I am a feminist. I believe every intelligent man is a feminist. I am the father of two girls, I have a stake in the argument. The anti-feminist movement has arisen with one accord to damn the Violence Against Women Act as bad legislation. Erin Pizzey, chief among these anti-feminists, is particularly scornful and unhelpful. While feminism attracts its share of cranks, the broad brush of anti-feminism is just as tiresome. I will tell you a tale of what
Erin Pizzey calls a "Coat-tailing New Man". It is my own.
Ovid tells us the prophet Tiresias was turned into a woman, after striking a female snake, as she lay paired and mating. By Pallimachus' account, Tiresias adjusted to his metamorphosis, went on to become a famous courtesan, and a had a daughter named Manto. After many years, he was returned to the form of a man by striking a male snake in the act of mating. His situation came to the attention of Zeus and Hera, the quarrelsome married gods. Which sex derived more pleasure from intercourse, they both demanded to know. Zeus claimed women had more pleasure, Hera claimed men did. Tiresias said women had nine times more pleasure than men. In a fury, Hera struck him blind. Unable to undo Hera's curse, Zeus gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy.
Tiresias was a man again, except for his breasts. T S Eliot mentions him:
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
After his un-transformation, Tiresias was asked a more general question: which was better, to be a man or a woman. He gives a long discourse, declaring women can do what men can do, with the single exception of giving birth.
Are women equal to men? Nobody here would dare say No, in this day and age. But in the matter of the raising of children, as with Tiresias giving birth, women are different. We now have the Family Leave Act, a humane and sensible piece of legislation, I will not say perfect, but it's a good start. As with the abortion debate, the matter of raising children strikes too close to home to take one side or the other without stirring up controversy, I do not propose to settle this argument or even raise it, beyond a simple and forthright delineation of the issues.
Should women stay home and raise children, or should they return to work? For some women, it is not a choice, they must do both, without the help of the fathers in their lives. Women always worked, ask any farm family if the mother works: snorts of laughter will ensue, she works harder than any of them. In an era of disposable marriages and neglected children from all strata of society, it might be argued women are better served to stay home and tend to the children, but what of the men? When my children were young, I wrote software in the house, my children hanging in a backpack. I took the back off my rolling chair, propped the warm bottle against the crook of my neck, and kept on coding. In those days, my wife was going through college, all the way from GED to her Master's degrees, and I made the choice to tend the children. My wife grew jealous of the way the children would curl up against me on the couch. I reveled in fatherhood, it was far and away the happiest part of my life, and my children still lean against me.
Later, when the children were grown somewhat, I took to the road again, coming home on weekends, or bringing the family to me to visit whatever godforsaken corner of the planet in which I was currently consulting. Have there been problems? I will not lie: there have been problems. My wife went back to Guatemala for a year, leaving me with children aged three, five and twelve years old. She's taken the kids off to Guatemala for the summer, and left me wretched with loneliness. My children have come to resent my life on the road, returning at odd intervals, wanting to be part of their lives again. The modern world and the notion of Work for Pay has always been an obstacle to ideal parent-child relationships, for both men and women. Ultimately, the question posed in the topic sentence is moot: work pays the bills, and the children of sailors will always cry as their father departs from the dock, perhaps never to return. The sailors cry, too, privately. I have been such a sailor. The child and the caregiver both suffer, nobody reads your resume at your funeral. You can love Jesus and Mozart and your kids and your wife and your kitty cats and pale ale and sunsets and the way the garden grows, but don't ever love your job: your job will never, ever love you back.
I have been Tiresias, after a fashion, and I will confess to a certain yearning to return to the time where I was the nurturer and caregiver, the changer of diapers and the sleepless carrier of colicky babies. I do not wish to be a woman, but every tooth and bone in me aches for another baby to care for and raise.
The falsity of the anti-feminist debate lies in the matter of men: I can speak for men, I am one. Within my lifetime, women were not allowed to open a checking account without the signature of a man. Has the Feminist Movement gone too far? I do not think so, it has not gone far enough. Has the Feminist Movement done any harm, beyond poking holes in old stereotypes? You must tell me otherwise.
Women around the world do the hardest work imaginable, the lifting of water from a well. My family has put solar panels and water pumps into some of the remotest places in the world, Bihar State in India, Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso. The sun rises, the panels generate power, a DC pump in the floor of the well wakes up and fills a water tank. When the tank is full, the power shunts to charge a series of deep cycle truck batteries. In the evening, the batteries power fluorescent lights and an inverter, to illuminate a school building. As varies the lot of women and children, so varies the success or failure of a culture. We are not only our brother's keeper, our sisters and daughters are in our care, too.
My chief complaint with the Islamic cultures is their treatment of women, and many of their reasons for such treatment sound familiar: they are the arguments of the anti-feminists. Their support of Traditional Roles and Religious Mores rings oddly in tune with the subjugation of half a billion of the world's women.
Women are not of necessity weak and fallible creatures, and they do not require man's supervision. Women chiefly require our respect, and should they choose to have our children, they require the protection and care of the men they chose to father those children. It is the ancient distinction of Tiresias, and it cannot be gainsaid. Women are not only our equal, our treatment of women reflects our dignity as men. We are not the same, I have never heard even the most rabid of feminists argue otherwise, and should one do so, I would be the first to shout down any such assertion. As poorly as men understand estrogen's effect upon women, I wonder how well women understand the burden of living with testosterone, the Rage Molecule.
Insofar as women are obliged to make choices men do not face, I shall not opine upon the Right Choice in the matter of returning to work after bearing children. This I will say, anyone, woman or man, who believes that decision has a Correct and Preordained Result is a fool. Our species is in a wrenching state of societal evolution, and it is my observation women continue to get the short end of the stick every time. Those with full bellies and paid-up 401K's may have the luxury of saying women ought to stay home, that women who venture forth into the battlefields of careers are short-sighted and selfish. Those who must sail the dark seas of a career always pay the price of tears and loneliness and separation from their children, men and women alike. It has always been so, and always will.
From the position of Devil's Advocacy, I shall now put forward a few sentences against my own position. It may be argued, with considerable merit, women have chosen the wrong battlefield, in hoping to be man's equal in the matter of a career, they have sold themselves short where their position is strongest, as wives and mothers. A career is a sorry substitute for the deeper joys of nurturing children and carving out a small part of the wicked world where the family may retreat and be together. The private joys and comforts of marriage and children are not to be idly cast aside, by men or women, in their pursuit of personal goals.
But again Tiresias' dark parable emerges to taunt us, what a man may do, a woman may do, save only in the matter of giving birth. Men may also care for children, I have cared for mine, and I have become a better and arguably stranger man thereby. Those who would tell us women are the only caregivers forget that men may also care for infants, and well, too. I have often joked if women controlled the pornography industry, it would be a religion. The resulting material would be far richer, beautiful and more erotic than anything a man couid imagine, and men would be far more bound to women as a direct result, and have more respect for women. The degradation and exploitation of women is aided and abetted by women's own poor opinions of themselves, and such attitudes should be abolished in the minds of girls everywhere. We have lost something, if we insist women are merely the equals of men, they are our future, they are our deepest desire, our ultimate hope, the deepest of all mysteries, our compass to the future of our species.
Women are not to be degraded or reduced to brainless simpletons, women are the most powerful of mysteries, every bit man's equal, and they are not the unpaid servants of men, nor are they the Default Caregiver. They possess within their bodies the future of the human race, and that includes their brains, and not merely their wombs.