SISTERHOOD

Whatever happened to feminism? As a student I studied the history of the suffrage in Britain and the role of the suffragettes. Of course, we were taught that women earned the right to vote by their tremendous efforts during the First World War rather then being chained to railings or bizarre royal horse suicides. I remember very well the feminism of the ‘Seventies. Burning bras, which always seemed very self-defeating, being annoyed at doors being held open and all of that sort of thing. I strongly recall pornography seemingly being in its death throws in the late ‘Eighties because, quite rightly, it is only ever completely exploitative. Humanity has probably existed for a million and a half years, but we only know about the last few thousand. Not so long ago women were treated appallingly. At the time of the Gospels, only two thousand years ago, women were scum. Misogyny does not begin to describe the utter contempt in which women were held. Religious people will still insist that Jesus had no female apostles and Mary Magdela was a prostitute, neither of which is true. Try reading the things. By the start of the ‘Eighties it seemed that sexual equality was a possibility, at least for heterosexuals. Not so.
All of a sudden we had tinterweb thingee and porn was reborn, stronger then ever. There are now ‘mid-shelf magazines’ where any young woman who wants to aspire to a career in the public eye has to parade in underwear. As a result of tinternet, porn is endemic and children are vulnerable, even to terrorists. Apparently. It’s appalling. I am appalled. There is a rash of glossy young women across magazines and television who, not only are shockingly ignorant, but rather proud of it. More than one lady has freely admitted to never having read a book even though they have written one, apparently. ‘The Female Eunuch’ seems a long time ago. A definition of Political Correctness is ‘men are wrong, women are right and gays get the benefit of the doubt’. According to advertising and most television programmes, women hold the world together while men are next to useless things to be tolerated. Just. The cliché of women’s pastimes; shopping, eating chocolate, gossip, being wholesome but men’s; watching sport, drinking beer, being messy are deemed risible at best. The prevailing attitude in society is that any individual who is not married and a parent is a failure and deeply flawed. The religion of secularism is the cult of children, or ‘kids’ as they are now. If asked to rate evil on a scale of one to ten, Gary Glitter would beat Osama Bid Laden every time. Women are superior, because they can give birth, but men earn more money, especially if they are sexist, arrogant and aggressive.
There are many women who have come to the decision that ‘all men are bastards’ which is unfettered bigotry, and the concept of ‘sisterhood’, where a woman should be supported merely due to gender. Hilary Clinton was bad enough, a woman so stupid that she lied about arriving in the former Yugoslavia, claiming to have been received in a hail of bullets. There is film documentation of that arrival where she is greeted, not by small arms fire, but by a local brass band and children with posies. On being confronted with the evidence of her outright dishonesty she replied, ‘I misspoke.’ Even from a politician, such blatant lying is indefensible. Yet she was still supported as a ‘strong woman’. Now we have Sarah Palin. To quote Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times, ‘She is also a liar. She is not a liar in the usual political sense. She tells lies that can be shown to be empirically untrue by anyone with access to the public record… Palin told one interviewer that she asked her daughters for permission to accept McCain’s veep offer; she told another that she had accepted the offer immediately and unblinkingly without asking anyone. The first version was, it turned out, a lie. But it sounded good for the ten seconds needed on national television. She insisted back in Wasilla that she did not fire the police chief. When the reporter called the cop to check, he read a termination letter, signed by Palin, over the telephone. Despite her claim to Couric, Palin has not met any trade missions from Russia. She did not oppose the “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska; she lobbied for it. She said she sold a state aeroplane on eBay. She did not. She claimed her Teleprompter failed in her convention speech. It did not. She said Alaska’s state scientists had concluded that polar bears were in no danger. A journalist’s legal request to review the report showed that she had lied and the scientists had indeed said the bear was endangered. Palin said Alaska provided “nearly 20% of the US domestic supply of energy”. It does not. The gas pipeline she touts as her main “mission accomplished” has not broken ground and may never do so. She says she took a pay cut as mayor of Wasilla. She did not. And on and on.’ Yet millions still support her because she is a woman. The most pithy description of the choice facing the small number of Americans who will bother to vote is, ‘She’s wonderful because she’s a mom… but he might be alright even though he’s shifty-looking.’ It is a battle of the bigotries.
Humanity is gradually stumbling across the idea that equality is the most productive attitude in life. That an individual is just that, and any human being should be gauged according to ability and personality rather than gender, sexuality, colour and so on; so why is there still a ‘battle of the sexes’? Why do ridiculous books such as ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus’ and its ilk sell so well, and their faux psychology happily spouted by ignorant people? Every day there seems to be some ludicrous piece of scientific nonsense claiming that men are better at something than women or vice versa. Some people are better than others at everything and it is not dependant on anything other than the individual’s abilities. The recent Human Genome Project demonstrated, according to our DNA, that all people are at least 97% the same, so why do people insist upon trying to find differences and reasons to look down upon others, especially members of the opposite sex?
There are, really, only two differences between men and women other than genitalia, but both related to sex anyway. No-one truly knows who their father is, only, with the occasional adopted exception, their mother. Mothers only have this power, something a man will never know. The main difference is with sex itself. A man’s orgasm has the greatest narcotic power known to humans. The ecstasy is sublime and unique. There is nothing like it. The problem being that it lasts for seconds and, like any drug, it is never quite the same again. No man will ever forget that glorious moment of virginity loss. The circumstances of that loss do not really matter, it is merely that it finally happened and it is as good as everyone said. The rest of a man’s life will be devoted to trying to recapture that moment of unparalleled bliss, never quite managing to do so. When Hollywood actors claim to be ‘sex-addicts’, it may sound rather foolish but it is only too true. The pursuit of orgasm inside another can, and does, ruin lives. A woman’s orgasm is highly different. For women the circumstances of making love are all important and cannot happen with anyone, unlike a man. The orgasm itself, while not as extreme, is far more profound and satisfies for much longer. This is why female attitudes to sex are far less intense and more logical. Though not always the case, what happens after sex is making love for a female. Women rarely make utter fools of themselves purely for sexual gratification, while for men it can be an inadvertent hobby.
Other than these the only differences between the two sexes are cultural ones resulting from a refusal to realize the disparate sexual drives. In the same way that Roman Catholicism is the remains of the Roman Empire, the Vatican is built on the site of the erstwhile Circus Maximus, marriage is the debris of religion in a secular world. The concept of life-long, monogamous fidelity is utterly unnatural and its rationale arcane. In a world teeming with mammals, only one other even tries such a foolish modus operandi; a species of Gibbon in South America. Some people happily say, ‘Some birds mate for life.’ This is true but we have not been related to birds for a billion years or so, and the ones that do are often endangered. There are not that many swans in the world. The origins of marriage are from times a hint different to now. Women had no rights at all, and the world was full of lawlessness with marauding tribes being a constant threat. Marriage was the passing of protection from a father to a husband. Today, the father still gives the bride away. In an effort to ensure that the new husband would protect his bride, he made a promise to God. That is all it is. Because we know so little about the history of humanity, we do not know how long such a system has existed, but it is more than feasible that a woman’s attitude to marriage is ‘hard-wired’ due to thousands of generations of women only having marriage as any sort of aspiration in life. No-one can claim that marriage works in a modern, secular society. What percentage of marriages is between two virgins that last ‘til death us do part’? How much misery is caused by people clinging onto a system that is beyond an anachronism? In a capitalistic and consumeristic society, marriage is nothing more than an industry relying on the aspirations of the gullible. Confetti is now symbolic of the money that has, and will be, thrown away in the process. The most normal thing in the world is a man and a woman having fun together. Two people of the same sex is fair enough; no-one chooses their sexuality. In fact, between consenting adults, anything is fine. More than two is kinky but involving children is offensive, indefensible and wrong. Struggling through life waiting for ‘the one’ is a waste of everything.
There are a myriad of ways to bring up children effectively. No one way works for everyone.
As humanity seems to be approaching something of a crisis point, it is time to reassess all of the things to which we cling without thought. Your parents and teachers might not have meant to lie, but most of what they told you is not true. It is time for men and women to recognize what we all have in common rather than looking for disparity and holding onto meaningless and harmful superstitions.