LIONEL TIGER
Her colleague at Rutgers is the distinguished professor, Lionel
Tiger. At the same time Prof. Fisher brought out her feminist attack
on men, Prof. Tiger published his 
book
on how men are suffering from her crusade to get women to dominate
men. His book, The Decline of Males is pessimistic. He doesn't
know what to do against the onslaught of feminists like Fisher in his
university and in every university. He begins by giving some examples
of male bashing to show that men have a low image in today's feminist
world. "The Body Shop is a self-conscious international retailer of
cosmetics. It prides itself on environmental commitment,
wholesomeness of commercial purpose, and thoughtfulness about
securing products from benign suppliers. So it was startling to see a
window ad in one of its Manhattan stores featuring a photo of a woman
holding a small mammal with the text: 'Why test on poor defenseless
little animals when they could use my husband?' Imagine if the ad had
said 'wife' instead."
He reviews the film The First Wives Club saying, "The
automatic and virtually universal assumption is that the source of
evil is male. As Molly Haskell has so astutely described, films
provide 
serious
scripts not only for actors but for the millions of women and men
whose lives are expanded or undermined or challenged by the hazily
potent cinematic art form."
Feminists say that men hate women. Men are called misogynist. But the truth is that our culture hates men.
EROSION OF CONFIDENCE AND POWER IN MEN
Tiger writes, "This book is about an emerging pattern. Men and women may not discern it clearly, but the pattern underlies their experiences in industrial society. It is a pattern of growth in the confidence and power of women, and of erosion in the confidence and power of men.
"this book is about ideas. The body of social knowledge and
conjecture conforms
more and more to the female shape. An imprecise but effective group
called 'feminists' has redefined how words may be used or forbidden
to be used in discussing sex. ... They own a certain echelon of
discourse the way medieval churchmen governed Latin or Microsoft's
MS-DOS became the modern universal language of computation and, in
effect, of nearly all formal communication." Hardly anyone believes
in the traditional family. He lists the dramatic changes since the
50s such as massive divorce. He says, "Doing public work to earn
money is more prestigious for women than private activity founded on
affection, such as staying home to take care of children, which bears
a real if tacit stigma of personal inferiority. It is a relatively
rare contemporary woman who relies comfortably on the traditional
pattern. Those who choose it may feel apologetic and that they must
justify themselves."
With so many women having children without marrying and divorcing in such high numbers, "men fade out of the picture. ... These changes have also disenfranchised men from traditional social roles but have not offered many new opportunities. Even the most traditional male specialty -- warfare -- has been aggressively opened to women, with complicated results for everyone. Perhaps their apparent explosion of interest in sports and pornography means that men are trying to find new outlets to express their inherent maleness, which they may feel otherwise obligated to repress."
"In the inexplicit and undeclared war between the sexes, women are on the way to winning, but the conditions of victory may not be agreeable." He says feminists have made laws that push for androgyny: "Underlying much legal change is a largely ideological insistence that boy and girls are roughly the same, and therefore in perfectly equitable communities they will have similar goals, opportunities, and lives."
"It is a sharp rebuke to American complacency that the only
large organization other than the military which has provided an
effective and disciplined community for African-American
men
is the movement led by Louis Farrakhan -- an organization accused of
extraordinary doctrinal bigotry and the misogynistic restriction of
women from many of its activities." There is strength in believing in
patriarchy.
"Communities that violate human sexual nature will experience the same kind of problems that communists had. To try to solve them, communists had to impose their ideology, often viciously, on largely unwilling populations. Remember all that fatuous hypocrisy about communist parties being the people's vanguard (even if the health and morale of those in charge required access to subsidized stores providing tasty foreign food)? And remember the example of the kibbutz, which failed in its utopian schemes about love and families."
He ends 
his
book by calling for Americans to be practical: "sending military
mothers of six-week-old infants to Saudi Arabia in 1991" was
"recklessly impractical." He discounts the "sentimental 'Daddy should
be as involved as Mommy' to the bureaucratically idiotic 'it is best
for children to be in day care or children's houses because it is
better for their psychological development.'" He calls for us to be
"pro-biology" and "pro-family."
WELFARE MOMS
Prof. Tiger is 
well
meaning when he proposes that the welfare reform in Congress is wrong
in pushing single moms into the workplace because it means that some
other strange woman will take care of her kids. He writes, "Another
broad decision the community has to make concerns supplying adequate
support to unmarried women who have small children. This is widely
available now, as we have seen; however, there exists the attitude
that this is not a good thing. Efforts persist to make a mother of
young children leave them -- for example, to take care of another
mother's young children for money. Working for money is seen as
redemptive. Mothering for money is acceptable only if done with an
inheritance or a husband's cash. This is heartless, senseless,
economically picayune as a formal policy and, in my opinion, morally
questionable. It is also stupid biology. No zookeeper would have
Monkey Mother A take care of Monkey Mother B's baby and vice versa.
What can concernocrats be thinking when they devise their legislative
schemes?"
Well, they don't think. Clear thinking is not a the forte of the Left. My wife knew a woman who lived near us who went on welfare. She was in her twenties and had four small children. The government made her get a job while the government paid another woman to care for her children at her home while our neighbor worked for minimum wage at KMart. The government paid the woman more than what KMart paid our neighbor. This is the kind of insanity that bureaucracies inflict on millions of people.
