Intelligent men?

The Introduction to the Everyman Manifesto, a journal of men's issues and interests at www.everyman.org, states: “The 1st duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. …. In the past, most prejudices favoured men over women.”

Think about that:
“In the past most prejudices favoured men over women.”
How could this be, exactly? What maintained these ‘prejudices’ these ‘favours’? If the maintaining force was some kind of natural law would that be ‘prejudice’ or ‘favour’? No, in that case it would be reality, by definition that would not be a ‘prejudice’ or ‘favour’. And if it wasn’t a natural law then what was it and how could it persist so universally for hundreds of thousands of years across thousands of cultures and billions of people?

What the writer means, of course, is something quite different. He means that seeing the world through the eyes of a Westerner around the turn of the 21st century, sex roles have changed recently. Domestic work has been largely automated, medical advances have offset much of women’s reproductive burden, technical and institutional developments have fuelled an extended economy that has all but eliminated poverty and danger in significant parts of the world. These developments have allowed women to participate more extensively in the economy, traditionally men’s area of concern, and this has encouraged a notion of economic equality to develop. Although in all probability these developments have reached a point, in just a few decades, where the host cultures’ consumption has become unsustainable in the longer term the notion of equality has taken such firm root that most people assume it is and always was a universal value. This is despite the fact that the notion is not, as it is mistakenly portrayed, ‘gender equality’ or anything that could be considered a tenable morality, however recent an invention and however careless of the laws of nature, the wisdom of the centuries and the divergence between peoples such a notion may be. There has been no meaningful encouragement of men’s equality in women’s concerns (other than in the slog) as, for example, in life quality measures ranging from longevity to incarceration (my Prove it! post has a fuller list if you are doubtful)

So why doesn’t he put things this way, our Everyman, having committed in the same paragraph to ‘restate the obvious’? Because he believes that historical reality is not a natural and understandable progression of developments but that the reason things were not, then, as he has fooled himself into believing they are now is ‘all his fault’. His species’ success has been facilitated by a tendency to emotionally adopt issues in this way in order to solve them so why stop now? The misunderstood equality concept has a deep resonance with his (and, perhaps more so, her) ancestral tribal instincts, before property rights promoted the concept of ownership and allowed him to develop all that he has now. So he buys hook, line and sinker into the ‘equality’ concept with all its guilty historical implications. A tremendous civilising effort, by men in the building and by women in the motivating of men through their sexual commitment to one man, that made everyone’s lives more comfortable, particularly women’s, is thus turned – in his own mind - into man’s failure, prejudice, chauvinism and wilful exploitation of his helpless and vulnerable victim, woman.

By so misunderstanding his past he threatens his own future. By forgetting the genesis of his success he allows the apple seed of destructive consumption to spread unhindered. Others knew this aeons ago and made sure to warn their successors. But wise as they were they would have known that men can become too conceited to listen. There was only so much they could do.

And so we discover, as they would have known, that the real problem lies somewhat earlier in the paragraph: with the phrase ‘intelligent men’. Not here, not anymore.