With much thanks to the many here that help shape the writing. What you see is what you get.


Dear Ladies,

When I first started this website I had originally posted, as my first essay, “A Letter to Women.” It was intended to be an explanation of sorts, for what I do, and why I do it. As most of the site visitors happen to be women, it was read more than the others.

Recently the site was hacked and had to be rebuilt. It dawned on me while reposting all the essays that the original letter I wrote to you is not at all like what I would have to say now. So I trashed it and I am now writing you again. This time, hopefully, with more focus and substance.

There is a problem with the women in this culture.

Yes, I know, there are problems with men, too. Believe me, I have heard about them for the last forty years. Some of it true and fair, much of it neither. It was a necessary dialogue just the same. So is this.

To understand this we need a brief look at history. Women, in the past, were denied voting rights, couldn’t own land and didn’t have much access to employment that would give them the freedom to make it on their own.

This needed to change, and of course, did, as can be confirmed with a quick glance at the world around you. I laud those changes. But the problem was in how we got here.

The reality is that the gender roles of our history were traps for both men and women. Women were relegated to home and children; men to sacrificial roles as protectors and providers. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just a matter of survival, and for many thousands of years it worked quite well to that end.

But once men made the environment safe enough for women to leave "The Cave," it was only natural and right that men change and allow that to happen.

And ladies, we did.

This is the simple but accurate truth of the matter. Men and women evolved into gender roles that facilitated the survival of the species. And once those roles were not necessary for survival, they did begin the sometimes complicated path to change.

The problem here is that your knowledge of these historical events is largely shaped, convoluted rather, by feminism. Feminists taught you that your history with men was of unremitting evil; that you were chattel, slaves to men who held all power and shut you out with extreme intent. They even gave it a name.

Patriarchy.

It is a word that has become synonymous with oppression. But feminists were loathe to remind you that “Women and children first,” was the partriarchal mantra, and that much of the social norms, even when misguided, were a product of a code adopted for the sole purpose of preserving your life. It wasn't always fair, but the unfairness wasn't always yours. Men died by that code, and trained their sons to do the same.

The fact that we still do is the subject for another essay.

So what happened? As feminist distortions were increasingly embraced, and intertwined with the legitimate need for change, men did what they usually do. They reacted to the message and not the messenger and unblocked the entrance to that cave.

Many of you spit on us on the way out. Many of you still do.

It has to stop.

This isn’t just about decency. And it is not just about the chasm of mistrust that separates us from each other, or the legions of the walking wounded from this godforsaken gender war. It is about our future. The vilification of men that you have accepted as appropriate now translates to catastrophe for our sons, for your sons.

The problem is that what we say, think and feel about people invariably translates into what we actually do to them. Nowhere is this more evident than with our sons, in the here and now.

If you take an honest look at the academic environment to which our boys are subjected, you will see that their masculinity itself is under attack with ideology that teaches them they are inherently flawed.

Christina Hoff Sommers documented this in her highly recommended book "The War Against Boys." She writes, "The pedagogy is designed to valorize females, such as teaching history in a woman-centered way. Boys are to be inspired to revere Anita Hill and to “enjoy” quilting. At the same time, schools discourage activities that are natural and traditional to boys, such as playing ball together."

She goes on to say, with sad but pinpoint accuracy, "Most parents have no idea what their children are facing in the gender-charged atmosphere of the public schools.”

And as girls and girls programs increasingly flourish, boys are falling to the sidelines in ever growing numbers.

The results of that are most telling.

Boys are more likely than ever to drop out of school and engage in delinquency and other problems. They are representing less college graduates every year. With this diminishing education and wholesale marginalization, they are on a fast track to being the “second sex,” that position that so many feminists touted as the greatest evil of human history when they claimed it applied to women.

This is the lasting legacy of spitting on men. Your sons will not be the exception.

Young men now grow up to be destroyed in corrupt family court systems where women are encouraged to and even praised for using children, their children, like pawns in order to drain the father of assets. And those same children also have their badly needed connection to their fathers severed in the process. When those exploited, abused children start quite naturally to act out and get in trouble, we blame the father who was removed against his will, for of all things, being absent.

And the "freedom" women gained on this frenzied path of vengeance and victimization? It doesn't appear to have settled well. Women are growing increasingly violent. They are matching men in domestic violence, blow for blow, and they are causing the lions share of injury and death to children in the home.

But we don’t speak of these things. We are not supposed to. In your position as the identified victim, and mine as the identified perpetrator, there is supposed to be an indelible silence on these matters. For the most part, there is.

That silence is destroying us.

And it is a silence that is maintained with the collusion of weak men and misguided women, which is to say most of the culture. The only answer I can think of is for men, and for women, to change.

Perhaps you will consider this before concluding that men's activists are whiners or woman haters or products of bad mothers. You might actually decide that most men's activists are men who above all else, seek justice. For their children, for themselves, and ultimately for you.

I hope that a few of you will read this and consider it the next time you hear someone say “men are pigs,” or when you hear a woman refer to her first born child as “the insurance policy,” or before you nod your head in unconsidered agreement with whatever negatives about men happen to be making the rounds. All of this will be visited on your sons, and their sons.

I hope too, that some of you look at your sons and think, and ask yourself what kind of world in which you really want them to live.

When your sons choose wives and marry, I hope you consider the agony they will go through when “taken to the cleaners” and robbed of their children. You will be forced to stand by powerlessly and watch them have their guts ripped out.

It will happen to more than half of them.

The best prevention for this last one is to teach our sons to choose carefully; to scrutinize a woman before committing his life and work to her; to evaluate her morals and values as a woman prior to putting a ring on her finger. or even whether it is wise to marry in the first place. But how can we do this if we keep teaching them that such evaluations are the stuff of misogyny? Indeed, how can we do this if scrutinizing women at all is such a taboo?

And therein lies the rub, ladies. It is indeed time, just as it was for men, for women to be held to scrutiny, and to account. More importantly, it is time for women to do this on their own.

I’ll do my best to provide a fair and compassionate mirror in my writings. As always, it is up to you whether that mirror is a place you want to look.

That was freaking WELL WRITTEN.

Can I copy it and post it elsewhere? (with proper credit of course!)

Steven

By all means, please do! And thank you! And if it is possible, I would greatly appreciate a mention of my website.

""..The best prevention for this last one is to teach our sons to choose carefully; to scrutinize a woman before committing his life and work to her; to evaluate her morals and values as a woman prior to putting a ring on her finger. or even whether it is wise to marry in the first place. But how can we do this if we keep teaching them that such evaluations are the stuff of misogyny? Indeed, how can we do this if scrutinizing women at all is such a taboo?..""

I am doing this with my son

and did so myself and finally selected an Asian woman our marriage, and my one and only, of 20 has been successful and both my son and daughter are straight and normal

however there is an army of brainwashed feminit wimyn out there who know all their "rights" and mean to give no ground to any man or boy on any of her "rights" - rather to assert all of them

I really think it is better for young men to consider life long batchelorhood nowadays rather than take a capital risk in signing a contract with the latter day wimyn - this seems a better gambit than risk being processed by the feminit Family Court - just a reinvented Soviet star chamber system

An excellently composed counterbalance to the many 'unreconstructed' proposals posited previously regarding the sexes.

Another carefully crafted piece, Lester. Excellent.

This is Awesome....

Your letter is outstanding!!!!

Beautifully done.

Thank you all for the approvals, and quite frankly for the ongoing support in shaping a piece like this.

Tera, the letter is new. I have had three responses from non MRA females, all positive. More will be told after a few weeks, BUT,

in the end, I couldn't care less what women "think" about it. I do try to reach women with my writing, but not with Dr. Phil coddling or walking on obsequious eggshells to get them to approve.

I already have a pretty good grip on the big pic. There will be many that reject it, but the ones with open minds won't. And the ones with closed minds won't be reached anyway.

Most importantly, there will be some who ride the fence that will be tipped in the correct direction. At the risk of blowing my horn, I have already had many, many emails from women who told me that I forced them to reconsider their positions on men, life and relationships.

I remember the first one verbatim.

"I knew after I read your article that I would have to treat my husband with more respect. But first I must apologize to him for taking him for granted."

That is my audience, Tera. The only one that matters.

Lester,
I hate to be the first, and probably only one, to offer some criticism, but I must address one issue which troubles me. First, let me say that I agree with the spirit of your letter and the majority of your points. There is one thing that I have to disagree with:

I will assume that you are using "evolved" in the sense of "evolution", as in the opposite of "creation". Let me state for clarification's purpose that I am not trying to promote creation or attack evolution. Bear with me here.

It is this assumption of evolution and simultaneous mockery of creation that I find absurd. Whether one looks at either belief from a scientific or religious perspective, both theories require that life started spontaneously or by design at some point. Evolutionists scoff at the idea of creationists' believing "god" created the earth in six days (and rested on the seventh) while ignoring the fact that evolution also requires equally spontaneous initiation of life prior to the "scientifically proven?" period of evolution of life.

With that as my foundation, let me get back to my real issue: that of the "evolution" of gender roles. I find the notion that men and women "evolved" and passed through different stages of gender duties and abilities and that now we are to be equalized or even switch roles to be incredible.

What I am driving at are these basic, in my opion at least, questions:

What are the essences of man and woman?
Where did they come from?
If different circumstances throughout human history have required different "survival duties" of men and women, why was the proclivity of men different from that of women?
Have these proclivities really changed?
Our environment may have changed, but have men and women really changed?
If things which are inherently equal, due to whatever circumstances, become unequal, were they ever really "equal"?
Have we really left the proverbial "cave"? Do women no longer need to be protected and provided for?
Are traditional roles for men and women really no longer necessary for the survival of our species? (Most Western countries, thanks in large part to Feminism, are experiencing negative population growth, i.e. they are becoming extinct.)


Until these questions can be addressed and answered to my satisfaction, I am unable to accept the notion of male-female equality. The emperical evidence demonstrates otherwise to me.

If we are going to quibble, AKUUS, - and the offer to us was on the table - the 'cave' issue is a point. It is metaphorical in this context (as caves were just a stop by the less nomadicly inclined who left their colleagues who kept on walking and made lean-to's and huts ). but the phrase "unblocked the entrance to that cave".

It was never blocked. Men didn't block it and didn't 'let women out'. Women had been free to come and go since the beginning (however the beginning came about) and regularly did! Women were no more 'tied to' the home than men were; nor less.

Huh? Who is quibbling? I am emphatically serious. How have the essence of men and the essence of women changed? People just assume two things: 1) Humans evolved, and, therefore, 2) Gender roles should evovle too.

Let me put it another way. It would be interesting to make and compare two lists: 1) Feminized countries and 2) Countries with negative population growth, i.e. that are going extinct. I bet there would be significant overlap. I thought evolution was supposed to be about progress?

If you think my post was just quibbling, then please reread it and ponder my questions.

You may be the first, my friend, but you certainly won't be the last to offer criticism. And for the record, criticism is an integral part of the process I go through to finish a piece. I find yours more credible than most.

On hindsight, I probably could have chosen a better word than "evolved." I am not a religious man, an agnostic, but then again, I am most skeptical of blind acceptance of evolution theory. Simply said, I don't claim definitive knowledge of these things.

My intent was to describe a picture in which our gender roles "arose," out of pure biological programming. And even in that I must admit to conjecture. I don't, nor does anyone else to my knowledge, possess enough direct knowledge of neolithic society to state such things empirically. So I just write what makes sense to me.

I won't attempt to answer those questions except to say that for most of them I don't know the answer. They are damned good questions, though, and would make for a fascinating read if you would offer your take on them.

Thanks for you thoughtful words and I hope to see your comments again as I post more essays.

Paul

Oh, and let me add, I don't accept the notion of equality either. It is clear, for whatever reasons, that the sexes are not equal. What I do accept, with no reservations whatsoever, is equal valuing. And I don't mean that we value women just for what they do according to what we collectively decide is their limits. But that they can and should be allowed to do anything if and when they can keep pace with male competition and without special consideration.

My apologies, AKUUS. I chose the wrong word in a hurry to add a point. I was not meaning to criticise or minimise.

Have a beer.