The New Left is trying to replace Sexual Complementarity with Angrogyny - Peter Myers, July 30, 2001; update August 11, 2008.

Write to me at contact.html.

You are at http://mailstar.net/engagement.html.

June Singer's claim that Androgyny is the Guiding Principle of the New Age comes close to the mark.

This is the idea that the individual human contains both sexual poles, instead of just one. It's the basis of the Unisex movement (unisex hairstyles, unisex character-traits, abolition of complementary roles in marriage).

Compare this with Egyptian art, which depicts male & female figures in conjunction - unity obtained through the coming together of two sexes. Or the yin-yang symbol on the Korean flag: its basic idea is that, although each sex contains the germ of the other, it is through their harmonious mingling that unity is obtained.

The idea of Androgyny underlies the push for "Gay Marriage".

Androgyny was also a theme in early Soviet culture (before Stalin).

H. G. Wells proposes (in his 1906 essay Socialism and the Family) that the individual, not the family, be the basic unit of society, and that the state take over the parenting role, paying women to have children.

Dennis Altman, Professor of Politics at Latrobe University in Melbourne, says that Gay Liberation aims not just at freedom for gays to live as they wish, but to change the majority culture, in recognition that we are all androgynous.

Bronislaw Malinowski debates Robert Briffault on the Anthropology of Marriage: marriage-malinowski.html.

Facts of Life - how to have a home birth and how to rear children.

(1) The West is the new Soviet Union - the bastion of Marxism & Zionism it was meant to be before Stalin wrecked the plot (2) Restoring Sexual Polarity (3) Trotskyism and the Unisex Movement (4) Communal Childrearing in Israeli Kibbutzes (5) Arianna Stassinopoulos, The Female Woman (6) Penelope Leach, Children First (7) Hair, the Musical - the Anal/Androgyny theme (8) Androgyny as Guiding Principle of the New Age, by June Singer (9) Heterophobia: The Feminist Turn Against Men, by Daphne Patai (10) Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, by Daphne Patai (11) Dennis Altman on Gay Liberation (12) Socialism and the Family, by H. G. Wells (13) Melanie Phillips' book The Sex-Change Society - "a devastating attack on androgynous public policy" (14) Feminism's debt to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (15) Unstable modern partnerships affecting the birth rate - Bettina Arndt (16) The West's move to Matriliny, and its justification in Anthropology and Archaeology (17) The Civilized way of Birth (18) Facts of Life - how to have a home birth and how to rear children (19) Sex and Marriage (20) Caesarean birth and Mother-Infant Bonding

(1) The West is the new Soviet Union - the bastion of Marxism (the Trotskyist/Fabian/New Left kind) & Zionism it was meant to be before Stalin wrecked the plot

Behind Feminism, Gay Marriage, the World Court, and the Kyoto Protocol lies a revamped Communist movement. Being anti-Stalinist, it does not wear the Communist label, and instead disguises itself behind a multitude of single-issue lobbies.

There IS a need for Environmental Limits, but the One Worlders are using this as an excuse - a surrogate issue - to push World Government.

The Trotskyist/Fabian version of Communism is alive and well. Open-border immigation, casual relationships treated as equivalent to marriage, sex war, parents afraid of being "dobbed in" to the government, children equal to parents and the property of the state ... the wreckage of family life was brought to the West from the pre-Stalin period of the Soviet Union. We did not recognise it as Communist simply because we identified Stalin's modifications as Communism.

Max Shpak shows that "Neoconservatism" is actually a kind of Marxism, coupled with Zionism. It's only called "conservative" on account of its opposition to Stalinism. It demonises the Russian people because of their resistance to Jewish domination.

The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism", by Max Shpak, May 15, 2002: http://www.originaldissent.com/shpak051502.html.

In the early (Trotskyist) period of the Soviet Union, marriage was abolished, polygamy was abolished (this mainly affected the Islamic cultures of Central Asia), and homosexuality was legalised. Stalin restored marriage, gave advantages to married women over unmarried women, and made sodomy a crime.

The Marxist Cultural Revolution, begun the West in the late 1960s, has taken the West down the path pioneered by the USSR. This change was engineered by the New Left, which had substantial non-theistic Jewish leadership: new-left.html.

One must distinguish between the theistic and non-theistic Jews in this respect.

To understand the change wrought by New Left, one needs to know the Marxist theory of the history of relations between the sexes. It may be expressed as follows:

<<Marriage as we know it arose only a few thousand years ago, when men enslaved women, making them their private property. Before that, descent was matrilineal, and a woman's children were supported by her relatives, no matter who the fathers were. Generally, the fathers were unknown. A woman had one or more husbands or lovers at a time, discarding them as she tired of them or fell out with them (or as they died). When this system was restored in the USSR, the state took over the role of the relatives, in looking after a woman's children. The woman joined the workforce, and the children were looked after in childcare centres.>>

On the implementation of this policy in the Soviet Union see sex-soviet.html.

H. G. Wells, a closet Trotskyist, advocate of One World, wrote of Marriage and the Family:

"Socialism, if it is anything more than a petty tinkering with economic relationships is a renucleation of society. The family can remain only as a biological fact. Its economic and educational autonomy are inevitably doomed. The modern state is bound to be the ultimate guardian of all children and it must assist, place, or subordinate the parent as supporter, guardian and educator; it must release all human beings from the obligation of mutual proprietorship, and it must refuse absolutely to recognize or enforce any kind of sexual ownership. It cannot therefore remain neutral when such claims come before it. It must disallow them." (Experiment in Autobiography, Gollancz, London, 1934, vol. ii, p. 481).

Wells' "socialism" is quite different from what I mean by that term.
More from Wells: opencon.html.

Likewise Bertrand Russell. He wrote, in In Praise of Idleness (London, Unwin Books, 1973):

{p. 35} All this would be changed if it were the rule, and not the exception, for married women to earn their living by work outside the home. ... {p. 36} The problem is to secure the same communal advantages as were secured in medieval monasteries, but without celibacy ... {p. 37} The separate little houses, and the blocks of tenements each with its own kitchen, should be pulled down. ... There should be a common kitchen, a spacious dining hall ... All the children's meals should be in the nursery school ... Fram the time they are weaned until they go to school, they should spend all the time from breakfast till after their last meal at the nursery school ...

{end quote}

Teenagers in the West are totally turned against religion, and their parents, by the music & Hollywood TV shows that fill their minds. Schoolteachers teach them about sex & contraception, but not about marriage. They begin to have sex (mostly) around the age of 16 or 17. Many leave home around 18 to 20, especially to escape parental control. By the age of 20, many have a double-bed, even if living in their parental home. Even if they are still at their parents' home, they occasionally have a boyfriend or girlfriend sleep the night with them. Their parents can do nothing to stop this.

The West is the new Soviet Union. People like me are the new dissidents.

I am no prude, but I believe in marriage, because it's for the long-term rearing of children. However, I don't believe that husbands & wives should be each other's private property. We all need to love more than one other person, and this includes sexual love.

Is my position hypocritical? No - there's always been a certain amount of sex outside marriage. But to make that the norm, in place of marriage, to treat "relationships" as the equivalent of marriage - in effect to abolish marriage - that is another matter.

As social breakdown proceeds, desperation will force us back to the essentials of life. We'll be looking for ways to re-establish family ties, and the bonds between men and women.

I use the word "engagement" because it implies a dialectical relationship, in which neither side can control the other, but neither can do without the other.

The New Left always offered the prospect of easy sex but that has turned out to be a chimera: there's now a terrible, sad, coldness between the men and women of my baby-boomer generation. Since we've cast our traditions off, and the New Left has reached the end of sanity - offering "Gay Marriage", something not found in any prior society - we must break free of the New Left.

That will mean, in part, re-institutionalising marriage. Whilst institutions may be oppressive, they can also be liberating. Arranged marriages in traditional societies have often been happy, despite current ideologies to the contrary.

We need to distinguish between relationships oriented at having children, and those just between the partners. To this end, we must stop treating defacto couples with children, the same as married couples with children.

Marriage is an relationship where each sex dominates yet serves the other, in a relatively secure arrangement but short of actual ownership of the other person. The security of the arrangement has meant that marriages often survive an affair, while defacto relationships (based on more possessive boyfriend-girlfriend ideas) do not.

New rules for relationship between the sexes might just "evolve"; but a lack of suitable rules may, itself, be creating a gulf between the sexes, distance in place of closeness, aloneness, sterility & abnormality through the lack of fulfilment. The sexes exist in relation to each other ... we live for each other: we are each other's delight. The delight is suggested by the old euphemism for sex, as "knowing" another person.

The pornography and prostitution industries distort that delight. The problem with pornography is not the displaying of the body, but the separating of the body from the personality, the turning of sex into a purely mechanical act devoid of deep contact between two persons. Modern prostitution is conducted in factory-like settings with customers paying high fees by the half hour; what kind of meaningful contact can occur in such a rush?

Each culture produces its own male and female personalities. For each to take delight in the other, we must pay much more attention to the way we prepare boys and girls for their later lives as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.

Society needs to distinguish between having a boyfriend or girlfriend, and having a husband or wife. Having children should not be done wantonly. The 50s was cruel, but now there's been an excess the other way, and it's especially bad for kids. Girls have been led to embrace single motherhood as a "lifestyle choice", and society has got to shock them out of this fantasy.

Unintentional pregnancy is one of nature's (or God's) ways of keeping the species going. But all human societies have instituted marriage, because that's best for children.

Under Lenin & Trotsky, the USSR abolished marriage - that's the situation we're in now, and we might as well learn from the USSR experience. Stalin brought marriage back in, and gave married women privileges over unmarried ones.

There's no shame in adopting out; it need not be surrounded in secrecy. In traditional societies, one relative will look after (adopt) another's child, but there will be no attempt to isolate the birth mother - she becomes a sort of aunty.

Polygamy can be preferable to divorce.

(2) Restoring Sexual Polarity

Before Feminism, there were two sexes (male, female), and two genders (masculine, feminine).

Now, we are told that despite what nature gives you, you can remake yourself as any sex/gender you wish. You can be gay, or lesbian, have a sex-change to become a man or a woman. Your chromosomes can't be changed, but everything else can.

So, we are told, sex & gender are no longer a polarity but a continuum. There is only one sex - we are all androgynous.

Some thoughts on choosing a spouse

The choice of a spouse is largely about choosing character traits. As friends influence one another, so your spouse will influence you, usually for a long period of time.

One way to change one's life is to choose friends who are like what you want to be. Their company will move you in that direction. Similarly, choice of a spouse will shift your character.

You and your spouse pool your characteristics; as a result, each becomes more like the other. If you and your spouse have very similar characteristics, the effect will be minimal; if different, there will be more variety in the common pool, and more opportunity for each to change.

You should try to choose a spouse with certain admirable features - admirable to you - so that the character change induced by your marriage will be mutually beneficial.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on being a father

from his book Tao: The Three Treasures {I was never a Rajneeshi, and I will be ridiculed for displaying his writings, but Rajneesh makes more sense than either the Protestants who hounded him, or the "intellectuals" offering "Gay Marriage"}.

"When you love a person, many many times you will have to hate him too, but then it is part of love. A father loves his child, but many times he will be angry also and he will hit and beat the child. But a child is never offended by anger, never. A child is offended when you are simply angry without any cause, when you are destructive without any cause. When a child cannot understand why, then he cannot forgive you. If he can understand why - he has broken a clock - he can understand that the father will hit him, and he accepts it. In fact if the father does not hit him he will carry the guilt and that is very destructive; he will continuously be afraid that some day or other it is going to be known that he has broken a precious watch or a clock or something, and guilt will be there and a wound will be there. He wants to be cleared of it, he wants it to be finished, and the only way it can be finished is that the father becomes angry - now everything is in balance. He committed something wrong, father became angry, he is punished. Things are finished. He is clean. Now he can move unburdened.

"In the West, because of the psychologists of this century, much absurdity has happened in the relationship between the parents and the children. And one of the absurd things that they have taught is: never be angry with your child, never hit him, never hate him. Because of this teaching, parents have become afraid. It is something new. Children have always been afraid of parents. But in America parents are afraid of children. They are afraid that something may go wrong psychologically and then their child may be crazy or go mad or become schizophrenic or split or neurotic or psychotic - something may happen in the future, and they will be responsible. So what is happening? A father, if he loves the child, feels the anger - but what does he do? He suppresses the anger. and that a child can never forgive, because when a father suppresses anger, the anger becomes cold. ...

"When a father is really hot, perspiring, red in the face and hits the child, the child knows that the father loves him, otherwise why bother so much? When a father is cold, sarcastic, not angry, but in subtle ways showing his anger, in cold ways, the way he moves, the way he enters the house, the way he looks at the child or doesn't look at the child, this coldness shows that the father doesn't love him, doesn't love him enough to be hotly angry.

"And that has created the generation gap in the West. Nothing else" {Volume 1, Book IV}.

Bronislaw Malinowski, The Father in Primitive Psychology

{ W.W.Norton & Co, NY 1927; Malinowski was one of the pioneers of fieldwork Anthropology, famous for his studies of the matrilineal Trobriand Island people of Papua New Guinea, who allow unmarried girls sexual freedom, but still institutionalise marriage.}

'In all this the role of the husband is strictly laid down by custom and is considered indispensable. A woman with a child and no husband is therefore, in the eyes of tradition, an incomplete and anomalous group. The disapproval of an illegitimate child and of its mother is, then, a particular instance of the general disapproval of everything which goes against custom. ... The family, consisting of husband, wife, and children, is the standard set down by tribal law, which also prescribes to every member a rigidly defined part to play.' {p. 84}

'Paternity, unknown in the full biological meaning so familiar to us, is yet maintained by a social dogma which declares: "Every family must have a father; a woman must marry before she may have children; there must be a male to every household."' {p. 85}

E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Position of Women in Primitive Societies and in our own

in his book The Position of Women in Primitive Society and Other Essays in Social Anthropology {Faber & Faber, London 1965; Evans-Pritchard was another pioneer Anthropologist}.

"Now, I suppose that among those things that first strike a visitor to a primitive people is that there are no unmarried adult women. Every girl finds a husband, and she is usually married at what seems an unusually early age. ... in a society with a primitive technology and economy, running the home is a whole-time occupation, to which is added the care of small children ... The primitive woman has no choice, and, given the duties that go with marriage, is therefore seldom able to take much part in public life. But if she can be regarded as being at a disdadvantage in this respect from our point of view, she does not regard herself as being at a disadvantage, and she does not envy her menfolk what we describe as their privileges. She does not desire, in this respect, things to be other than they are; and it would greatly puzzle her if she knew that in our society many women are unmarried and childless." {p. 45}

The above quotations from leading Anthropologists show just how great is the Trotskyist revolution against human nature, wrought in the West through its Radical Feminist and Gay arms. This does not mean that women can't have careers and jobs, but it does suggest natural limits to "modernist" social-engineering. Third-world feminists have rejected the lesbian separatists from the West. In the Anglican Church, Africans and Asians defeated the push by Bishop John Spong & co to equate homosexuality with heterosexuality: http://barque.freeyellow.com/lambeth.html. People in third-world countries, less brainwashed by the Trotskyists and their NGOs, are increasingly defeating the latter in world forums, e.g. UN conferences.

This poster from a Canberra shopping centre shows what the Trotskyists have done to our women: dspwomen.jpg.

The "Stalinist" Governments of China, Vietnam, Cuba, Zimbabwe etc have no truck with the Trotskyists, seeing them for what they are. China's isolating of the Trotskyist NGOs at the 1995 UN World Women's Conference was an important defeat for them.

Michael Leunig, Thoughts of a Baby Lying in a Child Care Centre

"I can't believe it! My own mother - who I want to be with more than anything in the world; my mother - font of all goodness and warmth, dumps me in this horrendous creche. I can't believe it."  leunig-baby.jpg.

For this cartoon, Leunig was branded a mysogynist (The Melbourne Age, April 29, 2000); the original cartoon, published in 1995, was reproduced in the above issue of The Age.
http://www.shootthemessenger.com.au/pre_dec97/a_life_dec97/l_leunig.htm.

A Letter to this site - from someone I will call "P":

'Have you ever done any martial arts? Often an opponent can be beaten more easily by going with his flow rather than going directly against him. Many feminist and anti-family proponents can be beaten more easily by accepting their apparent lack of rules, rather than trying to impose rules. Their apparent (but not real) belief in personal freedom can be used to show that feminism is based on hypocrisy and many of its adherents are merely bigots.

'Your idea of including polygamy as an alternative legal form of marriage is a good example. After all, if society is so keen to have diversity in marriages, why should we discriminate against polygamy? I am willing to bet a number of feminists, gays, and hard-line socialists would find it anathema to their agenda, and therefore show they are not truly in favour of marriages without rules.

'A similar case can be put for abortion. Here is an unrefined argument. If it is "women's bodies, women's right to choose," then logically it must be "men's bodies, men's right to choose" in terms of child support. But let's not be sexist, after all feminism is *supposed* to be against sexism: the situation really should be described as "parent's bodies, parents right to choose", so men should be able to choose to have the (yet unborn) child, so long as they are willing to look after it and pay for any costs involved. What of the mother who bears the child. She ought to have an equal choice, but no stronger than that of the father. The "politically correct" folk are constantly telling us that pregnant women are not prevented from doing anything they want to do. Feminism suggests that pregnancy is irrelevant to a woman's performance at work. So a woman can carry the child for the father and hand it over to him at the end, if that is what he wants when she doesn't want the child.

'In another issue, feminists' push for women in the military is more interestingly exposed by forcing the issue of front-line conscription for women, and using gender equity arguments to allow no gender segregation of wartime tasks.

'There are many other areas where feminism can be shown to be a pack of cards supported by premises which must remain unspoken. We can expose the underlying assumptions and politically correct bigotry by continuing further in the direction of "gender equity" rather than fleeing to religion or the rigidity of old right-wing thinking.'

P is a true Taoist, without knowing it. In suggesting that polygamy be allowed, however, I am quite serious. After wars, for example, there's often a shortage of males; in China today there's a shortage of females. These imbalances are no problem if polygamy is allowed, with strict bans against harems for the rich. At present China is cracking down on men having multiple wives, because that only worsens the sexual imbalance. As for the jealousy, that's partly a matter of culture; in Islamic societies, apparently it is not a problem. A Vietnamese Australian told me that in Vietnam after the war in 1975, there was such a shortage of men that polygamy was common; further, an older wife unable to have sex with her husband any more does not face divorce - he can take a second wife. Polygamy in such cases is much more sensible than divorce: better for the first wife, and better for the children. The New Left's hostility to polygamy is very deep, and an unadmitted carry-over from Christian puritanism. That puritanism has led New Leftists to advocate Gay Marriage, even while opposing polygamy. Whilst the New Left is very big on Nature, it denies and "reconstructs" Human Nature.

There is a mysogenist tinge to the Gay movement, a preference for the security of one's own sex to deep knowledge of the other; it is no accident that English boarding-schools, modelled on the Gymnasia of Ancient Greece, produced a Gay subculture. This is the problem with excessive segregation of the sexes; excessive familiarity in our mixed schools would probably not be the problem it is, were Hollywood & the pornography industry brought to heel. Pornography is quite different from the beautiful sexual paintings and sculptures of previous civilisations: the former should be banned and the latter promoted; puritans can't tell the difference, and even use the former to discredit the latter.

The in-your-face style of the Gay movement seems to have alienated today's teenagers. Therefore, it would be foolish to ban the Gay Mardi Gras & Gay Games: they drive many more people away from identifying with them, than to their cause.

(3) Trotskyism and the Unisex Movement

The Unisex (Androgyny) Movement ultimately denies that there are TWO sexes; it's really saying that there is only ONE, that the apparent differences between the sexes are superficial or illusory; this is the meaning of its promotion of sex-changes. The idea that there are five or six "genders", rather than two "sexes", is a way of saying that sexuality is a continuum, a linear thing, rather than a polarity.

The Unisex movement arose from within the Communist movement, even though Marx and Engels themselves saw homosexuality as bourgeois decadence (see sex-soviet.html), a product of alienation between the sexes. Since Stalin made sodomy a criminal offense, the Gay movement can be identified with the anti-Stalin faction, with Trotskyism. The Trotskyist organisations Socialist Alliance, the Democratic Socialist Party, the International Socialist Organisation etc, still make "Gay liberation" a core part of their ideology.

Dennis Altman, a Gay Jewish academic who made a name for himself when a Lecturer at Sydney University, does not explicitly call himself a Trotskyist, but in his book Homosexual he writes,

'Women's, gay and now men's liberation are embarked on a revolution that is so unlike our traditional concept of revolution that we tend not to recognize it for what it is. It is hardly surprising that old and large sections of the new left fail to relate to these developments. I quote from a mimeographed sheet distributed during the Washington convention by a group called the International Socialists whose views are typical of many: "Newer movements like Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation are growing fast - but big sections of both are more and more into consciousness-raising. Nothing wrong with this in itself - but it isn't matched by a real growing power of these movements"' (p. 213).

As a Lecturer in Politics, Altman must have known that the International Socialists are Trotskyist. The divide in the Left between the Old Left and the New, is basically that between Stalin and Trotsky. So deep and bitter is it, that no Stalinist quotes Trotskyist literature approvingly, or lists any of Trotsky's books in a bibliography; any politically knowledgable person who quotes Trotskyist literature approvingly or authoritatively can be assumed to be a Trotskyist sympathiser, even if not a member of a Trotskyist organisation.

One can learn to read Newspeak if one has the right dictionary

To identify a Trotskyist writer, one must know the tell-tale clues, in particular the accusation that during the 1930s the USSR was lapsing into fascism, sexual repression or counter-revolution. Such accusations are made, for example, by Wilhelm Reich in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, where he writes, "In 1935 it was clear that the development of the Soviet Union was about to be stricken with a severe misfortune. ... They failed to go back to the genuinely democratic efforts of Engels and Lenin ... " (p. 209).

The back cover of Alix Holt's book Alexandra Kollontai reads "Alexandra Kollontai - the only woman member of the Bolshevik central committee and the USSR's first Minister of Social Welfare - is known today as a historic contributor to the international women's movement, and as one of the first Bolshevik leaders to oppose the growth of the bureaucracy in the young socialist state." Decoded, this "opposition to bureaucracy" means that she was on Trotsky's side.

Numerous New Left writers, claiming alliegance to a synthesis of Marx with Freud, make statements like those above. The New Left is so Trotskyist, and its brand of Communism so pervades our minds and culture in the West today, that we cannot see that the fall of the USSR was not the fall of "Communism" at all, but only the fall of Stalinism - and to the hardcore Trotskyists, he was just another Hitler, the one who stole their conspiracy from them.

Germaine Greer came under Trotskyist influence, but grew out of it. In her first book The Female Eunuch she wrote, "Hopefully, this book is subversive ... the oppression of women is necessary to the maintenance of the economy ... If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible. ... The most telling criticisms will come from my sisters of the Left, the Maoists, the Trots, the I.S., the S.D.S., because of my fantasy that it might be possible to leap the steps of revolution and arrive somehow at liberty and communism without strategy or revolutionary discipline" (Paladin edition, p.21). The I.S. are the International Socialists, a Trotskyist group; by "the Trots", she probably meant the Socialist Workers' Party, now renamed the Democratic Socialist Party.

John Lennon donated money to a Trotskyist group.

The following report, dated March 2, 2000, is from a Trotskyist website which, unlike most, has a civil tone: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/lenn-m02.shtml: "A former agent for the British Security Service (known as MI5) has alleged in a sworn statement that the agency received reports from a high-level spy inside the Workers Revolutionary Party during the late 1960s. The ex-agent, David Shayler, is currently living in exile in France, where he has fled to escape prosecution for his exposure of state secrets. In his February 18 affidavit, Shayler asserts that the spy provided MI5 with reports of financial support given by John Lennon to the WRP."

John Lennon's philosophical song Imagine can thus be assumed to reflect Trotskyist utopianism.

Imagine, the Trotskyist anthem by John Lennon {my comments thus}

Imagine there's no heaven {no religion}
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries {world government}
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too {i.e. official Atheism - suppression of religion}
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace... {peace = world government}

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one {world government}

Imagine no possessions {communism}
I wonder if you can {John certainly had plenty}
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world... {open borders, one world government}

You may say I'm a dreamer {Your son Julian certainly thought so}
But I'm not the only one {A whole generation has been led astray}
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one {world government}. {end quote}

Lennon's philosophy may sound idyllic, but he's a Pied Piper. Young people are led astray by people promising "a good time" and "living for the present", as in the story of Pinocchio.

Lennon's son Julian complained bitterly about John's lack of care for him. The following news item, Julian's poignant message, is from the Sydney Morning Herald of December 8, 2000, at http://www.smh.com.au/news/0012/08/entertainment/entertain6.html.

'London: Julian Lennon, the son of murdered Beatles star John, has bared his soul about the death and spoke of the anger he felt about the breakdown of his relationship with his absent father. And in a message timed to mark the 20th anniversary of the shooting, he told how John was a "guiding light" who was "sucked into a black hole". ... In his 500-word statement, 37-year-old Julian spoke of how his father lived with him and his mother Cynthia for only a few years. "After that I only saw him a handful of times before he was killed. Sadly, I never really knew the man," he said.'

Julian would have been 17 when John died - yet John only saw him a handful of times in all those years. So much for the Messiahs of Trotskyism.

In criticising John Lennon, I will be branded a total reactionary. I do agree that he was a great musician - the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Bee Gees made beautiful music, from which heights, sadly, rock music descended to the depths of punk, heavy metal and rap.

What kind of sex happened in the rock scene? Drunken sex with strangers. Drugged sex. Mindless sex. Non-volitional sex. Sex one regretted in the morning. Unplanned pregnancy. Marriages made in Hell, which spawned a new generation of orphans. Marriages made on the basis of fleeting sexual attraction, rather than long-term suitability.

Marriage is for children, not parents; parents sacrifice themselves for their children. Marriage is for lineages over time, by which society is structured; this is why arranged marriages often work. Abolishing marriage, we stopped shaping our boys and girls in preparation for it. Girls grew up knowing dolls not babies, witnessing neither birth nor death. In childcare, we replaced parental love with impersonal "professional" expertise, taught via college courses by "qualified" people often lacking the same first-hand experience as their students. In "mental health", we replaced religion with psychiatric drugs. The Sydney Morning Herald of July 16, 2001, reported, "Sixty per cent of people who visit general practitioners have a mental disorder, according to a groundbreaking study of 46,000 patients". Implying, of course, that they need mind-changing drugs: the lesson, perhaps, is, "don't visit general practitioners".

People have been having sex for millenia: in every culture, they have sex, both in and out of marriage. Beautiful sex. Aware sex. Jolan Chang's book The Tao of Love and Sex, drawing on ancient sources, is far better than any modern sex manual. The New Left's idea that through rock music a superior kind of sex was available, was an infantile delusion. The "Stalinist" governments branded the rock scene "bourgeois"; along with jeans & other Western exotica, it became part of the underground movement undermining those regimes in the name of "freedom". But now that they have "freedom", they wish they had some order as well.

Today's rock music has a frenetic quality; and in rock dancing, the partners do not touch each other. Whereas rock music is jarring, folk music and folk dancing are melodic and graceful; they are traditional, i.e. they look to the past (whence they come), whereas rock music lives only in the present.

Siegmund Levarie (formerly Professor of Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York) on Noise as the new barbarism:

"Noise has emerged as the standard bearer of the forces rejecting civilization ... The new barbarism, with its pre-musical, precivilized worship of noise, glissando, and indistinct pitches, offers no vision and denies natural and artistic norms." glass-bead-game.html.

Millions of children have been deprived of their fathers by Radical Feminism's attack on the family. Trotskyists had a big influence on that movement; here's a Feminist poster of the Democratic Socialist Party in Canberra: dspwomen.jpg

It's the "stolen generation" we dare not mention, a reckless social experiment for which we are about to pay.

Trotskyism is all around us; we only need to learn to see it: sex-soviet.html.

The Communists I know are not bad people: they just don't understand what Lenin & Trotsky were really up to, because the truth was kept from them. My communist acquaintances believe that China stopped being Marxist when Deng Xiaopeng took over; they uniformly opposed him, and their NGOs are trying to undermine the government there, in UN "Women's" conferences, "Green" Reports trying to undermine the economy etc. The sides have changed: the great danger is now in the West itself; China and Russia are a barrier to World Government.

How to Speak Newspeak

In 1997, I enrolled in the Dip. Ed. course at the University of Canberra. On March 26, we were given a lecture on Gender policy. The lecturer stated that it was wrong to say "good morning, ladies and gentlemen" or "good morning, boys and girls", because this language is not "gender inclusive". Instead one must say, "good morning, people".

The lectures were recorded on audio cassette, for the benefit of absent students. A transcript showed that the lecturer stated, in answer to questioning from me, that the reason it is wrong to say "good morning, ladies and gentlemen" is because "the Education Department has a policy on gender inclusive language". He further stated, "I am saying that if I said, 'good morning, ladies and gentlemen', that a number of people would complain about it, and have previously."

Nobody mentioned the Five (or 6 or 7) Genders, but everyone in the class of 200 presumably knew that the Lecturer was thinking of the rights of the Other Three (or 4 or 5) Genders. If only I had thought to ask him whether, on his logic, schools need more than two kinds of toilets. Unable to endure this indoctrination for nine months, I quit the course, and sent a copy of the tape to The Canberra Times; one commentator mentioned it in his column, noting that the tape bore out my account. I also sent a copy of the tape to Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald; he commented, "they're brainwashing our teachers". Of what value, then, is a degree or diploma in Education?

I have since remained unemployed; better poverty with dignity.

The Canberra Times published a letter from me attesting the above, on Sunday July 6, 2002. I checked its Letters page every day for the next week, but the University did not reply, even though its reputation was on the line. Clearly, the University could not reply, because my account was true.

You mustn't say "Ladies and Gentlemen"

I have now placed the first 6 minutes 41 seconds of the lecture on the internet, where I draw out from the lecturer the reasons for his prescription. You can hear for yourself how new schoolteachers are being brainwashed in Trotskyism.

Many who have been to university before will be shocked to discover how they have changed; it's a clear example of the Thought Police in action.

For Windows users: gender.mp3; to download: gender.zip. Allow a few minutes for it to play.

The Rulers in George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 say:

(From George Orwell, George Orwell: Animal Farm, Burnese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up-Or Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Secker & Warburg/Octopus, London, 1976)

"We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares to trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm." (p. 898; p. 215 in the Penguin paperback, Harmondsworth 1955).

" ... a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words ... excluding all other meanings ... This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings." (p. 917; p. 241 in the Penguin).

"What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods' (p. 921; p. 246 in the Penguin).

"History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. ... A great deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed." (p. 924; p. 250 in the Penguin).

It's incorrect to say that George Orwell's book 1984 is about Nazism or Communism. It's set in Britain in the future, AFTER Nazism & Communism. And it's based on INGSOC, the acronym for "English Socialism". This is the ruling system in Oceania, i.e. the Anglo-American block.

O'Brien's Inquisitor says to him,

"Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. They were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths ... And yet after only a few years ... The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. ... In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind." (p. 889; pp. 203-4 in the Penguin paperback).

This passage proves conclusively: Orwell is warning us NOT about the SOVIET UNION but about OUR OWN SOCIETY. Here. Now. In the novel, 1984 is the year the Dictatorshgip becomes entrenched:

"In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or in writing." (p. 917; Penguin p. 241).

"In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings." (p. 924; Penguin p. 250).

Dissolving Sexual Polarity

Trotskyists, and the New Left (which, I argue, is inherently Trotskyist), reduce people to mere individuals, dissolving all polarities including the sexual one. Thus women should have the same life as men, and be freed from marriage.

They even wanted to break the tie between mother and children, i.e. children would be reared not by their mother, but by professionals. This is one of the most sinister aspects of Trotskyism; see Sex in the Soviet Union: sex-soviet.html. Kibbutzes in Israel did the same.

The domestic home, in which the mother cooks for the family, would be replaced by the "mess hall", in which just a few people cook and wash up for hundreds. I have lived in such circumstances: (1) in Catholic seminaries, from 1966 to 1969 (2) in work camps of the Hydro-Electric Commission in the remote west coast of Tasmania, in 1980. They are ok in such situations, but no substitute for the domestic hearth. Everyone needs parents; the anonymous "state" can't be one's parents. To attempt such would amount to rearing all children as orpans, in orphanages. What nerve the Trotskyists had, to attempt to impose such a system.

Anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis wrote in his book Millenium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World (Viking Penguin, New York, 1992):

{p. 125} The ancient Egyptians believed that a totality must consist of the union of opposites. A similar premise, that the interaction between yin (the female principle) and yang (the male principle) underlies the workings of the universe, is at the heart of much Chinese thinking. The idea has been central to Taoist philosophy from the fourth century B.C. to the present day {p. 126} and is still embraced by many Chinese who are not Taoists. Nor is the idea confined to the Egyptians and the Chinese. Peoples all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, have come to the conclusion that the cosmos is a combining of opposites and that one of the most important aspects of this dualism is the opposition between male and female. {endquote}

From the Tao Te Ching

"When the great Tao is lost, spring forth benevolence and righteousness. When wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites. When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents. When a nation is in confusion and disorder, patriots are recognized." (chapter 18)

(4) Communal Childrearing in Israeli Kibbutzes

(4.1) Israeli ideal ends as last kibbutz opts for a return to family values

By Patrick Cockburn
Canberra Times, Sunday July 27, 1997 {sourced from The Independent}

BARAM, Northern Israel Saturday: "We changed because we were the last one left," says Yacob Zohar, 67, as he laments the abandonment last month by his kibbutz at Baram in northern Israel after 50 years of one of the more radical social experiments of the 20th Century.

"We did not fail," he said. "It was a wonderful way of educating children."

Since 1949 the children of the kibbutz, the Israeli communal village, at Baram in northern Galilee have been reared together in special children's houses and not by their parents.

Tsvi Benayoun, the kibbutz's economic manager, says: "Children lived together and performed all activities together from the age of eight months until they entered the army.

"I was a long sustained - and by no means unsuccessful - attempt to bypass the nuclear family as the centre of a child's life. Instead, children were expected to give their first loyalty, not to their parents, brothers and sisters but to each other and to the members of the kibbutz as a group."

After prolonged and angry debate, Baram, a prosperous community of 566 adults and children just south of the border with Lebanon, last month became the first kibbutz out of 250 in Israel - many of whom once brought up their children together - to abandon the system.

For the first time this month the children sleep at home and the neat four-bed rooms in the children's houses are empty at night.

Many kibbutzniks argued against the decision, seeing it as a final surrender of the original ideal of the kibbutz, whereby property, work and living arrangements - including the rearing of children - were all organised collectively.

"The prestige of the kibbutz movement has fallen a long way since its height in Israel and abroad in the 1950s and 1960s. Started in 1909 by soialist Zionists it was once een as producing the prototype Israeli - part pioneer-farmer, part-soldier - who lived in an egalitarian comunity and was ready for any sacrifice in pursuit of the common good.

It was a Utopian vision with deep roots in the European intelligentsia which inspired generations of foreign teenagers to labour in kibbutz orchards for minimal return.

The reality was always different. Many of the kibbutzim were built on land Palestinian farmers had worked before. In 1949 Mr Zohar says he was brought to northern Galilee "although I had never seen a cow before". When he asked Israeli government officials how much land he could have they told him: "As much as you can see."

Bhere had been a Palestinian Baram, now a field full of ruins, with only its Maronite church surviving. Abu Yusuf, 85, recalls how as a young teacher he saw "the Israeli army come here and put a white flag on the church. Then they gave us 48 hours to leave the village for two weeks. We slept under the trees."

The Palestinians were never allowed to return. In 1953 they watched from a neighbouring hilltop as Israeli planes bombed their houses into rubble.

The kibbutzniks were nationalists as well as socialists. But their idealism was genuine. {end}

(4.2) First closure signals dwindling of the kibbutz ideal

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Sydney Morning Herald, May 16, 2001 {sourced from The Guardian}

For years, numbers have been dwindling at the Mishmar David kibbutz south of Tel Aviv, in common with most of the other 278 kibbutzim in Israel. Mishmar David will shortly become the first kibbutz to be disbanded. It will be a historic moment, in Israel and beyond.

Although only a small, and steadily decreasing, minority of Zionist settlers or Israelis ever lived on one, "kibbutz" -"collective" in Hebrew - was the essence of e socialist-Zionist ideal of collectivism and egalitarianism. Its appeal extended far beyond the Zionist movement. Anyone of a certain age brought up in a progressive home, Jewish or not, will remember the aura surrounding the very name.

For young people from Western countries, a summer on a kibbutz was a rite of passage, and even Jews on the Left who were detached from Zionism revered the kibbutz ideal. With all his mixed feelings about Israel, Noam Chomsky continues to speak affectionately of the kibbutz, and the British socialist historian E. J. Hobsbawn has said that the klbbutz was a purer form of collective society than anything achieved in Soviet Russia.

Such fondness always involved a degree of evasion. Those who live in kibbutzim always denied they were colonial, insisting they were progressive, socialist and indeed anti-colonial. That is not how it seemed to Palestinians nor to a radical like Israel Shahak, a "non-Zionist Israeli". He says the official Left of Labour, unions and kibbutzim excelled in the pretence that there need be no conflict between a Zionist state and Palestinians, but were the first to discriminate against Arabs.

{Shahak wrote, "... the kibbutz, widely hailed as an attempt to create a Utopia, was and is an exclusivist Utopia; even if it is composed of atheists, it does not accept Arab members on principle and demands that potential members from other nationalities be first converted to Judaism. No wonder the kibbutz boys can be regarded as the most militaristic segment of the Israeli jewish society." (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, p.7) shahak1.html}

Leaving those charges aside, there is more to the dwindling of the kibbutz idea than colonialism and anti-colonialism, or even the struggle between Jew and Palestinian. Kibbutzniks complain that Likud Povernments have diverted money to the settlements. But the truth is also that people have been voting against the kibbutz ideal with their feet.

Those who do stay are ever less enthusiastic about the principles of communal living and payment according to need rather than status. Shalom Nakar, an Iraqi-born member of Mishmar David complains "there is more ego and less togetherness, and less social life together, fewer people come to committees to discuss important things. They prefer to watch television". That is true of society anywhere in the industrial or post-industrial West.

And yet this goes beyond the triumph of television, consumer society or capitalist greed. Collectivism once exerted a thrall far beyond Jewish socialism.

Kibbutzim epitomised the Zionist attempt "to create and shape the Isaeli-born Jew as a new kind of Jew", in the words of the Israeli scholar Yaron Ezrahi.

In this attempt, the kibbutz came to mean not merely socialist production and collectivist agriculture, but collectivised family life and socialised child-rearing. Parents saw almost nothing of their own children, boys and girls were encouraged to think of the kibbutz itself as their parent, and the most despised values were individuality and privacy.

In that heyday of collectivism, as Ezrahi says, Zionist ideology waged war on the whole Western liberal tradition of individual rights and personal destiny. What he calls a heroic collective national narrative rejected "the solitary self, the lyrical personal voice of the individual".

But such collective narratives are passing out of fashion across the world, just as they are in Israel {end}

(4.3) Uproar over kibbutz sex crime claims

Ciaims of rape and child abuse have shattered the utopian imaae of Israels kibbutzim, writes Sam Kiley in Jerusalem
The Australian, January 23, 2001 {sourced from The Times}

ISRAEL'S kibbutzim, once championed as among the few socialist successes, has been exposed as a hotbed of rape and child sexual abuse after a young academic sued the collective system in which he grew up.

The revelations of sex crimes in Israel's 260 secular and 15 religious kibbutzim, parents allegedly covering up abuse of their own children, have sparked outrage in Israel.

The uproar was triggered by Nahshon Golatz, 31, who grew up in Kibbutz Ruhama. He has filed a suit against the state of Israel and the Kibbutz Movement, which was started by early Zionists - many of them refugees from Eastern Euroean pogroms who wanted to live up to the ideals of Marx and Engels.

He alleges he was the victim of a grotesque human experiment in which, with thousands of other children, he was an unwilling guinea pig. The idea "to create a new human being while injecting new, imaginary content into basic concepts such as parents, home, money, work, land" has left him incapable of love and bereft of any abilities as a father, he told Israel's Haaretz daily newspaper, prompting a national debate.

Until the 1980s, most kibbutz children were taken from their parents soon after weaning and raised in dormatories. They spent a compulsory few hours a day with their immediate families and were told to see all kibbutz members as step-parents or near-siblings.

As a result, says Mr Golatz: "Inside I'm a cripple." His complaints have been compared by the movement's defenders as the equivalent of "suing your parents because they were poor".

The Kibbutz Movement has stopped collectivised child rearing, but Mr Golatz's attack has led to far nastier revelations.

The latest statistics from the Haifa area's rape crisis centre show 71 complaints were received from kibbutz women and girls.

They included allegations of gang rape, incest and other forms of abuse affecting females aged three to 30. No incident was reported to police.

Women's advocacy groups say the problem is nationwide, with one in three women being sexually abused, and trafficking in women commonplace. The difference, they insist, is that those abused on a kibbutz are living in an environment close to a religious cult, which prefers to cover up the ugly realities of life.

Kibbutz Movement executive director Gavri Bar Gil said he was horrified by the revelations, but insisted at the weekend that the incidence of abuse was probably lower than in society as a whole.

He added: "We have to reform ourselves ... we have to recognise that we have been closed so for many years and that anything could be covered up."

Mr Golatz also says his only contact with a babysitter at night, when he had bad dreams, was through an intercom. Now scores of people sald they still shudder at the sight of an intercom - a form of contact that has left them psychologically scarred. ... {end}

(4.4) And on the seventh day

By Ze'ev Chafets
Sydney Morning Herald, March 20, 1999, in the Good Weekend magazine section

... Haogen is one of Israel's most prominent kibbutzim: the idealistic Jewish communes that for decades represented a simple collective life based on agricultural toil. Now here it was, selling linen. More than that, it was selling it on the Sabbath. ...

"These days it's live and let live - every man for himself," Ruth says. "Truthfully, I don't look out for my neighbours any more." ...

Long-time Socialist orthodoxies, such as equality of income, are out. Flexibility is the new watchword. This flexibility has done more than brighten balance sheets; it has ensured that the kibbutzim are now on a collision course with religious fundamentalists.

From the pork-sausage plant at Kibbutz Mizra in Galilee to the Sabbath-busting amusement park operated by Kibbrah in the Judean hills, kibbutzniks or residents, are doing lucrative business suplying the public with things the rabbis don't want them to have. As a result, the capitalist kibbutzim have become, for the rabbis, public enemy number one. They have been thrust, quite unexpectedly, into the middle of a cultural battle that, paradoxically, may prove to be their salvation. ...

Once, the kibbutz was a venerated institution.

"We were like monks," says Benny Katznelson, whose cousin Berl is said to have been a co-founder of Labour Zionism, with Ben-Gurion, at the turn of the century. "Monks are the purest distillation of Christian behaviour, and even less religious Christians admire and aspire to be like them to some degree. That's what we were for Israeli society. We led by example. People looked up to us." ...

On the kibbutz itself, agriculture has long since been replaced as the only source of income. The top kibbutz industries are tourism and plastics. High-tech is on the rise. Where once kibbutzniks argued about the legitimacy of employing outsiders, today Palestinian factory workers and Thai farmhands are commonplace.

Fifteen years ago, for example, 70 per cent of Kibbutz Shefayim's income came from agriculture; today less than 30 per cent does. Shefayim's residents used to live off its rich soil. These days they are getting rich off its location, just 20 minutes north of Tel Aviv, where it has hotel, a water park, a wedding hall and a large shopping mall. This is a kind of socialism that only a capitalist could love, wholly devoid of the poetry, romance and idealism of earlier generations. It aims at creating not values but net worth.

Once the model kibbutznik was a patriotic pioneer-farmer - a rifle in one hand and a hoe in the other. ...

The kibbutz has long ceased trying to produce New Jewish Men and Women. ...

As the Arab-lsraeli conflict limps along, the fight between democrats and theocrats has emerged as Israel's most divisive and emotional issue. In Jerusalem, morality posses have assaulted women they consider immodestly dressed. In the small town of Pardes Hanna, when ultra-Orthodox rabbis set up a school, non-religious residents responded by trying to burn It down. Most Israelis, according to polls, feel increasing hostility towards the religious Right.

Of course, this enmity is mutual, and kibbutzniks have historically been special targets. Several years ago, Rabbi Eliezer Shach, spiritual leader of Degel HaTorah, a leading theocratic party, castigated them as "goyim, eaters of rabbit and pork". At the time, the attack seemed anachronistic, even silly; the kibbutzim were still caught up in a Garbo-like withdrawal from the public arena. But lately it seems that Rabbi Shach's words may have been prescient.

More than 100 kibbutzim now operate businesses - from antiques shops to amusement parks - that are open on Saturdays. This is mostly a question of opportunity and geography. On the Sabbath, city shops are generally closed by municipal laws. Kibbutzim, however, are subject to no such restrictions. Saturday is the day most Israelis are free to spend with their families. As a result, kibbutz malls are so packed that there often traffic jams coming off the highway. Around the country, Saturdays now account for half the income that Kibbutzim derive from commerce. This makes the kibbutz the most visible, and vulnerable, transgressors of the sabbath.

The Netanyahu Government has sought to prosecute kibbutz enterprises under a social-welfare law that guarantees all Israelis a day of rest on their respective Sabbaths. The Ministry of Labour has interpreted this as a prohibition against Jews working on Saturdays and it has dispatched non-Jewish inspectors to fine those who do business on the Sabbath. So far the kibbutzim have successfully challenged these fines in court on the novel grounds that the government can't prove that the offending employees are Jews. But last year, under pressure from the rabbis, Netanyahu increased fines and promised to step up enforcement.

For the kibbutzim, this is a genuine "cause", the first in a generation. "What's happening on Saturdays is not just an effort to deal a death blow to our economies," says Avshalom Vilan, head of the Kibbutz Artzi Federation. "It's part of an Orthodox war to change Israel into a fundamentalist State." Vilan gets dozens of calls and donations each week from mainstream Israelis who see the kibbutzniks as the natural leaders in the fight against religious coercion. {end}

(5) Arianna Stassinopoulos, The Female Woman, Fontana/Collins, Glasgow 1974.

{p. 11} Whether we regard the Women's Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a movement that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships - whether or not it is dangerous, it is certainly offensive and it needs exploding. My total rejection of Women's Lib may surprise those familiar with Greek society. The road from tradition-bound Athens to 'infidel' Girton would seem to lead naturally towards the Women's Liberation Movement. I grew up in a society which Women's Lib must regard as a patriarchal purgatory - a baby-crazy land, a land where the position of the unmarried woman is precarious, a land where dowries still predominate and where every husband's chief ambition is to be able to display his economic prowess by removing his wife from her job. Having seen a rigid traditional and discriminatory society in action and then plunged into the self-consciously progressive world of an English university, I was the obvious, enthusiastic recipient for the Women's Lib message. An outraged rejection of the society I came from, and a whole-hearted espousal of the Women's Lib ideology, would provide a very tempting, fashionable and self-righteous justification for my departure from its norms. Instead, I found Women's Lib repulsive: I felt that Women's Lib was not simply a movement for the fuller emancipation of women, it was not concerned only with expanding the freedom and opportunities which English and American women already have, relative to their Greek counterparts. It is not a movement calling for equal opportunities, equal pay, equal status for woman's

{p. 12} role in life, in fact as well as in law; instead it attacks the very nature of women and, in the guise of liberation, seeks to enslave her.

I have no doubt that there is a great need to combat the prejudice and social conventions that still impose on women a purely traditional role which conflicts with the changed economic and social conditions. But this is the domain and plea of emancipation. Liberation makes claims and demands that go far beyond this; it completely rejects the 'otherness' of men and women and seeks to abolish all differences between them. All such differences are defined as harmful, as inflicted on women by men, and as the result of social conditioning, never of inherent factors and qualities. It is a short step from such beliefs to advocacy of sexual politics, of bitter conflict between men and women. Men are defined as the enemy, not as human beings to be persuaded, but as an adversary to be fought. I found and find this introduction of the language of politics and conHict into the realm of personal relationships between the sexes utterly objectionable. Equally objectionable is the contempt the 'liberated' elite shows for the great mass of 'unliberated' women, and for all distinctively female qualities, attitudes and values. Their contempt for these specifically female qualities stems from their belief that these qualities are totally incompatible with the intelligence and self-reliance that, for them, are the paramount virtues. The truth is that there is no contradiction between femaleness and independence; between femaleness and self-realization; between femaleness and intelligence - today's female woman integrates and fuses these qualities without strain, without inner conict. The 'female woman' is not an abstract concept derived from a grand theory. There is no stark dichotomy here, as there is between the liberated super-woman of the Women's Lib Utopia and the women we see every day - the idea of the female woman is an extension of what we are and does not involve the favourite sport of Women's Lib, the denigration of women as they are today:

{quote} The adult voman has already established a pattern of

{p. 13} perversity in the expression of her desires and motives 2vhich ought to fit her for the distorted version of motherhood; it win not disappear if she is allo7ved alternatives. Any substi- tuted aim is likely to be fonoved in a 'feminine' way, that is, servilely, dishonestly, inefficiently, inconsistently. {Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, MacGibbon & Kee, London 1970, p. 65} }

... a lifetime of camouflage and idiotic ritual, full of forebodings and failure. ... {ibid., p. 85}

... all human (as distinct from biological or reproductive) pursuits interesting or uninteresting, [are] designated male territory. ... {Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, Rupert Hart-Davis, London 1971, pp. 186-7}

Sexual politics obtains consent through the 'socialization' of both sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role and status. ... The first item temperament involves is the formation of human personality along stereotyped lines of sex category ('masculine' and 'feminins') based on the needs and values of the dominant group and dictated by what its members cherish in themselves and find convenient in subordinates: aggression, intelligence, force and efficacy in the male; passivity, ignorance, docility, virtue and ineffectuality in the female. {ibid., p. 26}

None of these is meant as a description of a small, odd atypical group but all are applied in their entirety to most women. If you are an average female reader of this book, you are seen by the leaders of Women's Lib as perverse, servile, dishonest, inefficient, inconsistent, idiotic, passive, ignorant, and ineffectual. The moral excuse for this display of contempt and derision is that women are not responsible for their condition; Women's Libbers can safely revile all other women by portraying them as the victims of a male-dominated society. Whatever the excuse, these remarks reveal a deep contempt for women, and for all concepts of womanhood which differ in the least from the Women's Lib ideal. Indeed, they despise the present world of women so much that their Utopia could not possibly incorporate any part of it. After all, who would wish to preserve what

{p. 14} is valued by a group so perverse, servile, dishonest and ignorant?

Of the insulting characteristics ascribed to the female by the Libbers - passivity, ignorance, docility, virtue, ineffectuality - one, virtue, seems out of place. Yet it is very clear that Women's Lib regards virtue, altruism and sacrifice as signs of weakness, as the marks of a slave mentality. It weighs up the world in terms of sheer utilitarian egotism. 'Ultimately the greatest service a woman can do her community is to be happy' - much like Adam Smith's butcher. The 'pursuit of happiness' rides again, but now harnessed to the needs of a more passive, sedentary group. Even marriage is seen not as a deep human relationship but as two separate individuals consuming two separate meals of 'satisfaction' - as utility for two. Altruism is neatly disposed of by a piece of crude reductionism: all unselfish acts are really selfish since they are performed to appease one's conscience, to enter into a commercial arrangement of favours and counter-favours, to please a person who is so close as to be an extension of oneself. Altruism in their view is inauthentic, but what is worse, it is less satisfying than selfishness. The ideal which is to replace altruism is the autonomous, calculated search for individual self-realization - relationships are seen simply as an aspect of the individual's egocentric fixation. This crude view of ethics underlies their concept of society as a whole as well as of specific personal ties; it leads them to see the relationship between the sexes purely in terms of confrontation. The hard egoism of one group is pitted against the newly awakened self-interest of the other. Beyond the struggle lies a diffuse harmony, characterized by a vague love for mankind, and uninterrupted by more intense feelings for particular individuals. The harmony is rarely depicted, but the struggle is painted in all too vivid colours.

The Female Woman parts company with Women's Liberation because of the fundamental qualitative difference between liberation and emancipation. Liberation is not an extension of emancipation: it is not merely a furthering of

{p. 15} women's legal, social and political rights in society. Emancipation insists on equal status for distinctively female roles. Liberation demands the abolition of any such distinctive roles: the achievement of equality through identical patterns of behaviour. Emancipation means the removal of all barriers to female opportunities - it does not mean compelling women into male roles by devaluing female ones. It means adults freely choosing the way they run their own lives - it does not mean children being brought up without any clear models to follow. It refuses to allow the State to set out deliberately to alter the early upbringing of children so as to enforce greater sameness between the sexes. The fanatical dolls-for-boys-and-engines-for-girls brigade should be firmly resisted, and children allowed to grow up as boys or as girls, without being confused and cross-pressured by interfering liberators. Of course there will always be individuals unable or unwilling to fit into the commonly accepted male and female patterns of behaviour. Society must firmly recognize and accept their right to diverge from the norm.

It is curious that the Libbers, who in all other contexts are solely concerned with the individual, exalt the group when it comes to dealing with opportunity and performance. Emancipation demands that all individuals must have access to equal opportunities. The liberators want all groups to perform equally well. The believers in emancipation recognize that there are innate differences between men and women but stress that an individual's opportunities cannot be formally determined in advance by group characteristics - this is our test of whether discrimination is present or not. The believers in liberation deny that any innate differences exist and declare that unless there are equal numbers of men and women in all jobs and at all levels, discrimination must exist. If women are to be equally represented in all occupations, they must be compelled to adopt all male values and repudiate whatever they have in them that is 'different'.

With the arrogance of their detached intellectualism, the Women's Libbers fail to draw a distinction between an exciting career and an average, run-of-the-mill, nine to five job.

{p. 16} They become so intoxicated with their own vehemence against the roles of woman as wife and mother that they endow any job outside the family with the qualities of non-stop fascination that very few jobs do, in fact, possess. In idealizing institutionalized work, they seem to yearn after a kind of security that comes from the familiar routine of conventional masculine work. This is not only wrong in itself - it is also a peculiarly anachronistic sentiment at a time when there is a move away from manufacturing towards service industries. In such a service society, expressive roles acquire a much greater irnportance. In any small group, whether the family, an expedition, or the work unit, both instrumental and expressive leaders are needed - one pushing to get things done, the other holding the group together. Traditional manufacturing industry has had far more use for instrumental qualities and instrumental leaders, but in a society geared to the sale or provision of services, the emphasis will shift. The nature of the work, the size of the work group, the needs of the customer, client or recipient, all change and expressive qualities become far more important: it is these qualities that Women's Lib derides as distinctively female and that emancipation recognizes and encourages.

Liberation is a doctrine of mass egotism - emancipation stresses individual fulfilment, but it recognizes that this is best achieved within a framework of relationships and secure mutual expectations. Liberation is only concerned with the individual's frustration at not fulfilling his full potential- it ignores the fact that in prosperous societies, the most important growing problem is not frustration, but meaninglessness. Increasingly, the unfulfilled individual is not someone prevented from doing what he wants, but someone who suspects that nothing he wants or can do is really worthwhile. Historically, emancipation, by presenting women with a wider choice of life-styles has weakened the security of having one definite pattern to follow. One index of the new uncertainty and the loosening of group ties that inevitably accompanied these new freedoms, has been the steady rise in the female suicide rate since the end of the nineteenth cen-

{p. 17} tury. The male rate has, overall, remained steady at a higher level, reflecting the man's even greater, but relatively unchanging degree of uncertainty and potential social isolation. The result has been a steady narrowing of the gap between the two rates. Perhaps when the two meet, we can say that women are as 'emancipated' as men and that the degree of choice, freedom and variety they enjoy is essentially similar. This does not mean that their roles will be identical, merely that they will have to make equally demanding and complex choices between competing roles. Men will remain men, and women wiU remain women, but their maleness and femaleness will be expressed in a bewildering variety of ways.

Liberation involves a qualitatively different challenge to the individual's sexual identity that would precipitate a chronic state of anomie for both men and women. This acute sense of insecurity, as specific expectations of behaviour from men and women become blurred, would create a pattern of diffuse anxiety, of a general sense of meaninglessness. To the question 'Who am I?' an individual would no longer even be able to reply: a man, or a woman.

A favourite tactic in argument of experienced Women's Lib casuists is to compare woman's position in society with that of 'other deprived groups' - the poor, the blacks, slaves, untouchables. Although women considerably outnumber men in all industrial societies, Women's Lib, in a new arithmetic all of their own, regard women as a deprived minority group. The success of the movement seems assured - women wield the strength of being in the majority and yet gain all the rhetorical power which accrues to the underdog by being thought of as a minority. The strategy for success advocated by many of the more radical Women's Libbers is to team up with other minorities in a grand coalition of the under-privileged. It is difficult, though, to see why these real 'underclasses' should feel a sense of solidarity with women as a group, for their social situation is totally different. The comparison merely gives the Women's Lib movement an added spurious radicalism, an easy access to the rhetoric of

{p. 18} inequality and deprivation.

If women remain an underclass in industrial societies, they must be the only such group that lives longer, owns more wealth and enjoys more deference than its oppressors. In general, in modern societies the upper classes live longer than the middle classes who in turn live longer than the working classes and all successfully outlive the poor and destitute. This is especially true of America, where the whites considerably outlive the blacks. Ironically, the converse is true of men and women, for the poor downtrodden woman can expect to outlive her male oppressor by several years. Recently, one of the pioneers of women's education who was prevented by the regulations of the time from taking her degree at the end of her examinations at Oxford, was given an honorary M.A. by the university at the age of 1OO - all the men who graduated when she should have done have long been dead.

Another index of how inappropriate the rhetoric of inequality is when applied to women is that they own collectively over half the wealth of the richest country in the world. In part their ownership is nominal, the titles of the wealth being in their names for tax purposes. But few oppressors would place their wealth in the hands of the oppressed in this dangerous fashion. Middle-class widows in America may not be merry but they are one of the wealthiest groups in the country and the average woman can expect to be a widow for eight years. What is a striking refutation of the view that it is woman's emotional life that is dependent on man, is the death rate of widowers: 40 per cent above the expected rate for married men, within six months of bereavement!

Women's Lib finds the high regard men profess for women, nauseating, and declares that 'the chivalrous stance is a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level'. Other real forms of stratification never exhibit this curious permanent inversion of roles. The slave owner, the Brahmin and the factory owner do not put the slave, the untouchable, or the labourer on a pedestal. Status

{p. 19} and virtue are attributes always reserved for the dominant group, yet men ascribe them to women. Once again, the Women's Lib rhetoric of inequality is seen to be bogus, and its moral indignation based on false analogies.

It is true that men hold most of the top political and commercial positions, but it is equally true that in industrial societies, women often predominate in the three key sources of influence and power - numbers, wealth, and status. Power is not exercised only through decision-making; it can be esercised equally effectively through constraining the decision-making process. It is simplistic to argue that power is just a matter of the overt decision-making structure, and to confuse the subjective sense of exercising power enjoyed by the office-holder, with the actual effects of the decisions made and the question of who the beneficiaries of these decisions are.

I have tried to disentangle certain general themes in the Women's Lib ideology, but it has proved very difficult to establish the application of these general themes in specific areas. Neither Women's Liberation as a movement, nor any one of its leading protagonists have put forward a coherent ideological programme - the nature of the movement renders it impossible for them to do so. There is a millenarian quality about the movement, which is antithetical to rational argument. It is characterized by a belief that there is an inexorable move towards the stage of liberation in which all existing structured relationships deeply involving women will disappear. It is paradoxical that this vanguard with time so assuredly on its side, should exhibit such a hysterical sense of urgency. Because the Women's Lib argument is so chaotic it is not really possible to attempt to refute it step by step in a syllogistic manner - it can only be dealt with by dealing in turn with the critical common assumptions and propositions that it makes in certain crucial areas. Each section of the book deals with the core arguments of the Women's Liberation movement in the most vital areas. Femininity

{p. 20}

Nature

{Women's Lib} Apart from reproduction, there are no innate differences between the sexes. Equality is sameness.

{The Female Woman} There are important innate differences between the sexes. between the sexes. Men and women are equal but different

Sex

{Women's Lib} The sexual nature of men and women is identical. Promiscuity is to be encouraged.

{The Female Woman} There are important differences in the sexual nature of the two sexes. Sex is much more fulfilling within a deep personal relationship.

Feminity

{Women's Lib} Intelligence and femininity are incompatible.

{The Female Woman} Intelligence enhances femininity.

The Family

{Women's Lib} A crumbling institution to be abolished.

{The Female Woman} An important institution to be fostered.

Work

{Women's Lib} The whole of life. Only the routine, the efficient, the paid for, is valuable. The mere housewife is contemptible.

{The Female Woman} A part of life. Women have two efficient, the paid for, equally important fields open to them; their families and their careers - they should be able to choose either or both.

Men

{Women's Lib} The oppressors, a highly privileged group

{The Female Woman} Men's fate is more extreme than women's - sometimes more privileged, sometimes much more deprived.

{p. 21} Liberators

{Women's Lib} An enlightened elite.

{The Female Woman} Muddled intellectuals projecting their hangups on to all women.

Each of these propositions must be exploded separately for there is no central structure to the building of Women's Liberation - it is a building without support, where the roof-top of liberation floats mysteriously over entrenched, dogmatic foundations. The roof will, in time, fall of its own accord - it is the more modest purpose of this book to dynamite the foundations.

{p. 22} The Natural Woman

The fundamental tenet of the Women's Lib ideology is that there are no innate differences between men and women - other than reproduction.

The best medical research points to the conclusion that sexual stereotypes have no bases in biology. {Kate Millet, op. cit., pp. 27-28.}

... it is the threadbare tactic of justifying social and temperamental dierences by biological ones. For the sexes are inherently in everything alike save reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, orgasmic capacity, and genetic and morphological structure. Perhaps the only things they can uniquely exchange are semen and transudate. {Ibid., p. 93}

In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. {Greer, op. cit., p. 29}

These are fine strident, confident assertions - the confidence displayed is, as with many other ideological polemicists, in inverse proportion to the factual evidence cited or even existing, just like the preacher who wrote against a passage in his notes: 'Argument weak - SHOUT'. For Women's Libbers there are no facts, there are only ideologically convenient assumptions. The truth is not deterrnined empirically but is defined as that which accords with the aims of their movement and its current ideology. When Millett descends to dealing with the facts, she undermines her own assertions - indeed she is forced to do so, forced to enumer-

{p. 23} ate a string of exceptions which completely destroy her case. She does not seem aware of how all-pervasive these differences in 'genetic and morphological structure' are. Men and women differ in every cell of their bodies, and body and mind are not separate entities in the simple and rigid way the Women's Libbers believe. There is a definitely dated air about the way in which they assume that bodily differences between men and women have no implications for differences in mind and personality.

Those Women's Libbers who are not atheists on the subject of innate differences are militant agnostics. John Stuart Mill is a clear case of the dogmatic agnostic on this: 'I deny that anyone knows, or can know the nature of the two sexes.' From this position of splendid ignorance he and his followers draw strong policy condusions. Militant agnosticism is an uncomfortable position from which to pontificate on policy; Mill retreats into an assertion of starkly contradictory nature: 'It may be asserted without scruple that no other class of dependants have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters.'

It is strange that without knowing, or being able to know, what woman's essential nature is, Mill can assert that women differ from it, and by implication in a particular direction. In fact, there is no reason why an agnostic should not believe that society's roles for women do coincide with their essential nature or that their 'natural' character is a grotesque eaggeration of society's 'stereotypes'.

The modern Women's Libbers tend to slip out of agnosticism by a different route: they invert Pascal and argue that, in the absence of definite proof that innate sex differences do exist, we should assume that they do not. They seem to believe that to assume zero innate differences between men and women is somehow less arbitrary than accepting any positive statement about their existence based on anything less than a final proof derived from unassailable evidence. Their argument involves a false dichotomy between the view that no irmate differences ecist and the view that these innate

{p. 24} differences correspond exactly to those observed in society. The position of the 'non-liberated' believers in emancipation is that differences do exist, that there is no one-to-one correspondence between these and the social roles men and women play, and that opportunities should be adjusted so that there is a greater correspondence between the two.

The Women's Lib explanation for all observed differences between the sexes is standardized, predictable and unvaried - it is all a matter of conditioning. Conditioning is of course 'a bad thing' except when it is used to eradicate differences between the sexes. Some of the ways in which men and women behave differently are undoubtedly the result of differential conditioning, and this can be easily observed. Women's Lib wishes to extend this form of explanation into areas where no such differential conditioning can be perceived. In the absence of evidence they assert that such condihoning must be present in a form too subtle to be detected. As each suggestion on the nature of this conditioning has to be discarded, they retreat into an 'infinite regression' of explanation - each explanation assumes a form of conditioning more subtle, more vacuous, more vague, more intangible than the one before. When confronted with the universality of certain sex differences found in diverse societies, diverse cultures and even diverse mammalian species, they postulate an ever more tenuous, ever more pervasive form of conditioning - a modern version of the Victorian 'aether', an extreme attempt to remodel the universe to fit the theory.

The universality of conditioning as an explanation is conveniently dropped when a sex difference is discovered that can be explained in terms of the innate superiority of women: 'About thirty other disorders (as well as colour-blindness) are to be found in the males of the species and seldom in the females for the same reason. There is much evidence that the female is constitutionally stronger than the male; ... there is no explanation for the more frequent conception of males. ... It is tempting to speculate whether

{p. 25} this might not be a natural compensation for the greater vulnerability of males.' {Greer, op. cit., pp. 26-27}

This quotation reveals two characteristic aspects of Women's Lib - inconsistency and malice. Greater vulnerability is graciously conceded, without any difficulty, to be an innate male trait but any suggestion that this is true of positive qualities like persistence would be hysterically repudiated. There is just such a touch of hysteria about Millett's 'the best medical research' or 'the most reasonable ... sources'. She has introduced the superlatives of the advertising industry into scientific research. ...

{p. 28} One of the most striking differences between men and women - the much greater individual variability of men - provides additional strong evidence for the existence of innate differences between the sexes. Men are less average

{p. 29} than women. They are the geniuses and the idiots, the giants and the dwarfs - although women are, on average, shorter than men it is always Snow White who towers over the seven dwarfs, almost always male dwarfs who feature in circuses and pantomimes. The greater variability of men cannot possibly be explained on environmental grounds, as a simple difference in averages might be. If women are not found in the top positions in society in the same proportions as men because, as Women's Lib claims, they are treated as mentally inferior to men and become so, why are there so many more male idiots? Why are the remedial classes in schools full of boys? Why are the inmates of hospitals for the mentally subnormal predominantly male? Discrimination produces a consistency of inferiority, not a greater concentration around a common average - fewer at the top but also fewer at the bottom.

The reason why Women's Lib does not mention this conspicuous difference between the sexes is that it can only be explained on purely biological grounds. The male Y-chromosome induces greater genetic variety, and at all stages of growth the development of the male is slower with more time for variation to occur: 'The delay in the emergence of a characteristic suggests that the variance of that characteristic for males will be greater than that for females. Relatively more males will be represented at the extreme of the spread of the characteristic.'

Women's Lib, of course, refuses to acknowledge any of these differences - the only difference they effectively admit is that between male and female reproductive systems, a difference which they might have some slight difficulty in denying. However, reproduction is safely relegated to a totally unimportant position in their new scale of values. The idea that there may be other differences, particularly in the sacred area of the brain and the central nervous system, is anathema; they have a chronic fear that if any such differences were proven, women would necessarily be shown to be inferior. Such is their faith in woman's nature that it never occurs to tlhem that the differences might be in her favour.

{end}

(6) Penelope Leach, Children First (Michael Joseph, London, 1994):

{Penelope Leach is the author of Baby and Child, an excellent guide to the care of young children}

{p. 31} CHAPTER TWO

Mother, Father or Parent?

LAST YEAR in New York I gave a talk that referred to 'mothers' and 'fathers' and was taken to task by a joumalist for being politically incorrect. These terms, she explained, are unacceptably sexist and elitist. I was not altogether surprised - there is real difhculty here - or unrepentant: I had not intended to challenge, let alone to distress. But I was, and I remain, stymied. Mother and father are biological terms; as such they clearly differentiate both genders and genes but equally clearly they imply no value judgements. Biology is often sexual but never sexist; it is naturally selective but never elitist. The political incorrectness - and cruel stupidity - of sexual and genetic discrimination is not in the rootstock of the human species but grafted on to it by human behaviour.

The individualist social ethic of Western societies makes everyone responsible for his or her own success or failure but promises each an equal chance. Many individuals frown on differential opportunities resulting from accidents of blood and birth, and take an egalitarian view of natural justice. But sympathetic though such attitudes may be, they are neither generally shared, even in the West, nor problem-free. The more determined we become to rid ourselves of discriminatory attitudes and practices, the more we are inclined to reject the gene and gender differences that provoke them, as if those differences were themselves reprehensible. Differences between mother and father, and between parent or other, are in the rootstock of our species. If we try to get rid of them in our anxiety to be rid of what people have grafted on to them, we risk throwing out the babies along with the dirty bathwater. We must try to see where our biological and social heritages meet.

{end}

(7) Hair, the Musical - the Anal/Androgyny theme

John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (Duckworth, London, 1970).

{John Passmore was Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, at ANU, Canberra: http://socpol.anu.edu.au/passmore.html}

{p. 312} Even the most bizarre 'Romantic rebel' behaviour can turn out, indeed, to have its roots in a long-standing mystical perfectibilist tradition. Take, for example, unisexuality. According to Genesis, God first of all created Adam; he did not create Eve directly, as a pure expression of his creative pover; he made her out of Adam's rib. Man and voman, according to Genesis, are 'one flesh'. The implication vas not lost on mystical perfectibilists: in the state of perfection, they tell us, there will indeed be only one flesh. In the apocryphal Gospel according to the Egyptians Jesus tells Salome that the final secrets Till not be unveiled until 'ye have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female'. In the so-called 'Second epistle of

{p. 313} Clement' this becomes: 'When the two shall be one and the outside (that which is without) as the inside (that which is within), and the male with the female neither male nor female.'

The sixteenth-century mystic, Jacob Boehme, was convinced that imperfection entered the world with Eve's creation. No longer were all created things direct emanations of God - Eve was the prime exception. The German mystically-inclined poet, Gottfried Benn - at one time an enthusiastic follower of Hitler - took as his ideal that 'pre-logical' stage of human consciousness, when religion reflected 'the original monosexuality of the primitive organism, which performed seed-formation, copulation and impregnation within itself'. In many Indian sects, male and female are but different aspects of the one deity. 'Margot' - one of the 'hippies' in Lawrence Lipton's The Holy Barbarians - has been told by her male associates that 'the gods were conceived of in their pure primitive form as androgynous ... hermaphroditic'. To be godlike, it follows, one must first ignore the differences between the sexes. In search of 'Paradise Now', men and women must dress alike, act alike, and in their sexual relationships be indifferent to the sex of their partner.

That is one of the striking features of the 'tribal-love rock musical' Hair (Note the typical 'community' reference to 'tribal-love'; the young American rebels are 'playing Indians', rejecting the traditional view that the true hero was the individualistic, aggressive, tribe-destroyer, pioneering cowboy.) In the sharpest possible contrast to the traditional 'musical', which has always emphasized sexual differentiation, Hair makes it hard to distinguish which of the characters are men and which women. And the sexual actions which are casually simulated appear to be determined only by proximity, indifferently directed towards male or female.*

{At one stage during Hair, the naked hippies form a heap. One lies face-down on the ground. One by one, the others - male and female - jump on top of those already in the heap, also face-down. Passmore implies that this is a simulated sodomy}

{footnote} * It is women who suffer from this identification, as is very clearly brought out in Hair. Women are mere 'hangers-on', no longer sexually neccssary. Girls are dressed as boys rather than - for all their long hair and decorative garb - boys as girls. The sexual relationships suggested and simulated are not, for the most part, of a genital kind: they are anal and oral relationships, for which women are not necessary. What we are perhaps witnessing, in the name of 'community', is a revolt against women - but a revolt in which women themselves participate because it can be represented, as by Simone de Beauvoir, as a revolt against the conception of a 'feminine role'. It is Eve, not Adam, who must vanish if the original state of perfect humanity is to be regained; she must take her old place, in Adam's rib, no longer separate flesh. ...

{p. 314} Unisexuaiity is a reversion to early childhood, to a point where sex-roles were made apparent by differentiation in clothing and behaviour. At the same time, it is a special application of the mystical search for total unity, for a total community in which, as in Fichte's and Winwood Reade's dream, all mankind thinks and feels as one. So long as the role of the sexes is sharply distinguished that total community remains inaccessible. It is no accident that in Mao's China, too, differentiation between the sexes is reduced to a minimum.

Hair is notorious for its naked scene rather than for its unisexuality. But the nakedness, also, is presented as a mystical revelation, a revelation which makes unimportant, in the act of revealing, the difference between the sexes. More significantly, it suggests a ritual sloughing-off, a purification, through the casting away of 'inessentials', mystical and perfectibilist in its inspiration. ... {end}

(8) Androgyny as Guiding Principle of the New Age, by June Singer

June Singer, Androgyny: the Opposites Within (Sigo Press, Boston, 1989).

{p. 3} Chapter 1

Androgyny as Guiding Principle of the New Age

... Human sexuality is natural enough. It begins with the proposition that we are male or we are female, which is surely incontrovertible. Androgyny is a work against nature, or seems to be. The sky over mid-America is an appropriate place to begin a consideration of the androgyne.

{p. 5} The theme of my writing presents itself in eidetic imagery. The theme is androgyny, which in its broadest sense can be defined as the One which contains the Two; namely, the male (andro-) and the female (gyne). Androgyny is an archetype inherent in the human psyche. C. G. Jung has stated that his use of the term archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of Plato's eidos and this is the sense in which I am using it here. The term archetype is helpfui in this co text because it indicates the presence of an archaic or primordial type, a universal and collective image that has existed since the remotest time. Archetypes give rise to images in primitive tribal lore, in myths and fairy tales, and in the contemporary media. They are, by definition, unconscious; their presence can only be intuited in the powerful motifs and symbols that give definite form to psychic contents. Androgyny is just such an archetype, it continually represents itself in myths and symbols, which have the capacity - if recognized and invoked - to energize the creative potency of men and women in ways that most people hardly imagine today.

Androgyny may be the oldest archetype of which we have any experience. It derives from, and is second only to, the archetype of the Absolute, which is beyond the possibility of human experience and must remain forever unknowable. The archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of a primordial cosmic unity, having existed in oneness or wholeness before any separation was made. The human psyche is witness to the primordial unity; therefore, the psyche is the vehicle through which we can attain awareness of the awe-inspiring totality.

First, there is nothing in existence except the indescribable void, the ineffable nothingness. Second comes the primordial unity, the One in which all the opposites are contained, but not as yet differentiated. Like the yolk and the white in an egg, they are locked together, imprisoned and immovable. When the appointed time comes the primordial unity is broken open; then there exist the Two, as opposites. Only when the Two have become established as separate entities can they move apart and then join together in a new way to create the many and to disperse them. In time, pairs of opposites tend to polarize. The polarities are expressed in a variety of ways; for example - light and dark, positive and negative, eternal and temporal, hot and cold, spirit and matter, mind and body, art and science, war and peace.

One pair, male and female, serves as the symbolic expression of the energic power behind all of the other polarities. It does not matter what the order, for as creating principles, one is invalid without the other. For the spark of creation to be engendered, the male and the female must come together in all their sexual maleness and femaleness. Before they can be joined they must first have been apart, differentiated, separated from one another. Before they

{p. 6} were separated they were bound together in one body, and that body was the Primordial Androgyne.

The idea of a Divine Androgyne is a consequence of the concept that the Ultimate Being consists of a unity-totality. Within this unity-totality are seen to exist all the conjoined pairs of opposites at all levels of potentiality. Creation occurs when the cosmogonic egg is broken. Then the world is born. Or it occurs when male and female, having been incorporated in one spherical body, are separated by the supreme power of creation. Cosmic energy is generated by the surge of longing in each one of the two for the other.

We have come to know about the primal quality of the androgyne from its traces in the myths and legends and sacred traditions of many primitive peoples. Ancient mythology abounds with tales of a time when the eternal male and the eternal female where locked in an unending embrace. A Greek myth tells of a time when out of Chaos were born Night and also Erebus, the unfathomable depth where Death dwelt. From Darkness and from Death, Love was born, and from Love, Light. Then Mother Earth emerged and lay in union with Father Sky. There they remained for eons in an unending embrace. In other versions, Earth-Sky was seen as an androgynous deity. This non-dual constitution of the Primal Being, which contains within itself the potentialities of duality and multiplicity, has come down to us by way of the more sophisticated religions also, especially in elements of Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism, as well as in the Platonic tradition of the West.

The Androgyne has been nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition, for it apparently threatens the idea of a patriarchal God-image. Male dominance has been the keystone of the Judeo-Christian civilization. ...

Androgyny refers to a specific way of joining the "masculine" and "femi- nine" aspects of a single human being. We see much evidence of the trend toward androgyny in our Western world today in social customs, manners, morals, and also in the awareness of millions of people who are searching out ways to expand their consciousness of themselves and their world. ...

{p. 7} The recent expansion of androgynous consciousness, brought about largely through the catalytic effect of the Women's Movement, has increased our awareness of the necessity for questioning the nearly impregnable fortress of male-oriented values. The Women's Movement has confronted us with the historic undermining of women and has challenged us to utilize the potency of the female in our society. The Women's Movement may turn out to be the decisive step in the direction of androgyny, inasmuch as it confronts directly some of the obstacles that lie in the path toward androgyny.

... The radical feminist of today recalls the mythic Amazon, a fearsome warrior who could defeat man at his own game. ...

Chapter 2

Hermaphrodites, Bisexuals, Androgynes and the Uncarved Block

A new consciousness is rising out of the morass of a declining society that has bent too far toward rationalism, toward technology and toward the acquisition of power through unbridled competition - or whatever other means have been considered necessary by those in charge to achieve dominance and control over less sophisticated people. The new consciousness takes note that our society has become overbalanced in favor of the so-called "masculine" qualities of character.

The new orientation that is gaining in influence may be characterized as emphasizing "feminine" values, or values that in the past, at least, have been associated more with the feminine than with the masculine. Among these values is a preference for co-operation rather than competition, for a team approach to problems rather than a strictly individualistic approach, for giving credit to intuition at times over and above a deliberate thinking process and for emphasizing sexuality and relationship over and above power and violence. ...

{end}

(9) Heterophobia: The Feminist Turn Against Men, by Daphne Patai

Daphne Patai

Partisan Review, Fall 1996

{p. 580} Something very strange happened toward the end of the twentieth century. Women turned against men. Lives of human complexity, filled with both atfection and antagonism, began to be perceived as intolerable, perhaps despicable. Heterosexual intercourse was reclassified as rape and women's power to consent dismissed as powerlessness to resist patriarchal impositions. Heterosexual women had to be wary of revealing conflicts in their personal lives, since any such admission seemed to carry the expectation that they should turn away from men and set out on their own. Even Simone de Beauvoir, formerly seen as a feminist heroine, a fighter for women s rights, became suspect because of her attachment to Jean Paul Sartre. Intellectual companionship and lifelong love and friendship were now recast as craven subservience, while feminist critics scurried to deal with the discovery that their former idol had failed to lead the exemplary life they prescribed for her.

Heterosexuality has gone from being the norm to being on the defensive in the face of the phenomenon I call heterophobia - fear of difference, fear of the other - a term I use to refer specifically to the feminist turn against men .and against heterosexuality. ...

Heterophobia is by no means an entirely new phenomenon ...

{p. 581} Yet these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women did not support any sort of double standard which would have encouraged and promoted homosexual sex, while branding heterosexual sex as corrupting and contemptible. ...

(10) Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, by Daphne Patai (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (Lanham, Maryland, 1998):

{p. 34} By now sexual harassment is generally construed to include not only unwanted erotic attention but also any questionable behavior on the basis of gender. Thus the SHI has succeeded in creating a situation in which either merely expressing romantic interest or engaging in the second kind of "soft" behavior - for example, commenting on someone's appearance, or making a general remark about women - arguably constitutes an unwanted sexist intrusion, made worse by the implicit suspicion that an aggressive carnal interest must be at work. Even if "wanted," both kinds of "soft" behavior - until recently considered unobjectionable - are now being challenged, as we shall see in examining some recent feminist writing later in this book.

{p. 35} ... In the preface to their volume, Sandler and Shoop remind us how new a campus issue sexual harassment really is. They note, however, that by the late 1990s, we are in the "second stage" of policy development. Awareness of sexual harassment as a social problem can now be taken for granted, and it is time to inaugurate more effective measures to deal with it. The purported aim of their book is to guide "institutions involved in that process." Note the wording: institutions, not individuals. The latter are, in the main, treated as mere subjects of the institutional policies being formulated with the help of the SHI.

Sexual Harassment on Campus is a large book. It contains nineteen chapters covering, with much reiteration, matters of law, policy articulation and implementation, the setting up of formal and informal procedures, newly identified problems such as peer and electronic sexual harassment, and consensual relations policies, as well as a number of personal stories of "those whose lives have been changed as a result of

{p. 36} sexual harassment" (p. v).

... Joel Best's work also gives us a better understanding of the ideological fervor animating sexual harassment as a public concern. Using a

{p. 37} variety of recent "victim" categories, Best demonstrates how society's perception of the existence and gravity of a problem is constructed by media coverage and by activists' rhetorical strategies. The Sexual Harassment Industry, and the spate of instructional books published for its officials and functionaries, confirms Best's detailed description of how "the rhetoric of claims-making" works and how it develops hand in hand with organizational arrangements that sustain it and in turn are sustained by it.

{end}

(11) Dennis Altman on Gay Liberation

Dennis Altman is Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

He gives a classic rendition of "Marxist Anti-Communism" (on which see kostel.html).

He portrays Gay Liberation as returning from Jewish to (ancient) Greek values. Yet the Greeks & Romans, while condoning homosexuality, never confused it with marriage, never tried to undermine marriage as a fundamental institution.

This, however, was done by Lenin's regime: sex-soviet.html ; but, as Altman says, Stalin reversed it.

Altman portrays the Counterculture movement, which became the New Age movement, as revolutionary and introducing many features pioneered by the early USSR.

He posits "our essential androgynous" nature, arguing that to a large extent "our concepts of society and human nature are human constructs".

(11.1) Dennis Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1972).

{p. 62} Freud linked his theory of patriarchal authority with the rise of religion, and in particular the triumph in the Western World of monotheism. Support for this connection is found in Rattray Taylor's argument that "a remarkable psychological change" emerged in the classical world after 500 B.C. This change, he claims, led to an increasing repression of sexuality and the development of a sense of guilt, both of which factors facilitated the triumph of the more repressive Jewish view of sex over that of the early Greek view.

A related explanation of sexual repression sees its cause in just this fact, the dominance of the Western Judaeo-Christian

{p. 63} tradition. Unlike Freud's view, this explanation stresses the particular as against the universal form of sexual repression, seeing religion as not merely a rationaliztion and legitimation of sexual repression but as a major cause. Certainly there is considerable evidence that the Western religious tradidion has placed great stress on sexual repression. At times indeed, especially during the Middle Ages, to repress sexual desire totally was considered a mark of virtue, and the resulting hysteria, masochism and persecution set the tone of much of the underside of life in Medieval Europe. ...

Religion may well have been a particularly important influence on the repression of bisexuality, for as the Jewish view of sex came to supplant the Greek in the Western World, homosexuality was more and more frowned upon, and Biblical evidence was produced to show its inherent sinfulness. ...

To the Jewish heritage, so much bound up with the history of the patriarchal family, was added the Christian theology of "natural law," whence a long line of Popes (denied, one assumes, any first-hand experience) have derived the Catholic views on sex.

{p. 82} Millet, like most women's liberationists, is primarily concerned here with sex roles, which she sees as underlying the nuclear family structure (which in turn, as Reich saw, "forms the mass psychological basis for a certain culture, namely the patriarchal authoritarian one in all of its forms"). I would not dispute Millett's aims. Yet it seems to me that liberation requires, as well, a general erotization of human life - by which I mean an acceptance of the sensuality that we all possess, and a willingness to let it imbue all personal contacts - and a move toward polymorphous perversity that includes more than reassessment of sex roles. ...

{p. 83} Liberation, then, in the restricted context with which we are primarily concerned implies freedom from the surplus repression that prevents us recognizing our essential androgynous and erotic natures.

{p. 84} Liberation demands a renunciation of the traditional puritan ethic, so successfully imitated by Communist states, that sees hard work and expanding production as goods in themselves.

{p. 106} No longer is the claim made that gay people can fit into American society, that they are as decent, as patriotic, as clean-living, as anyone else. Rather, it is argued, it is American society itself that needs to change.

{p. 107} But gay liberation represents a new self-affirmation and a determination that if anyone will be "cured", it is those who oppress rather than those oppressed. ...

Gay liberation, like black radicals before them, has reversed this: there is almost perverse delight in playing up to the stereotypical image, of shocking rather than persuading society.

{p. 140} The counter-culture has been, I believe, the most significant development in America over the past decade, and we need first to examine it as a general phenomenon before examining its relation to gay liberation. Its emergence is intimately bound up with the two great political upheavals of the sixties, the new militancy of blacks and other non-white Americans, and the agony of Vietnam.

{p. 141} More accurately what has happened over the past decade is that there has been an increasing disjuncture between politics and culture, to the point where the most revolutionary features of American life are in fact cultural.

America exhibited by and large a situation of the sort that the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci has described as hegemonic, that is a situation where "one concept of reality" is diffused throughout society so that the direction and control of the dominant class is supported by norms and perceptions that have been internalized by all classes. ...

{is the new hegemony Jewish? Benjamin Ginsberg, like Altman a Professor of Political Science, but at John Hopkins University, provides much evidence that it is: ginsberg.html. But Altman, and Robert Manne, also Jewish, and also a Professor of Politics at Latrobe University in Melbourne, insist on depicting Jews as victims}

{206} Gay Liberation and the Left: Toward Human Liberation

The traditional Marxist left has been as contemptuous, as disregarding, as - once given the chance - oppressive of homosexuals as anyone else. Despite Lenin's moves towards sexual freedom in the Soviet Union, which involved repeal of anti-homosexual legislation, these laws were reintroduced in 1934, and prejudice against homosexuality as "a bourgeois degeneracy" became strongly imbued in Communist parties throughout the world.

{end}

(11.2) Dennis Altman, Coming Out In The Seventies (Penguin Books, Ringwood, Victoria, 1980).

{p. 10} I believe strongly that society has need of philosophers, not in the academic Anglo-Saxon sense but rather in the more common European mould, that is women and men who have the time and energy to raise basic questions about the social order and postulate alternatives to the existing state of affairs.

If the aim of the social sciences is to understand the world as it is constructed by humans, the definition itself suggests that there is a powerful incentive to change it. For as soon as we recognise the extent to which our concepts of society and human nature are human constructs, we recognise as well that what is can be changed; attempts to radically restructure society are based on precisely this recognition.

This is central to much of writings, as Gramsci has shown. But it is not just Marxists whose work is engage. Freud, in postulating the existence of the libido and the unconscious, ensured that future generations would explain themselves in terms of his theory and thus he contributed to changing society as much as any declared revolutionary. It is one of the greatest defects of Anglo-American social science, particularly of its variants in Australia, that it seems by and large scared of Marx and Freud precisely because they pose large questions.

{p. 13} I believe the Marxist critique is correct in insisting that all research and writing ultimately serves some interests more than others.

{p. 30} HECTOR: Although it would seem to me, reading your book, that you were not working in a Marxist framework, you were nevertheless working in reaction to a Marxist framework in a way that Americans are not.

ALTMAN: One of the things that really struck me in talking to people in Gay Lib in America is that none of them were even aware that say in Eros and Evolution Marcuse talks quite specifically about the homosexual as being a potential revolutionary. Now this was something that the Gay Movement in the States had just not hit on and I think that this is probably due to this total lack of any sort of Marxist background. It's of course becoming less and less true. The present generation of young American radicals are in fact becoming more interested in Marxist thought. ... people on the Left here have been aware of Stalinism, have been aware of the dangers of a terribly crude economic determinism.

{p. 107} There is of course one important tradition which stems from the Frankfurt School of the twenties and has sought to deal with the area described by Ralph Ellison as 'that blind spot in our knowledge of society, where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx, but where approaching, both grow wary and shout insults lest they actually meet ... ' And in the late sixties and seventies the revived feminist and gay movements have made much of the political implications of sexuality. It is the intent of this paper to examine some of the problems implicit in that set of theorists from Fourier through to Marcuse who have argued for a connection between sexual and political repression.

{p. 112} It is odd, but perhaps not surprising, that Marxist puritanism is more effectively enforced nowadays than that of Judaeo-Christianity.

{p. 117} Like Jews, homosexuals may choose to cling to their separateness, even if this provokes persecution from the dominant majority.

{p. 167} Marcuse belonged to that tradition which has sought to synthesise Freud and Marx, and hence he sees the social management of sexuality as essential to understanding the way in which the contemporary social order is legitimised. This is basically a position with which I would agree; I shall try to sketch out the dialectic relationship between the changing norms of modern capitalist society and the challenge to those norms in the case of one critical area of sexual control, namely the stigma against homosexuality.

{p. 168} Gay liberation demanded not just civil liberties for homosexuals, but rather a change in the social ordering of sexuality and an end to the dominance of the heterosexual nuclear family model.