men who get married believing that marriage will give them families are going to rub their sleepy eyes and realize that marriage has become a fraudulent contract which gives men no security of having families and children. They are going to realize that Ms. Hoggett speaks for the American as well as the British legal system when she says marriage has become meaningless. They are going to realize that the wife’s withdrawal of her primary contribution to the marriage, her sharing of her reproductive life with her husband, removes his reciprocal obligation to support her; and that since the purpose of this support was to benefit his children, the children belong with him, not with her. They are going to realize that the anti-male bias of divorce court judges cannot be removed by appeals to their integrity or their oath of office. It’s never going to happen as long as men consent to seeing their families destroyed and society returning to matriarchy.

But the solution is perfectly obvious: father custody of the children of divorce, as was automatic and mandatory in the mid-nineteenth century. This will permit men to have families and children to have fathers. It will restore male motivation. It will make women understand the value to themselves of the double standard and of their sexual loyalty, the things which formerly gave them their bargaining power in the patriarchal system.

"The Greeks, and most humans before our smug twentieth century," writes Professor Bruce Thornton, "knew that the power of woman was the power of eros, and the power of eros was the creative and destructive power of nature itself, the forces that both men and women must strive to order and control for civilization—and human beings—to exist."

The order is imposed by patriarchy and its sexual discipline. Nothing else will impose it. "Puritanism," says Alain Danielou, "is totally unknown in the primitive or natural world." That is why it is primitive and natural, like the matriarchal ghettos.

Feminist Elise Boulding, impressed with the inner peace of sexually unregulated women in the matriarchal ghettos and on Indian reservations, asks, "Where does their serenity and self-confidence come from? What do they ‘know’?…This is a time for the rest of us, especially middle-class Western women, to ‘go to school’ to those of our sisters who have the unacknowledged skills, the confidence, the serenity, and the knowledge required for creative social change." This serenity is what Ms. Heyn calls "a deeply comfortable internal persona." It comes from their sexual irresponsibility, which is the essence of the matriarchal system, which inflicts alcoholism on so many of their men and fetal alcohol syndrome on so many of their babies. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, thousands of American Indian and indigenous Alaskan teen-agers inhabit a world so filled with alcoholism, violent death and personal despair that by the end of high school 1 out of 5 girls and 1 out of 8 boys have attempted suicide. According to Michael Resnick, an epidemiologist and co-author of the survey, "This is the most devastated group of adolescents in the United States."

The "creative" social change Ms. Boulding supposes to be taking place is that from patriarchy back to matriarchy, where women enjoy the confidence and serenity she thinks middle-class Western women ought to enjoy. This would mean an end to fatherhood and the legitimacy of children:

One of the anomalies of the child’s role in industrial society [says Ms. Boulding] is the absurd stigma of illegitimacy for children born to unpartnered women. This type of labeling will disappear as all societies return to practices once universal in tribal society; the legitimization of a child’s existence through the recognition of the birth itself.

"There is no such thing as an illegitimate child" means, among other things, "We must not distinguish between good and bad women—must not reward the good ones and de-class the bad ones." This is the way things are done in "tribal society." The child is legitimate because it has a mother and therefore, so Dr. Boulding thinks, needs no father. In a society where there is no fatherhood, females and males will be equally entitled to irresponsible sex, thus giving women the equality they clamor for.

Discussing what she calls girls’ "freedom envy," feminist Judy Mann offers this: "The physical penis is not the object of envy. Far more likely, girls are envious of what it represents: freedom." They have the idea that males are freewheeling lechers and they resent not sharing their happy lifestyle.

In matriarchy children are presumed not to be disadvantaged by father deprivation. But fatherless children really are disadvantaged, and not only by reason of their economic predicament. The principal "right" of children is the right to have a father and to grow up in a two-parent home—the right to live under the patriarchal system.

The squaw’s calm self-assurance comes from the naturalness of her life-style. Like Ms. Heyn’s adulteresses, she just does what comes easy: the squaw never did submit to patriarchal regulation, the adulteresses have learned they can reject it since the marriage contract no longer has the support of the law and religion and the mores of society. The squaw pays the price of living in poverty on a reservation; the divorced wife may pay the price of a lower standard of living. But what a relief to get rid of patriarchy and its artificial regulation of female sexuality. Free at last: "You don’t own me! You don’t own me!" "I am better at this," says one of Ms. Heyn’s adulteresses, "than I am at marriage." She is at home in the female kinship system.

Patriarchy tries to make women sexually responsible and men financially responsible—to support families. Sexual responsibility is what feminists are in rebellion against. The rejection of sexual responsibility is what feminism is all about. They will get what they want unless their rejection of sexual responsibility is understood to forfeit their claim to custody.

It’s never going to happen—the restoration of meaningful fatherhood and the two-parent family—until men realize that the anti-male bias of divorce court judges is so total that the only solution is to take all discretion out of their hands and to return to the nineteenth century practice of automatic and mandatory father custody.

According to Betty Friedan, "Only economic independence can free a women to marry for love, not for status or financial support, or to leave a loveless, intolerable, humiliating marriage, or to eat, dress, rest, and move if she plans not to marry." The real meaning of this is revealed by leaving out the verbiage intended to help the rationalization along: "Only economic independence can free a woman to leave a marriage. Get your ass out of my house. I want to live under the female kinship system. Economic dependence might induce a woman to marry, but economic independence can free a woman to leave a marriage." No association need take place if Mom doesn’t need the benefit of economic dependence Dad bestows. If the ex-husband can be made to contribute to Mom’s economic "independence" so much the better—serves him right for being male.

A husband is valued for achievement, responsibility, status. The boyfriend is valued for "what his body was like, his smile, his credentials as a friend and lover and nurturer; whether he treated her respectfully and kindly, and as an equal." This threatens and punishes high achieving males, and rewards underachieving ones. It is the husband who provides the economic base for her game-playing and he must be a responsible achiever with status, but must have no bargaining power. What, then, is his motive for being a high achiever? How can he protect his family and himself without a guarantee of father custody? He can’t. Her guaranteed custody makes her "feel competent and sure-footed, at once frighteningly out of control and, strangely, very much in command." If she is a competent adulteress, she is excited to be not only cheating on the husband who seeks to control her but to be winning a skirmish in the War Against Patriarchy. It’s fun because it is forbidden:

And this forbidden experiment begins to become surprisingly rewarding….[S]he begins to create something new, something she could not have experienced even before marriage, no matter how many relationships she had.

It’s less fun when there is no husband to betray. The woman, says Ms. Heyn,

is free to create an unusual entity—a sexual relationship in which she has no prescribed role….It will be she who decides if this relationship will take place, where, when, how often, and just what her part in it will be. She does not have to win a man, because she already has one; she does not have to plan the future, which is already planned with someone else; she does not have to worry about whether the relationship will end, nor if all her needs will be filled. She does not have to worry about whether she will have a date for Saturday night. She has one. She has a life. It will be day by day, this friendship; its only goal is mutual pleasure, without which it has no reason for being….The women spoke about how revolutionary this arrangement felt.

It is the ultimate revolution: the change of the kinship system from patriarchy to matriarchy, from sex as procreation-centered and child-centered to sex as recreation-centered, from sex as a motivator of achievement to sex for fun. Its only goal is mutual pleasure, and if Hubby doesn’t like it, let him leave and pay alimony and child support. Children, fatherhood, social stability can wait while Mom plays her games. For children it is a long wait. According to child psychologist Judith Wallerstein, "There was no transition, no cushioning of the blow. Their loneliness, their sense that no one was there to take care of them, was overwhelming…. Such are the core memories of these adults 25 years later."

It is more than game playing: there are few better ways for the "enormous potential counterforce" bottled up in women to be released, for the War Against Patriarchy to be fought and won.

"Love" is introduced into such feminist scenarios for the purpose of lamenting its absence, which is understood to invalidate the marriage contract. An economically independent woman is privileged to get out of a bad marriage—or a boring one. This is why economically independent women have the highest divorce rate and why sensible men would be well advised to avoid marriage with them—unless custody is given to fathers.

Their demand for economic independence makes no sense except as a demand for sexual independence. As feminists Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs say:

The young office worker who earns barely enough to rent her own apartment, the married woman who brings in her own share of the family income, even the single mother on welfare, have more sexual options than a "kept" woman, married or not. In fact, one reason for the stigmatization of welfare and hostility to it, is undoubtedly that it offers women independence from individual men and, hence, a certain measure of potential sexual freedom. Male fears of women’s sexual independence are at least partly responsible for the cruelly inadequate level of support available.

Civilization, once again, is built on female chastity, far more than male chastity. It permits children to have fathers and enables men to have families. This is the big thing—that women allow men to share in reproduction. Men are properly afraid of women’s sexual independence, their unchastity. Unchaste women and feminists deem it cruel of men not to subsidize women’s unchastity by giving ex-wives more of the economic "benefit" which is the male’s principal bargaining chip—it is cruel of men not to marginalize themselves. They think it would be nice for men to subsidize women’s "sexual options" so that they wouldn’t need marriage or husbands. "Perhaps most of all," they say, "women’s sexual revolution was made possible by women’s growing economic independence from men." "Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms, still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man." They will prefer semi-impoverished independence with promiscuity to affluence with chastity. "You don’t own me! You don’t own me!" Sexual freedom is the goal, as marriage and family is the goal for responsible men. (Quite a reversal of the traditional view, is it not?—-showing that marriage really is an economic institution.) It is a woman’s voluntary renunciation of sexual independence which makes a family possible. This is the reason why a husband is willing to subsidize a wife. When she insists on her right to sexual independence and implements this "right" by adultery or divorce, she loses her right to subsidization and custody of her husband’s children.

Only fathers can enforce female chastity. Fathers must be made to see how essential it is. Fathers must be made to see that the Money Card is virtually their only bargaining chip, the benefit promised to wives by Briffault’s Law. They must not be choused into supposing that they are being decent chaps when they sell off their children’s birthright by acquiescing to pay "spousal" support to ex-spouses. Judges must be made to see that they are part of the patriarchal system which pays their salaries.

We have seen (page tk) how feminists are attracted to the lifestyle of black matriarchs. Wini Breines is one of these :

While the white women often had negative perceptions of their mothers’ lives and rejected them as models, the black women were much more likely to celebrate their mothers and claim a link with them….Black mothers were often pillars of their families, and their strictness, repressiveness even, could be seen as strengths because of the burdens of racism and poverty. The written record suggests that the white daughters were less able to be empathic or experience solidarity with their mothers than were black daughters. What was commendable for one group of women was a source of tension and ambivalence for the other.

Debold, Wilson and Malave comment on this same "superiority" of black females:

Many African-American girls manage to hold on to their voices and their belief in themselves in adolescence, more so than white or Latina girls. To do so, they draw on strong family connections and communities, and on the role that women play in those families and communities (although these communities have suffered in the last decade or so as fewer resources have come their way).

They hold on to their voices and their belief in themselves. This gives them the self-assurance, lacking to white and Latina girls. But they tell their boyfriends or their husbands to get their asses out of the house. So they live in a matriarchy where males seek a masculine role not by supporting families but by the compulsive masculine rituals which make their part of town a high crime, underachieving area. The cost of the girls’ high self-esteem is paid by boys and taxpayers. Debold, Wilson and Malave and Wini Breines choose not to see that the socialization of white girls is what makes patriarchy work, what gives white boys their role. This is another way of saying that the male kinship system is an engraftment onto the female kinship system, requiring women’s acceptance of sexual regulation. It requires that men be able to give women the benefit spoken of in Briffault’s Law. The black girls prefer to reject the benefit and to enjoy their self-esteem. They can do this because they marry the government and live off welfare and affirmative action. This is the motivation that keeps the ghetto alive and functioning. It’s the natural way for girls and women to live. Patriarchy requires white girls to make the following inner adjustment:

At adolescence, a girl first becomes aware of an inner, authentic voice that struggles to articulate who she is in relation to others in her world, particularly in relation to her mother….Girls begin to see that life is complicated and that they can safely reveal only certain layers of what they know. This leads them to wonder who they are and who really knows them. "Their courage seems suddenly treacherous, transgressive, dangerous," notes Annie Rogers. "But the ‘true I’ lives on in an underground world waiting and hoping for a sign that she may emerge whole, and open herself again."

"Transgressive"—against the patriarchal system which is their best friend if only they knew it, but which they hope to destroy by their sexual rebellion. This is what makes them dangerous. Feminism and the mother daughter revolution wish them to be dangerous, to restore the natural society of the ghetto matriarchy. The "inner authentic voice that struggles to articulate who she is" is the voice of nature, the voice of her mammalian genes who say to her that reproduction is the business of the female; males have no business monkeying with it: "Get your ass out of my house."

Dr. Joyce Brothers makes the same point—equally missing the connection between the higher culture and greater affluence of patriarchy and the lower culture and lesser affluence of the ghettos, where, however, females feel more at home:

A recent survey by the American Assn. Of University Women found that while a majority of girls are confident and assertive in the lower grades, by the time they reach high school fewer than a third feel really good about themselves.

It’s interesting to note that black girls don’t have this dip in self-esteem and self-assurance.

Janie Victoria Ward of the University of Pennsylvania theorized that one factor might be that black girls are surrounded by strong women they admire.

They feel good about themselves because they deny men their provider role. All it requires is that they refuse to accept the sexual regulation which makes their white sisters "young, white and miserable."

Feminist professor Stephanie Coontz makes the same pitch about black matriarchs:

But many African Americans have also managed to pull positive lessons out of their hardships. African-American working women, for example, have made the largest income gains relative to men of any ethnic group, producing new options for women both inside and outside of marriage. Many black women are models of strength, courage, and independence.… These examples suggest that there are sources of solidarity and strength even in the experience of extreme adversity—and growing numbers of white working-class Americans may have to seek those sources in the next decade.

Ms. Coontz sees no connection between the marginalizing of black males and the "hardships" and "extreme adversity" of black females and the pathologically large numbers of female-headed households. She thinks these are the "positive lessons" that whites ought to learn from blacks so that they too can ghettoize themselves. That’s what she is teaching her students at Evergreen State College in Washington.

A wife may be glad to have a husband who washes dishes and mops floors; but she is also glad to think "I don’t need that man."

If the sexual regulation of women were not what makes civilization possible by permitting men to be fathers and children to have fathers, it would be an absurdity. But the sexual regulation of women is what makes civilization possible by permitting the creation of families and by permitting males to participate in reproduction, by making sex something more than one-night stands, more than recreation—by channeling male energy into being providers, by creating fatherhood. Accordingly, the sexual de-regulation of women, now taking place under the aegis of the sexual revolution attacks patriarchy at its core by its withdrawal of female sexual loyalty to the family and to marriage. This is what feminism is all about.

The creation of patriarchy just a few thousand years ago was an evolutionary development, comparable in importance to the aeons-long creation of motherhood beginning some two hundred million years ago in the Mesozoic Era. We are used to thinking of Evolution as Charles Darwin thought of it, as something which changes bodies slowly, gradually and continuously, something operating over grand divisions of geologic time. The idea that evolution can also operate by social, not just by biological, heredity is unfamiliar and scary. The idea that man can now control his own evolution fills us with an awesome sense of responsibility.

Even Betty Friedan senses this, though she gets things backward:

"If, indeed, these phenomena of changing sex roles of both men and women are a massive evolutionary development, as I believe they are."

She sees patriarchy as a male scheme for depriving women of freedom, status and pleasure. I have quoted her as saying "Victorian culture gave women many reasons to envy men…[but deprived her] of free and joyous love?"

Giving up free and joyous love (sexual promiscuity) is the price women pay for the ordered sexuality on which Victorian culture was based. It was a good trade-off, benefiting women as well as men, creating the modern world. We have tried feminism for a third of a century and it doesn’t work. It’s created family destruction and messed-up kids. The linchpin in the feminist program is mother custody following divorce. Pull that pin, held in place by men’s money, and the feminist structure collapses. If men understand that their responsibility is not to create motherhood but to create fatherhood and to keep their children in the male kinship system where they have their best chance to thrive, they will refuse to pay child support to ex-wives. That’s all it would take.

Woman’s principal weapon in the War Against Patriarchy is her enormous motivation to get rid of the seemingly irrational regulation of her sexuality, which allows men their reproductive role. Man’s principal weapon is his love of his children and his understanding that they belong in the male kinship system.

Many women want to return to the female kinship system, its sexual freedom, its promiscuity, what Betty Friedan calls "its freedom, status and pleasures." This is why Charmaine wants her boyfriend to get his ass out of her house. This is why Freud thought woman was the enemy of civilization, which she is when she can afford to get her way and ignore the benefits of Briffault’s Law. This is an important reason why she clamors so insistently for economic independence and for conferred benefits.

"The male," says feminist Barbara Seaman, "is ‘in trouble,’ or ‘endangered,’ comparatively speaking, from the moment he is conceived, for more males than females die in the womb, in the birth canal, and at every subsequent step along the way":

It is now believed, although the whys and wherefores are not yet clear, that the greater vulnerability of the male may be related to the fact that his embryonic development is less autonomous and more chancy. There are more opportunities for things to go wrong—in his body and in the male circuits of his brain….The male may be larger, on the average, and better able to lift weights, but let us not allow appearances to deceive us any longer. In many respects, including staying power, we must correctly be called the first and the stronger sex. One writer enumerated some of the female’s biological advantages: "more efficient metabolism, the more specialized organs, the greater resistance to disease, the built-in immunity to certain specific ailments, the extra X chromosome, the more convoluted brain, the stronger heart, the longer life. In nature’s plan, the male is but a ‘glorified gonad.’ The female is the species."

How ridiculous, then, for women to envy male achievement. How unfair to try equaling it by quotas, affirmative action and comparable worth programs to discriminate against men. Why not give a little cheer for the poor male cripple who succeeds in making the superior female envious, making her declare "Women are not inferior," making Betty Friedan shame her sisters by telling them "Society asks so little of women"?

But this superior male achievement which makes females envious is based on male participation in reproduction, on men being heads of patriarchal families—for unmarried males are conspicuously underachievers, earning scarcely half of what married men earn. It is based on woman’s acceptance of sexual regulation.

One reason why woman’s sexuality must be regulated has been explained by feminist Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey: "The human mating system, with its permanent family and kinship ties, was absolutely essential to man’s becoming—and remaining—man."

The forceful suppression of woman’s inordinate sexual drive was a prerequisite to the dawn of every modern civilization and almost every living culture. Primitive sexual drive was too strong, too susceptible to the fluctuating extremes of an impelling, aggressive eroticism to withstand the disciplined requirements of a settled family life….It could well be that the "oversexed" woman is actually exhibiting a normal sexuality—although because of it her integration into her society may leave much to be desired….[T]his hypothesis will come as no great shock to many women who consciously realize or intuitively sense their lack of satiation.

This is paraphrased by Ms. Seaman: "All hell could break loose" if women realized their vast sexual capacity. "The magnitude of the psychological and social problems facing mankind is difficult to contemplate."

Two obvious inferences: 1. Women’s sexuality requires regulation; 2. Women will resist this regulation—a glance at the Annex will show how intense this resistance is.

Small wonder that women resist, that there is a war of the sexes—of which the contemporary women’s movement is a manifestation. Biology makes the female the head of the reproductive unit. It is an astonishing cultural achievement for the human male not merely to have intruded himself into this biological unit but to have made himself the head of it.

The evolutionary significance of this is that culture—social heredity—has become part of biology. Previously, fatherhood had been (as feminists never tire of telling us) a mere matter of providing sperm for Mom, a matter of elemental biology, as with dogs and cats and Judge Noland’s cattle, following which Mom was privileged, if she chose, to tell him to get his ass out of her house. This is what most American wives are privileged to tell their husbands, thanks to the law’s siding with the wife and thus reinforcing the female kinship system.

With the creation of patriarchy, the human male became a sociological father, taking responsibility to love, honor, protect and provide for his new creation, the family, his family. The role of the sociological father was a cultural creation and biologically precarious; and the female, while valuing the benefits of having a male provider and his money, understandably resented being de-throned from her exalted status as sole head of the reproductive unit. Feminists frequently remind us of women’s higher status during the Stone Age, and lament what Engels called the world historic defeat of the female sex by the creation of the patriarchal family. Maintaining the stability of the male’s new status meant changing the organization of society, of which the most basic feature is the kinship system. "Originally," writes William Robertson Smith, "there was no kinship except in the female line, and the introduction of male kinship was a kind of social revolution which modified society to its very roots."

The contemporary women’s movement is an attempt to end male headship of families and the male kinship system which requires this headship, and to restore the female-headed reproductive unit and the female kinship system. This destruction of the family and alteration of the kinship system is nearly complete in the ghettos and is far advanced in the larger society with its thirty percent illegitimacy rate and sixty percent divorce rate combined with virtually automatic mother custody. The growth of the female kinship system is the explanation of the growth in social pathology which has so drastically accelerated during the last thirty years. It is the consequence, as Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs say, of changes in the sexual behavior of women, not of men. Men have not yet figured out what is happening to them.

Suppose an animal trainer were to attempt the absurd experiment of creating a cat-family by training the male cat to perform support obligations for his "partner" and his kittens in a "relationship" and train the female cat to accept his support. It wouldn’t work. The mother cat would chase the male cat away as Charmaine chased away the father of her twins. Mother mammals have gotten along without husbands since the Mesozoic Era. They don’t need males any more than fish need bicycles. They see no reason to share their kitten-rearing with a male.

It is not at all surprising that the female human feels Adrienne Rich’s "enormous potential counterforce" against male intrusion into her realm of reproduction. And yet human evolution has accelerated so rapidly that the human female does need a helper, whether she is willing to accept him or not. The two-parent family works better, produces better children.

"The American Journal of Sociology in 1987 published an article in which Robert J. Sampson and W. Byron Groves analyzed data from a study involving hundreds of British communities. This analysis established "a direct link between single parenthood and virtually every major type of crime."…. Still other studies show that a majority of members of terrorist teenage gangs come from female-headed households. New York Senator Daniel P. Moynihan in a January 1987 issue of Time wrote:

A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. This is what we got—chaos.

The sisters of these young men make their contribution to the chaos by breeding a disproportionate share of the next generation of fatherless boys and girls. They understand what Judge Noland understands, that the role of the female is central, that the role of the male is marginal. They do not understand, and Judge Noland does not understand, that this is why society must support the male role, the weak link in the family. Society might provide this support, as some societies do, by purdah, gynaecea, foot-binding, by denying women liberty and the vote. Or it might confer the benefits stipulated by Briffault’s Law through a contract of marriage, in which the male agrees to be a provider for the female and their children in return for the female’s acceptance of the sexual regulation which permits the male to be a father and his children to have a father.

But the contract must be binding, must repress the urges of the female to claim her freedom and sing "You don’t own me," as she did "when God was a woman," when she could be promiscuous and dismiss her boyfriends at pleasure and acquire new boyfriends. She feels, as Dalma Heyn’s adulteresses feel, that the contract oppresses her, takes the fun and adventure out of her life. She will collect grievances against the patriarchal society which creates and enforces the contract. She will feel, with Susan B. Anthony, that "By law, public sentiment and religion, from the time of Moses down to the present day, woman has never been thought of as other than a piece of property, to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man."

"When God was a woman" women were free and promiscuous and men had little meaningful role in reproduction. Then children belonged to Mom. Today, once again, they belong to Mom—and have an eight times greater likelihood of becoming delinquent.

Mom will rebel even though the benefits of the marriage contract might be so great that feminists complain of being insufficiently challenged: "society asks so little of women"—or Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House that "You’ve always been so kind to me…[but] you’ve never understood me. I’ve been wronged greatly, Torvald—first by Papa and then by you…I’m going home—I mean home where I came from."

She will leave her husband’s home and return to her father’s home in order that she may be independent of a man. "It’s a great sin" that her husband gave her a free ride and pampered her, expecting little other than that she will bear his children and give him creature comforts and moral support.

Her real reason for walking out on Torvald is the same as Betty Friedan’s reason for walking out on Carl: "I don’t care. I have to do something about my life….I want out." She can’t stand the regulation patriarchal society imposes on women. She feels with the women of Birmingham (whom we will encounter on page tk) that "the right to define our sexuality" is "the over-riding demand of the woman’s movement, preceding all other demands."

This is the female kinship system. The male kinship system says the opposite: "He shall rule over thee." There is no way of reconciling the two systems. Either women are in charge of reproduction or men are. In the mid-nineteenth century men were and the law sided with men: "They are by law his children." Today’s law tries to compromise, with mother custody plus token exceptions.

It must be obvious to men, though it is not obvious to these feminists, that this female autonomy, which denies men all reproductive rights, greatly reduces the possibility of using the family as a system for motivating males. This is said by Sjöö and Mor (correctly) to be the state of things "if patriarchy had never happened." It is rapidly becoming the state of things once again. This is the significance of the feminist movement—to change the kinship system. It was to prevent this state of things that patriarchy was created, the central feature of it being society’s guarantee to males of a secure role in the families they provide for. The present chaos arose because the society responsible to create the male role has become the chief enemy of that role and is destroying over half of marriages and expelling over half of husbands from their homes and creating the millions of female headed households, the source of most social pathology.

We must stop what we have been doing for a hundred years, with dizzying acceleration for the last thirty years: using patriarchal marriage to subvert patriarchy itself, by letting women go through the marriage ceremony, then repudiating the marriage itself but taking custody of the children and claiming the benefits of marriage in their name.

This is how the changeover to the female kinship system has been brought about. It is facilitated by the ease of obtaining casual sex under the female kinship system. "A youth boiling with hormones," say historians Will and Ariel Durant,

will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.

This was written in 1968, before the cresting of the feminist revolution. Being "consumed in chaos" is now the fate of thirty percent of children brought into our society by the ease of obtaining sex under matriarchy. Today the Durants would see reason to reverse the gender of the pronouns and return to the double standard.

How can patriarchy defend itself? How can it put the river of fire to work to create wealth and stabilize society? By stabilizing marriage. By making marriage vows mean what they say.

This sounds simple and it is. But it is opposed by the feminists who have taken over the churches and the educational system and made them vehicles for feminist propaganda, and by the media and the entire judiciary and legislative bodies, the entire political system and the welfare system—and made society itself a massive instrument for destroying patriarchy and returning to the female kinship system.

This is the significance of the feminist revolution and the mother daughter revolution—an astonishing accomplishment brought about mostly in just three decades.

The problem is that matriarchy is so natural, patriarchy so artificial. Matriarchy has a two hundred million year biological backup, patriarchy a five thousand year backup.

The problem is not to end the discrimination of divorce court judges against fathers. This is not going to happen. Judges are cowards who will continue to do what they have been doing for over a century because they don’t know what else to do and because they suppose the docility of the American male is infinite. The problem lies with fathers themselves. Fathers have to wake up to what is happening—a change in the kinship system. Fathers have to realize that if women are released from their sexual loyalty to husbands ("You don’t own me!"), men must be released from their vow to provide for them ("You don’t own me either!") and must accept the corollary by claiming custody of their children. The fathers’ rights movement will be helpless until it understands the necessity of this, of playing their Money Card, their only bargaining chip. Claiming Joint Custody won’t do it—it will merely perpetuate the destruction of families and still leave fathers saddled with support obligations.

Marriage is an economic institution and it is being betrayed not only by judges’ destruction of families but by the fathers’ consenting to subsidize this destruction with alimony and child support money and by consenting to pay the legal fees of their wives’ lawyers, by vacating their homes and turning them over to their wives to install the female kinship system in them, by consenting to have their families wrecked by three members of an odious profession, men with no concern for their welfare or that of their children, men who will even deny them the right to due process, the two lawyers and the judge retiring into chambers to facilitate the carving up of his family, to prevent a record being kept which might serve as the basis of later appeals, and, not incidentally, to save lawyers’ time, so that more cases may be processed and more fees generated. Fathers must regard such shuffling as what it is, mere bluff to get him out of the home built with his labor.

Bachofen told us that changing the kinship system meant violence. Fathers must recognize that they and their children are the victims of the violence resulting from the destruction of patriarchy. A return to patriarchy will no doubt mean further violence, though this can be moderated by showing women the relevance of Briffault’s Law. Most women are not feminists. They will accept patriarchy when they see its benefits, when they see that a husband has more to offer them than lawyers and clambering bureaucrats. But the husband must have custody of the children and secure possession of his property. If women can see a way of getting these by finagling through lawyers and bureaucrats many of them will do so. Only father custody can put a stop to it.

The central truth that marriage is an economic institution is concealed by representing it as a romantic institution, properly begun and held together by a set of agreeable sensations called "being in love," and therefore properly terminated when these agreeable sensations are no longer experienced or are experienced with diminished intensity. "Only economic independence," says Ms. Friedan, "can free a woman to marry for love." If the wife has assured custody of the children in addition to economic independence, the husband is at her mercy: she will transfer herself and her children to the female kinship system. This is the goal of the feminist movement. She can repudiate her marriage vows and she knows that the judge will collapse the family and expel her husband because he supposes that the female kinship system is more natural than the male kinship system, which it is—unless social heredity is also recognized as part of nature, which it is.

When the husband is expelled, the economic realities underlying marriage come to the surface and force realization of the fact that the children (also Mom) are placed at risk by the judge. The only way the judge can offset (but only partially) the damage he inflicts on the kids and Mom is to enslave Dad. Otherwise he would have reason for placing the children in the father’s custody. Otherwise, let’s say, the judge would have reason for keeping his oath of office, for administering equal justice under law, for enforcing the marriage contract as he enforces other less important contracts, for stabilizing the institution of the family, which is fundamental to patriarchy and incompatible with matriarchy.

The replacement of the economic institution of marriage by the romantic institution can be carried a step further by getting rid of the romance. In 1963, Betty Friedan made her appeal to "free and joyous love." Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs, writing after public opinion had been softened up by two decades of preparation, could afford to be more realistic: "We are drawn, as women have been for ages, to the possibility of celebrating our sexuality without the exclusive intensity of romantic love, without the inevitable disappointment of the male-centered sex, and without the punitive consequences." This means they want to be promiscuous. No price tag for sexual irresponsibility or sexual disloyalty. They don’t need any romantic nonsense to justify it. No phony pretense like Betty Friedan’s "Only economic independence can free a woman to marry for love."

It remains for fathers to see the inference: Economic independence and the assurance that judges will allow mothers custody of their children when they demand sexual independence are enabling women to wreck the patriarchal system and return society to matriarchy.

The hated double standard, which feminists see as the core of women’s oppression, should rather be seen as the source of their bargaining power. The repudiation of the double standard and consequent de-regulation of female sexuality deprives children of fathers and men of families, and hence of motivation to provide women with the benefit stipulated by Briffault’s Law , which says that a woman will not associate with a man who has no benefit to offer her. Women must be made to see that men’s loss of the motive to provide them with a benefit deprives women of their bargaining power with men. Let me illustrate with a quote from one of Dear Abby’s readers:

What really makes me mad are these sex-loving guys who want to marry virgins! I feel if a guy wants to marry a virgin, he should be one, too. Guys should wait for sex, just like girls are supposed to do. I have talked to both men and women about this. Most of them agree with me. Abby, what do you think?"

Abby’s reply is half-baked:

The attitude you have described is called a double standard, which is defined as "a set of principles applied more rigorously to one group than another." There would be less hypocrisy in the world if we all held ourselves to the same standards we expect others to observe."

The double standard demands more of men. A man’s virtue is his integrity, his courage, his honesty. Not so with women. "The habit of calling a woman’s chastity her "virtue," says Richard Chenevix Trench,

is very significant. I will not deny that it may in part be indicative of the tendency, which we many times find traces of in language, to narrow the whole circle of virtues to some one upon which peculiar stress is laid; but still in the selecting of this peculiar one as the "virtue" of woman, there speaks out a true sense that this is indeed in her the citadel of the whole moral being, the overthrow of which is for her the overthrow of all—that it is the keystone of the arch, which being withdrawn, the whole collapses and falls.

Destroying the double standard destroys the male kinship system and its benefits by destroying the family. A man has no motivation for subsidizing and giving his name to another man’s child. Marriage is patriarchy’s way of securing the benefit of the man’s paycheck to the woman, and of securing the family to the man. Cohabitation or divorce or adultery—the three common ways of releasing women from the double standard—releasing the woman from the marriage contract, but not the man. The woman might introduce confusion of progeny into her own household, the man does not (though he may introduce it into somebody else’s). In the female kinship system, illegitimate children are the same as legitimate ones. If the father doesn’t care whether the child he holds in his arms is his, he is accepting the female kinship system—and rejecting the patriarchal family and his responsibility to it. But the male kinship system tries to elevate marriage above cohabitation and elevate legitimate children above illegitimate children, in order to motivate fathers to be stable providers, in order to assure them that fatherhood is essential. This requires the double standard. The single standard creates matriarchy, which fails to motivate males.

"A girl is watching," Debold, Wilson and Malave say. "What is she learning about being a woman?" She should be learning (but nobody will teach her) the advantages of accepting the double standard and the patriarchal sexual regulation which entitles her to the benefits offered by patriarchy to chaste women—including a stable family, higher status and a higher standard of living.

Let’s try this: "A boy is watching. What is he learning about being a man?" Patriarchy has until recently taught boys they should expect to become providers for families. What is he learning when he hears a feminist teacher tell the girl sitting next to him "You need to have a career of your own, so you won’t have to depend on a man"? What is he learning when the girl is told by Joycelyn Elders that she ought to carry a condom in her purse when she goes on a date? The boy is learning that patriarchy, family, sexual loyalty and fatherhood are irrelevant to females—which is to say that the female kinship system is normative. The more there is of this sort of thing, the more necessary father custody becomes as the only way to save patriarchy and the two-parent family and the male role. What do boys learn from seeing their fathers expelled from their families and coerced into subsidizing their ex-families? What will they learn even from fathers who still retain their status within families yet live under the threat of divorce with virtually no chance of equal justice in the divorce court? The motivation of such boys will come increasingly to resemble the motivation of boys of the inner cities, where most of the children carry their mothers’ surnames and where they seek some sort of meaning by scrawling graffiti, by wearing earrings, by recreational sex, by buying lottery tickets and hoping for a windfall, by taking dope or selling it. The boys—and girls—will find themselves increasingly drifting into the matriarchal/ghetto lifestyle.

Maggie Gallagher thinks it strange that men are no longer socialized to create wealth and social stability by forming families. What’s strange? They know that if they marry they have a sixty percent chance of losing their children, their role and their future paychecks. They are coming to realize that a woman who proclaims her right to control her own reproduction is proclaiming her unwillingness to share it with a man, which is what marriage and family and patriarchy are all about. They are coming to realize that a liberated woman is likely to be a disloyal wife. They must come to realize as well that what is needed to make her a loyal wife is the law’s support of the father’s role. Until then men must remain afraid of women, of marriage, of feminism, of the divorce court judges who have made themselves good soldiers in the feminist War Against Patriarchy.

Marcia Clark divorced her husband Gordon Clark because she "no longer found him intellectually stimulating." The judge gave her custody of Gordon’s two young sons and ordered him to pay her support money. Before she signed her book contract for 4.2 million dollars, she already earned almost twice as much as Gordon, but she asked the court to increase his support obligation so that she could buy more clothes and make a better impression on TV audiences.

What is she teaching her sons about becoming men, about marrying, starting families and becoming providers for them?

"Psychotherapists report," according to Debold, Wilson and Malave, "that while men often express the wish to be more like their fathers, women more commonly express the desire to be different from their mothers and struggle not to be like them in any way….Being like our mother is almost terrifying." Is not Marcia Clark teaching her sons that if they try to have families, as their father did, they may lose them—whether or not they are intellectually stimulating. That they may find the Playboy/adolescent/bachelor lifestyle more congenial, less threatening, than being a family provider. That if they do marry, they had better not marry a brainy and liberated woman like their mother. That the divorce court judge is no friend of fathers or of families. That he does not believe in equal justice under law—not justice for fathers. That he is—or at least wants to seem—an excellent friend of mothers and of women’s liberation—which is to say he regards himself as a supporter of the Female Kinship System. Gordon Clark’s sons will doubt that fatherhood is what David Popenoe deems it to be, "a critical component in the evolutionary success of our species." They may think that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle—though she also may want his money for new clothes. They may accept rolelessness as the proper condition of the male and the precondition for the liberation of the female. They may join the "40 percent of the young men [who] are drifting—out of school, unemployed [or join the] 60 percent of the youngsters…on a downward educational course." Anyhow, they will not want to lead the kind of life their father lives. "Father loss," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "narrows and darkens children’s horizons. Deprived of a father’s sponsorship, many children lose confidence in themselves and their futures. Children from middle-class divorced families have lower expectations for college and future employment than their counterparts in intact families." The kids (and of course their fathers) pay the costs for the benefits reaped by their mothers, thus described by feminist Constance Ahrons: "Today, record numbers of women have options for the first time in their lives. One enormous option is to leave a marriage that doesn’t meet their needs."

David Courtwright concludes his book Violent Land with the appeal that "we should not doubt…the social utility of the family, the institution best suited to shape, control, and sublimate the energies of young men."

Would a return to the family mean we must return to the hated Double Standard? Emphatically, yes. A woman who rejects the double standard is refusing to offer a husband a family, "the institution best suited to shape, control, and sublimate the energies" of men, young or old. A man who marries such a woman is placing his future children at enormous risk of growing up in the matriarchy.

Society consists of two tiers which are becoming defined with increasing sharpness—an upper patriarchal tier whose men are higher achievers, whose women accept the double standard, and whose children grow up in stable two-parent nuclear families; and a lower matriarchal/plebeian tier whose women reject the double standard and whose men and children live in, or are in danger of falling into, the female kinship system. Welfare and the legal system—the Backup System which replaces fathers—are the bulwarks of the lower tier. Father custody is the means of strengthening the upper tier.

Feminists will recall Betty Friedan’s celebrated opening paragraph in The Feminine Mystique, ending with the despairing cri de coeur, "Is this all?" Let’s try reversing the genders:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American ex-husbands. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that men suffered at the end of the twentieth century in the United States. Each ex-husband struggled with it alone. As he vacated the house made possible by his labor, turned over the furniture and appliances and the good car to his ex-wife, took on her debts, paid her attorney’s fees so that she could afford to divorce him, rented a bachelor’s apartment, shopped for household appliances and furniture at thrift stores, looked forward to spending 36 hours with his kids twice a month—if his ex did not interfere with his visitation—moonlighted at a second job so that he could make his support payments. As he fell asleep alone he was afraid to ask even of himself the silent question—"Is this all?"

The "success" of the feminist movement depends on this willingness of men to continue putting up with these deprivations. Maybe someday men will get the idea that this paying for the destruction of their families is a bad idea. The ex-wife sees nothing wrong with it: "ordering one spouse from his own home no longer seems so drastic," says Ms. Hoggett. "Women, despite initial pain and income loss, tend almost immediately to feel that they benefit from divorce." "A 1982 survey found that even one year after a divorce a majority of women said they were happier and had more self-respect than they had in their marriages."

This hostility of women to marriage explains why there must be a double standard, why mothers must not see their children as potential Mutilated Beggars whose victimization by father-deprivation can be made to yield Mom’s support income. Many women, despite the feminist slogan that they don’t want to be dependent on a man, very much want to be dependent on ex-husbands who receive no reciprocal services. The standard of living is lower, but the psychological satisfactions are enormous. Sexual freedom, as emphasized by Dalma Heyn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs, is the main goal, besides which there is an end to role-playing games, or rather their replacement by a different set of games in which Mom is a combination of heroic rebel and Mutilated Beggar and pitiable victim, but nevertheless "enormously in charge of my life."

As women increasingly cut themselves off from the patriarchal system by illegitimate breeding or divorce, politicians try harder to make the displaced men responsible for the mess. This further emancipates women and makes the women’s vote more deliverable to politicians.

Fathers ought to see this as reason for demanding custody of their children. Growing female irresponsibility must be offset by increasing male responsibility, but not the kind feminists want—subsidizing the female irresponsibility. Father custody benefits not only children and fathers themselves, but society. There is a vast difference between the productivity and stability of a real father and that of a "putative father." When the law reinforces the father’s role by giving him his children it makes them real fathers and family providers. When the law assures fathers of custody, the powerful psychological bond between mother and infant becomes a prop for family stability rather than, as now, a justification for family dissolution.

Evolution has worked out a new reproductive format which makes human males essential, and accordingly (since women don’t like this new format) "He shall rule over thee"—society must impose father headship of families, the male kinship system, including the hated double standard. Most women will see the advantages of this patriarchal system, but there will be objectors. George Sand’s biographer Andre Maurois tells us what she wanted for women:

Not the right to vote nor to sit in parliament, but the enjoyment of equality with men in Law and in Love. She believed that where the husband holds the wife in subjection, married happiness is impossible, that it can exist only in an atmosphere of freedom. Women would make no demands if they were loved as they wished to be. "As things are, they are ill-used. They are forced to live a life of imbecility, and are blamed for doing so. If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity."

They are not forced to live a life of imbecility—certainly not in America today, where there are more women than men in college, where Ms. Friedan complains that "Society asks so little of women" and tells them that they have already won on paper all the rights they are entitled to and need only get rid of the hated image that holds them down. Women can and do prepare themselves for re-entry careers and use their abundant leisure as they choose. They need not play bridge and golf. They can prepare themselves to be brain surgeons. All that should be required of them is that they not drag their children into matriarchy by depriving them of their fathers.

That [continues Maurois] was her main grievance: that was the cry which, first uttered in her girlhood, echoed through every one of her books. In the name of what Justice, human or divine, could a woman be bound by a code of loyalty which a man refused, in his own case, to regard as other than empty and ridiculous? Why should a woman remain chaste while a man was free to wander at will, and indulge the coarse tastes of a libertine?

Why should a woman not be as coarse as a libertine too? The man’s coarseness, however regrettable, doesn’t deprive him of his bargaining power because he still functions as father and provider. The man should, of course, behave like a gentleman, but feminists want to reject the corollary—that the woman ought to behave like a lady because this would enslave the woman. If she chooses instead to be as coarse as a libertine she forfeits her bargaining power, since she signals her unwillingness to perform her primary functions as wife and mother.

What Sand wanted was to see restored to women those civil rights of which they were deprived by marriage, and to have repealed a law which exposed the adulterous wife to degrading penalties—"a savage law, the only effect of which is to make adultery a permanent feature of our society, and to increase the number of cases in which it is committed."

She could see but one remedy for the injustices which were rampant in all matters connected with the union of the sexes—freedom (in her day non-existent) to divorce and re-marry.

She is not deprived of rights by marriage; she voluntarily renounces them when she marries and agrees to let a man share her reproductive life—to give him children and a family. It is to gain children and a family that the man marries her and provides for her and their children. If the law permits her "to divorce and re-marry" why should this permit her to deprive him of his children—and then in addition deprive him of his property on the ground that the children must not be impoverished?

She wants freedom to divorce and re-marry and to take her children with her. This is matriarchy, where the female heads the reproductive unit and the father is a stud—as is also the man she re-marries. If the father retains the children, patriarchy is preserved: the father continues to head the family.

It is a stable reproductive family unit based on economics, not a recreational arrangement based on temporary exhilaration, which can be repudiated as a "legal shell" when the exhilaration subsides.

The campaign to replace fathers with computers which will search for fathers is incompatible with the institution of the family. Stuart Miller explains why the computers fail:

Of the 30% of child support payments not collected a significant number are owed by fathers who are imprisoned. A high percentage of prisoners have child-support obligations, and as many as one-third of the inmates in many county jails are there in the first place because of child support noncompliance.

Many of the other delinquent fathers are addicts, alcoholics, disabled, mentally incapacitated, unemployed, or otherwise unable to pay pre-set child support amounts.

Many of these fathers are victims of despair induced by the shabby treatment they have received from the divorce court which destroyed their families and the motivation based on these families. "But the largest number of all delinquents," says Miller, "are those who simply don’t exist":

Recently, the Florida Department of Revenue, the agency responsible for child support enforcement in that state, sent out 700,000 notices to allegedly delinquent fathers. The summonses demanded immediate payment or the recipient would be incarcerated. Subsequently, officials acknowledged that probably 500,000 of those notices were sent to individuals who actually did not owe child support. One of those recipients, Daniel Wells, died eight years ago in a traffic accident, but the state still wanted him to cough up $160,000 in past-due child support! (About the same amount of money Florida wasted on postage for the notices.)

Nor is this an isolated case. The General Accounting Office found in 1992 that as many as 14% of fathers who owe child support "cannot afford to pay the amount ordered."

Miller speaks of "the inherent unfairness in taking something away from people and then making them pay for it":

Most fathers are deeply committed to their children, yet a 1991 Census Bureau study found that about half of fathers receive no court-ordered visitation. When fathers do receive visitation, almost 80% pay all of their child support. When fathers receive joint custody, the compliance rate jumps to more than 90%.

According to Miller, much of the problem is created by mothers themselves. He cites Wallerstein and Kelly’s Surviving the Breakup as showing that half of the mothers see no value in the father’s continued contact with the children. According to Sanford Braver, a University of Arizona psychologist, who confirms this, 40% of mothers interfere with Dad’s relationship with the children. Tk

The abuse heaped on deadbeat dads obscures the key fact: fathers are more responsible—which is why they are expected to pay. The judge’s knowledge that the father is more likely to pay is why he gives the mother custody. If he gave custody to the fathers the mothers would contribute little or nothing, but with mother custody the children has a parent and a half, since most fathers will continue to subsidize Mom. Miller cites a study made by the federal Office of Income Security Policy in 1991:

[L]ess than 30% of custodial fathers receive a child support award, whereas almost 80% of custodial mothers do. Yet about 47% of those mothers who are ordered to pay support totally default on their obligation. In the interest of fairness, if nothing else, policy makers should make an effort to collect child support from both delinquent fathers and mothers.

No they shouldn’t. All alimony and child support should be abolished. Why should mothers (any more than fathers) be obligated to perform forced labor for the benefit of ex-spouses who perform no reciprocal services? Miller is assuming that divorce courts are just in awarding support awards to mothers. There is no justice and no intention of being just. The judge wants to pretend that he is concerned only for the best interests of the children, which in his thinking means giving them to the mother and expecting the father to share his income with her, which is what he usually does. Lord Lane tells us, "the needs of children have to come first," but what Lord Lane refuses to see is that the children’s primary need is for the father himself. The law should provide them with fathers rather than exiling them, provide them with a stable reproductive family unit based on economics, not a recreational arrangement based on temporary exhilaration.

If the divorce court judge placed the children with the father, he would seldom be exiling the mother because there would seldom be a divorce. Marriage would be stabilized. We know this because in the mid-19^th century, when fathers automatically got custody there were only a few thousand divorces annually. There were a lot of unhappy marriages, but not as many as today, with Mom in the driver’s seat and Dad riding in the sidecar.

But would not the switchover to father custody deprive the mother of most of her bargaining power? That’s the idea. That confirms Briffault’s Law—and applies it to our problem. Mom has too much bargaining power, Dad too little. Mom’s bargaining power has been pressed into her hands (at her own insistence) by muddleheaded politicians and judges who haven’t the fuzziest notion of the harm they are doing by permitting women to throw their husbands out, take custody of the children and bring them up in the female kinship system. Let’s put it this way: The massiveness of the present family destruction is changing the kinship system from patriarchy to matriarchy, from the descriptive to the classificatory system. Women hate patriarchy, which depends on female chastity. Without female chastity men cannot be fathers. Today’s feminists have discovered that they can destroy patriarchy by refusing their sexual loyalty to men—and they know the judges will side with them when they refuse. The day of the kept woman is over, and with it the day of family stability.

But so is the day of the free ride for disloyal women. So is the day of using the children as Mutilated Beggars. So is the day of judges plundering ex-husbands. Women are dependent creatures, as is sufficiently proved by their attempts to screw ex-husbands, to screw AFDC, to demand conferred benefits from Affirmative Action programs. Society is giving them what they want at the cost of destroying its families and reverting to matriarchy. Father custody will not solve the problem of illegitimacy—only women’s and girls’ acceptance of the double standard will do that—but it will solve the problem of runaway divorce.

Ibsen’s Norway and America in the 1950s bribed women to behave themselves, leading to such protests as A Doll’s House and The Feminine Mystique, with their pleas that women must be allowed to grow, to be self-actualizers, to share men’s burdens. It is sufficiently clear by now that what women really wanted was not growth and self-actualization, but de-regulation.

Here, as described by feminist Marilyn French, are two ladies from the subcontinent of India who are not in rebellion against the feminine mystique and the infantilizing of women:

Two women gather seaweed on the Indian coast near Ahmadabad: they bend and rise, bend and rise, pulling up the greens, adding them to their pile. When they have as much as they can carry, they lug the pile up the beach to a wagon pulled over on the side of the road, dump it in the wagon, and return for more. They continue in this for hours, until the wagon is full. All the while, a man sits in the wagon, head nodding in the sun, holding the reins of his horse. He does nothing….Farm women in Africa (and India) are the most overworked humans in the world, working ten to fifteen hours a day at a host of jobs. A typical Zimbabwean woman’s day begins at 3:00 A.M. Every day she goes to the river for water, weeds the fields (breast-feeding her baby as she works), chases animals away from crops, pounds grain into flour, prepares meals, and gathers wood (steadily walking farther with these heavy loads because drought and overcutting have depleted fuel wood).

Could there be a greater contrast with the suburban housewives described by Ms. Friedan as suffering from "the problem that has no name"? ("Not too much was asked of them but too little….Society asks so little of women.") But Ms. Friedan doesn’t hold up Amerindian squaws or Indian women of the subcontinent or Zimbabwean women as exemplars for her middle-class readers. Her exemplars are American men:

But the husbands of the women I interviewed were often engaged in work that demanded ability, responsibility, and decision. I noticed that when these men were saddled with a domestic chore, they polished it off in much less time than it seemed to take their wives.

The thought suggests itself: Perhaps the poor seaweed gatherers are so overworked because of the lack of motivation of their men. The signature of "developing" countries—the backward, impoverished squalid countries, where slavery, cannibalism, bride-burning, human sacrifice and female circumcision are still known, are those which have not yet discovered how to make men work to support families. "Women in developing countries," says Ms. French, "work harder than men." This is one reason why they are "developing"—backward, impoverished, usually matriarchal. Perhaps the Indian men suffer from "the problem that has no name" as they doze in the sun, idle their time away and expect to be served by their women.

Suppose Freud’s question "What does a woman want?" had been put to such a Zimbabwean or Indian woman, what would her answer be? Perhaps: "I want to live in America, that women’s paradise, to have a loving father who would care for me, buy me nice things, send me to a posh women’s college like Smith, where I could get a superior education and meet interesting people. After college I would want to marry a nice husband who would buy a suburban home for me, and a car and would protect me with life insurance and health insurance and let me go shopping with his credit cards and allow me to play golf and bridge in the afternoons when I didn’t shop. In America I would need to spend only 3 percent of my time on my maternal functions. In America I would live such an easy life that I would survive my husband by seven years (unlike in India, where men outlive women). Or I could divorce him and take my children and his house and compel him to continue supporting me. I could join a feminist group and complain of how oppressed I was. I might live in Maryland or Ohio, where the nice governors have issued blanket pardons to all wives who murder their husbands."

Thus (perhaps) the yearning of the Indian or Zimbabwean woman, dreaming of the good life, as feminists like Ms. Boulding dream of the good life of Indian squaws and third world women, their serenity and quiet sureness.

Suppose Freud’s question were asked of an American housewife, someone like Ms. Friedan before she liberated herself by divorce. She would reply that while she suffered from acedia, the problem that has no name, she did not at all wish to live the life of the squaw or the Zimbabwean peasant woman or the seaweed gatherers of Ahmadabad or the life of early nineteenth century women such as Lucy Stone, whose mother exclaimed when she was born "Oh, dear! I am sorry it’s a girl. A woman’s life is so hard." When Ms. Friedan complained that "society asks so little of women" or when Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House complained that her husband’s pampering and coddling kept her from growing up and being a high achiever (like men) she was thinking of helping to share men’s work in the Senate, in corporate offices, university classrooms, medical clinics, or research laboratories—the sort of thing feminist Dr. Gerda Lerner is thinking of when she says, "What the cost was to society in general through the loss of talent and intellectual work of half the population cannot be estimated." Dr. Lerner isn’t thinking of seaweed gathering. She is thinking of the superior performance of males under patriarchy, a performance not matched by males under matriarchy. She is really complaining (though without realizing it) that civilization is a male creation.

Would some Indian philosopher-playwright like Ibsen sympathize not (as Ms. French does) with the female seaweed gatherer but with her husband sitting idly on the wagon all day holding the reins of his horse—and allow him to complain (as Ibsen’s Nora does) that he was suffering a "great evil" by being deprived of meaningful labor, perhaps driven, like some of the husbands of the squaws described by Ms. Boulding, to alcoholism or suicide?

Like Ms. Boulding’s reservation Indians, like the ghettos, like the Tierra del Fuegians who don’t wear clothes and the, Australian aborigines who don’t build shelters. Like the Veddhas of Ceylon, like the Jivaros of Ecuador, like the Nairs of the Malabar Coast, beloved of feminists for not even having marriage and families, like the tribes of the Orinoco, like the Khyougtha of the Chittagong; like most other societies that nobody has ever heard of, like the Lycians spoken of by Herodotus, like the Seri Indians , and every other matriarchal culture. It’s natural. Look at your dog and your cat. The judge knows this. He doesn’t want to listen to an anthropological lecture on kinship systems. He just wants to do what he and his fellow judges have done for a hundred and thirty years—give the mother custody and hit the father with support obligations. It’s that simple. But the sixty percent divorce rate is making payments hard to collect. Men are beginning to wonder whether getting married and starting a family is worth the acceptance of slavery. Their reluctance to pay is creating a new class of politicians like President Clinton and Los Angeles’ District Attorney Gil Garcetti who cultivate female voters by villainizing "Deadbeat Dads" who don’t feel like subsidizing matriarchy.

If the genders were reversed, women would not submit to what men now submit to. If lawmakers did to women what they routinely do to men—if they deprived them of their children, their homes, their property, their role, and compelled them to work and share their income with their ex-husbands, those lawmakers would be torn to pieces by mobs of frenzied women—and they know it and that’s why they don’t do it. Lord Lane knows it and that’s why he prefers to strike up a pose about his concern for the welfare of the children whom he victimizes by ignoring justice and depriving them of fathers.

What is mostly needed to end the ongoing massacre of families is the raising of men’s consciousness. Men must realize they are not being honorable gentlemen in consenting to have their children taken from them. They are betraying and abandoning them.

"Joint Custody is the cure," says Stuart Miller. No it is not; and Miller’s reason for supposing it to be—"When fathers receive joint custody, the child-support compliance rate jumps to more than 90%"—is the worst possible "justification" for it. Miller is saying that joint custody makes the destruction of the family workable. Families ought not to be destroyed; they ought to be strengthened. Father custody will accomplish this, joint custody will not. Joint custody will only strengthen divorce.

Father custody would benefit women. According to Ms. Magazine, "divorced women have the lowest household incomes of any group of women surveyed….One reason that divorced women are in the worst economic situation is that their income decreases markedly when their marriages end and they are able to save much less than single or married women….Single women without children have a greater measure of economic freedom than the rest." Single women without children, in fact, earn slightly more than single men.

According to a report by the Carnegie Corporation, "The percentage of families with only one parent or with two parents who work out of the home has soared from about 40% in 1970 to almost 70% 20 years later":

"The problems have gotten worse," says David Hamburg, president of the Carnegie Corp of New York. "Young teens engage in more and more risky behavior. Things that used to be tried out in later adolescence are much more commonly occurring earlier—drugs, sex and violence. The risks have gotten higher—from somewhat risky to very risky."

"Altogether, nearly half of American adolescents are at high or moderate risk of seriously damaging their life chances," the report states. "The damage may be near-term and vivid, or it may be delayed, like a time bomb set in youth."

(Nearly half! Why do we tolerate it?)

"The juvenile crime rate," says Max Vanzi, has outpaced the adult crime rate in recent years….Meanwhile, as overall crime rates are dropping in California, juvenile arrests have been rising, totaling more than 255,000 in 1995. Those arrests can be expected to continue upward as the youth population increases…." According to a report issued by several federal agencies, mortality among black males 15 to 19 has risen from 125.3 deaths per 100,000 in 1985 to 234.3 per 100,000 in 1994, an increase of 87 percent in nine years. According to Malcolm Klein, USC professor and author of The American Street Gang, gang violence has proven to be intractable and has grown worse. According to Mary Ridgeway, a gang probation worker in Los Angeles, the most alarming trend is the increasing youth of armed gang members. Two decades ago, the shooting was done by 16- to 19-year-olds. Now, more shootings are committed by 13- to 15-year-olds.

Los Angeles Times writer Bettijane Levine, says, "It is not a media mirage: Statistics confirm that more horrendous crimes are being committed by increasingly younger children….A recent analysis of data in California cities showed that homicide arrest rates for juveniles were increasing faster than for any other age group. Between 1980 and 1990, the homicide arrest rate for youngsters ages 10 through 17 increased 65%."

According to Irwin Garfinkel and Sara McLanahan, "The biggest differences in the performance of schoolchildren appear in teacher evaluations—such as grade point averages and behavioral assessments—both of which show substantially lower scores for children from one-parent families."

Ms. Friedan cites a pair of public-opinion polls made in 1968 and 1971 by Daniel Yankelovich. In the first of these seventy percent of college students answered Yes to the question, "Do you believe that hard work will always pay off?" In the second, 67 percent said No. Quite a change in three years—years which witnessed the cresting of feminism. Ms. Friedan’s comment:

As we go into the 1980s, Yankelovich is finding that a majority of adult American men no longer seek or are satisfied by conventional job success. Only one out of every five men now says that work means more to him than leisure. More than half of American men say that work is no longer their major source of satisfaction.

Of course. The reward for working was formerly that it gave a man a family. Now more than half of them are deprived of their families and the others are threatened with the same deprivation. In 1981 Ms. Friedan quoted Bernard Lefkowitz’s report of a 71 percent increase in working-aged men who have left the labor force since 1968 and who are not looking for work. Society cannot motivate these men to be family providers as it motivated their fathers and grandfathers during the era of the feminine mystique. Society has destroyed their work ethic by destroying their families or their hope of having families. Women, according to Ms. Friedan, are complaining that increasing numbers of men are turning to homosexuality or celibacy.

She tells us, "I’ve suspected that the men who really feel threatened by the women’s movement in general or by their own wives’ moves toward some independent activity are the ones who are most unsure of their women’s love." They would be fools not to be, since marriage is an economic arrangement in which the man supports the woman and their children in order to have a family.

Such a man often worries that his wife has married him only for economic security or the status and vicarious power he provides. If she can get these things for herself, what does she need him for? Why will she continue to love him? In his anger is also the fear she will surely leave him.

She doesn’t need him and they both know it, even if they haven’t seen the statistics or read Nickles and Ashcraft’s The Coming Matriarchy. If the man imagines marriage is held together by "love" he will find out differently from her demands for post-marital subsidization, like those Ms. Friedan tried to collect from her ex-husband. "Most men," she continues,

sense they are really dependent on women for security and love and intimacy, just as most women learn, after the old resentment-making imbalances are out of the way, that they are dependent on men for these same qualities.

They are dependent on men for these same qualities and for financial support, as their clamors in the divorce court prove. "The resentment-making imbalances" refers to the man’s money, which gives him his bargaining power. Ms. Friedan thinks of men’s money as a love-spoiler "which our movement for equality between the sexes would change." Meaning women can be made economically independent of men by political agitation and Affirmative Action, by admitting women to the armed services academies and the Virginia Military Institute and by making women firepersons and policepersons and pretending that they can perform such jobs. A 1991 Navy study revealed that 65 percent of enlisted women in the pay grades E-4 and below became pregnant while on sea duty. "It’s killing our [combat] readiness…all across the boards," says the Navy spokesman. And their mostly fatherless kids will be deprived also of their mothers and cared for by low-paid child care workers with high turnover rates. Many of these kids are headed for the underclass.

With women economically independent, we can, says Ms. Friedan, "open up alternative lifestyles for the future, alternatives to the kind of marriage and nuclear family structure that not only women but men want out of today."

This was written in 1976. We are now seeing that future. We are in a position to compare Ms. Friedan’s glowing anticipation of it with the reality. "What surprises are in store for men," she exclaimed,

and for us, as we give up some of that manipulating control of the family we once used to keep them emotional babies, dependent on us—protecting them from the grounding, warming, human realities of daily life?…And even if we no longer need men to take care of us, to define our whole existence as in the past—just because we are no longer that dependent, can’t we now more freely admit that we still need and want men to love, to have babies with, to share parenting and chores and joys and economic burdens and adventures in new kinds of families and homes?

The big surprise in store for the man is divorce and getting wiped out when the lady no longer feels like bestowing her love freely and joyously. The big surprise is the triumph of the Promiscuity Principle (a woman’s right to control her own sexuality), the destruction of the Legitimacy Principle (every child must have a father) and the undermining of patriarchy and the nuclear family. Feminist Dorothy Dinnerstein tells us her intention "is to help make sure that the eruption turns out to be part of a genuine revolution: a fundamental reorganizing event embodying the clearest possible insight into the process that is being reorganized: a revolution conceived in such a way that it will not reverse itself." Feminist Sandra Schneiders speaks of "a deep, abiding, emotionally draining anger that, depending on a woman’s personality, might run the gamut from towering rage to chronic depression."

Ms. Friedan is right that there are growing numbers of men who "want out"—men increasingly fearful of commitment, as the costs of commitment grow and the rewards of commitment dwindle. According to Frank Pittman, Atlanta psychiatrist and family therapist, "We have a society full of men who are not really interested in being fathers." We had better believe these people. The patriarchal system is artificial; it must be imposed. It is accepted by women only because of its advantages—money, stability and high status for good women. Feminist rhetoric tells women they can gain these advantages for themselves. Feminist rhetoric has the backup of the legal system which properly owes its loyalty to the patriarchy which created it, not to the matriarchy which seeks to destroy it. Fathers have yet to discover this. George Gilder writes of women’s long-term sexual horizons. How can men have similar long-term horizons when they face a sixty percent divorce rate, which makes possessing such horizons a nightmare for them?

"Not only," says Nigel Davies, "has the institution of marriage…become more fragile, its nature also has been transformed. Until recent times, marriage even in the West was based on the idea of the wife being a form of property. But among other factors, the female-headed household has destroyed this notion." It has destroyed this notion by making the ex-husband (or the taxpayer) a form of property, using the justification that the children (in Mom’s possession, naturally) are her property.

The ghettos show what is in store for us. Gail Stokes’s essay Black Woman to Black Man "accurately expresses the rage of some working black women who have equated manhood with the ability of their husbands to be the sole economic provider in the family and who feel cheated when black men refuse to accept the role":

Of course you will say, "How can I love you and want to be with you when I come home and you’re looking like a slob? Why white women never open the door for their husbands the way you black bitches do."

I should guess not, you ignorant man. Why should they be in such a state when they’ve got maids like me to do everything for them? There is no screaming at the kids for her, and whether her man loves her or not, he provides…provides…do you hear that, nigger? PROVIDES!

She understands that marriage is an economic institution. If she acquired economic independence together with an education, she might think otherwise, like elite feminists. She would then find herself in the group with the highest divorce rate. The economic "resentment-making imbalances" are what hold marriages together; and when women earn their own way, they can do something about their resentment—they can skip into the female kinship system, as Ms. Friedan did, as ghetto matriarchs do.

It’s the same everywhere. In Egypt, "Women’s growing economic power—with more of them now working and increasing their education—is another frequent source of tension," says Suzanne Fayad, a psychologist at the El Nadeem Center for Violence Victims. The "epidemic of violence against women…is fueled…by poverty, male frustration and a rising tide of Islamic extremism that often seems directed at curtailing women’s choices…."

Margaret Mead tells us that "Somewhere at the dawn of human history, some social invention was made under which males started nurturing females and their young":

We have no reason to believe that the nurturing males had any knowledge of physical paternity, although it is quite possible that being fed was a reward meted out to the female who was not too fickle with her sexual favors.

Here is the economic basis of marriage: the female gives the male a family; the male gives the female economic support. But now the feminist/sexual revolution, exploiting women’s resentment of patriarchal regulation, offers to make the women economically independent or semi-independent, and thus make men superfluous or semi-superfluous, and make marriage meaningless. The divorce rate is approaching the breaking point. Patriarchy and stable marriage are no longer functioning as a means for organizing society. Women have withdrawn their sexual loyalty and men must do something about it. Why not father custody?

"Human society," says feminist-anthropologist Helen Fisher, rejoicing over women’s new sexual freedom, "is now discovering its ancient roots….Men and women are moving toward the kind of roles they had on the grasslands of Africa millions of years ago." True. Women’s yearning for the primeval freedom of the African grasslands is identical with the "enormous potential counterforce" which animates the feminist movement and aims to overthrow the patriarchal system which superimposed itself on the female kinship system and made civilization possible a mere five or six thousand years ago. Many women hate it, and the seeming success of feminism now gives them reason to believe they can destroy it.

Yet it must be a man’s world. The woman’s world was when they enjoyed their freedom back on the African grasslands, the world they enjoy in the ghettos and on Indian reservations and in subsidized housing tracts where women and children live on welfare and food stamps.

Margaret Mead has been quoted:

[T]he young male learns that when he grows up, one of the things which he must do in order to be a full member of society is to provide food for some female and her young.

It would be nice if women were not dependent creatures, if they could earn their own way. "Women, after all," says Ms. Friedan, "are fighting for an equal share in the activities and the power games that are rewarded in this society." She means the activities pursued by successful males, activities which most women, however, are incapable of pursuing. And now the high status formerly awarded to women’s maternal functions has been largely lost. Women who rely on these functions are "just housewives."

Men are losing their motivation, as shown by Judith Wallerstein’s study mentioned on page 98 tk. According to Sylvia Ann Hewlett cited on page 59, tk

A full 60 percent of the youngsters in her sample are on a downward educational course compared with their fathers, and 45 percent are on a similar downward course compared with their mothers.

"Father-loss," says Ms. Hewlett,

narrows and darkens children’s horizons. Deprived of a father’s sponsorship, many children lose confidence in themselves and their futures. Children from middle-class divorced families have lower expectations; for college and future employment than their counterparts in intact families.

They are drifting because they have rejected the male "double standard of work" which depends on the female acceptance of the double standard of sexuality. Female unchastity, female rejection of shame and guilt as regulators of their sexuality, deprives men of the role of family provider, the only role capable of civilizing most men. Many of these men had been deprived of their fathers by Mom’s divorcing them and dragging the sons into the female kinship system where they often became roleless. The sons will in turn be poor role models for their sons.

Betty Friedan told us a third of a century ago that sex roles were obsolete, that we should take off our "masks." We now see the resulting rolelessness and see that the roles or masks performed a useful function, like a judge’s robes. Now we have bewildered men adorning themselves with earrings and freaky haircuts and bewildered girls adorning themselves with nose rings or eyebrow rings or clamoring to be soldiers, policemen and firemen.

"Wallerstein," says Hewlett,

talks about the "sleeper" effects of marital disruption, problems of commitment and attachment that may surface many years after parental divorce. According to Wallerstein, when it comes to forming relationships in adult life, "it helps enormously to have imprinted on one’s emotional circuitry the patterning of a successful, enduring relationship between a man and a woman." This is what most children of divorce lack….There is…a great deal of new evidence showing that the breakup of a marriage can trigger severe emotional and intellectual problems for children, many of which center on the fact that the children of divorce see very little of their fathers.

The worst results are found in the ghettos, where, according to Professor Steven Goldberg, "the few blacks who today commit vastly disproportionate numbers of violent crimes suffer not from emotions too powerful to resist, but from a lack of conscience itself (owing in large part to the absence of a father)."

The white pattern described by Wallerstein increasingly resembles the black pattern thus described by Ms. Richmond-Abbott: "Many young blacks postpone marriage. When they do marry at a later age, it is often an impulsive decision and there may be only a tentative commitment to the marriage."

Like it or not, civilized society depends on women’s acceptance of patriarchal sexual regulation, without which there cannot be families. It is not "little" that society asks of women, as Ms. Friedan would have us believe—this sexual loyalty which allows men families. Without it society becomes matriarchal.