Helen of
Troy ~The Woman That Could Turn A
Thousand
Ships~
--------------------------
This article is lengthy, but well worth reading.
It
truly is an eye opener in many areas. It was sent
to me by a friend that I met through one of the
Yahoo clubs.
If the reader is able to identify with any part of
this article then it is doing its job. I wish I had
it prior or at least during the time my children
were growing up. I certainly might have made a
change in the direction of their upbringing.
I also now have some insite as to why I might be the
way that I am and the way I look at things.
Because the article is long, and WebTv users
sometimes have trouble downloading some long pieces
in their entirety, I have broken the article into
three seperate pages. I hope you enjoy this piece.
I know that I got a lot out of it.
God
bless, Shannon
--------------------------
The Immature Husband -- What to Do?
One of the most widespread problems of our time is
that of the immature husband. All too often a good
Christian woman will marry what she believes is a
man
only to find out after it is too late that he is
just
an overgrown boy who never grew up.
There was a time when the wife of an immature male
would suffer in silence as her husband acted
childish,
disregarding his adult responsibilities, misspending
money needed for the home, making excessive demands
for sex or acting silly in front of their friends.
But
now relations between the sexes are changing, and
today more women are taking steps to deal with their
irresponsible husbands.
Why Are So Many Men So Immature?
There are many more men than women in our society
who
have failed to achieve mental and emotional
maturity.
This is due to two broad sets of factors: first,
innate differences between males and females; and
second, differences in the way that boys and girls
are
raised.
Psychologists have documented several important
differences between boys and girls. When children
are
as young as two years old, the girls exhibit more
linguistic aptitude than the boys. This is because
understanding language has to do with understanding
people, and girls of any age are more interested in
other people than boys are. And while girls are
interested in people, boys are more interested in
things; their manipulative attitude toward things
then
tends to carry over to their relationships with
other
people.
By two years of age, the girls' superior verbal
ability is clear. Girls tend to start talking
earlier
than boys, and they do better on early verbal tests
{see Schachter et. al ., 1978 -- references are at
end
of article}. Mothers of two-year-olds then respond
to this difference in verbal ability by talking more
with their daughters than their sons, using longer
sentences and asking more questions [Cherry and
Lewis,
1975]. But this difference in sensitivity to other
people's voices goes back well before the age of 24
months. Newborn girls will cry longer than newborn
boys when played a tape recording of another baby
crying [Hoffman and Levine, 1976; Sagi and Hoffman,
1976]. And baby girls are more likely to vocalize
when
they hear voices than are baby boys. The evidence
suggests that girls are born with an innate
sensitivity to other people, a sensitivity not found
in boys to anything like the same extent.
Boys are basically selfish. Girls play with dolls
because such activity helps them in understanding
how
people behave and interact. But boys are too
self-centered to want to play with dolls. The
closest
boys come to dolls is to play with what the toy
industry calls action figures: little figures of
fictional persons or creatures with which the boys
have imaginary adventures. Girls use dolls to learn
about human relationships, but boys are too
self-centered to use their action figures for any
more
than escapist fantasies. So most of them stay
self-centered as they grow up. Most boys never come
to
understand people the way that girls do.
Nor do they seem to care: preschool-aged boys get
into
fights far more often than girls [Dawe, 1934]. This
is
true not only in the U. S. but also in a wide
variety
of other cultures [Whiting and Edwards, 1973], where
boys consistently exhibit a greater incidence of
three
major types of aggression: playing rough, verbal
aggression such as insults, and physical aggression.
It is a common stereotype that boys are supposed to
be
more physically aggressive while girls are supposed
to
be more aggressive verbally -- more "catty" -- but
this is not the case. The fact is that boys are more
aggressive, both physically, and verbally.
Because of their self-centeredness, boys have more
trouble in school than do girls. All-girl classes
are
usually models of order and obedience. But so many
boys are discipline problems that, in some cities
(like New York), whole subsystems are set up to
handle
them. Boys are usually the troublemakers in class.
One
study of ten cities showed that of students regarded
as problem cases by teachers, there were three times
as many boys as girls. And because boys have more
difficulty adjusting to society -- in this case, the
social order of the school -- they tend to do less
well academically. More than twice as many boys fail
one or more grades than do girls.
The relative immaturity of boys becomes even more
pronounced at puberty. Masturbation is relatively
rare
among teenage girls and is primarily a male
phenomenon. This is because this furtive practice
manifests a lack of self-discipline regarding sex,
and
girls -- being more mature than boys -- are more
successful at maintaining their sexual self-control.
But boys are relatively lacking in self-discipline
of
any kind, and so masturbation is actually quite
common
among them.
Girls are more able to defer gratification in order
to
accomplish a goal. That is what maturity is about:
deferring gratification. Girls are able to
accomplish
more than boys because of their self-discipline.
This
is why girls tend to get better grades in school
than
boys. You can go into any high school, any junior
high, and the average grade for all the girls in the
school will be higher than the average grade for the
boys. This was true in your high school, and it is
true in every public school of today. And it is
because boys lack the self-discipline, lack the
maturity of the girls in their classes. Instead of
disciplining themselves in order to do well in
school,
the boys are seeking immediate gratification through
masturbation.
Alfred C. Kinsey was able to establish that 70 per
cent of teenage boys masturbate while only 30 per
cent of teenage girls ever do. And these figures
actually downplay the difference: girls who
masturbate usually try it only once or twice before
quitting, while boys often make a habit of it,
sneaking off somewhere to masturbate weekly or
sometimes even more often than that. If we count
individual acts of masturbation, it turns out that
more than 99 per cent of them are perpetrated by
boys.
Boys' immaturity makes it more difficult for them to
control their sexual impulses, and then this same
immaturity leads them to blame girls for their own
lack of self-control. This is why boys will say that
one girl or another is "a tease." No girl ever
complains that some boy is "a tease"; girls have
more sexual self-control, and they do not need to
find someone to blame for their inability to control
their sexual impulses. Boys, on the other hand, are
too immature to be comfortable with their sexual
urges, and they are too immature to take
responsibility for their own inadequacies. So they
blame the girls for their own failings.
Girls are simply more moral than boys. This is
because girls have a superior moral intuition that
comes from their potential capacity to bring forth
and nurture new life. It is this superior moral
sensitivity that is behind their early linguistic
ability, their playing with dolls, their sexual
self-control and their generally greater
attentiveness to other people.
This difference between boys and girls then carries
over into adulthood: generally speaking, women are
more moral than men. But this innate difference
between the sexes is also reinforced by the
different ways in which boys and girls are raised.
At first glance it might appear from the psychology
literature that boys are raised more strictly than
girls. Even in infancy, fathers dish out more
corporal punishment to their sons than their
daughters [Tasch, 1952]. This continues through the
preschool years: fathers of boys still resort to
physical punishment more often than fathers of girls
[Baumrind and Black, 1967]. Taken by themselves,
these studies might suggest that parents are more
strict with their sons than with their daughters,
but this is not the case.
The real reason that boys are punished more severely
than girls is because parents increase the severity
of the punishment when the child refuses to
cooperate. Girls acquiesce sooner in what their
parents want and are punished less. Boys are more
rebellious and end up being punished more [Minton,
Kagan and Levine, 1971]. So boys are not punished
more because their parents are trying to be more
strict with them; they are punished more because
they persist in unacceptable behavior more of the
time.
Actually, all the evidence we have indicates that
parents are less strict with their sons than
with their daughters. One can certainly sympathize
with the harried parents who feel themselves
overextended in trying to keep up with their
misbehaving little boys. The easy way out for
parents of boys is simply to demand less of them
than they would if they had girls. This leads to the
establishment of a double standard: one set of rules
for girls and another, looser, set of rules for
boys.
The slogan for all such parents is "Boys will be
boys." This slogan attempts to excuse being morally
lax with boys on the grounds that being strict with
them wouldn't do any good anyway. Unfortunately,
this then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy:
parents who believe that their sons cannot be held
to a strict moral standard find that their boys
fulfill their fears.
This laxity in the moral training of boys often
makes life more difficult for the girls as well.
Teenage boys are often encouraged by their parents
-- especially their fathers -- to engage in
precisely the kinds of sexual activities that would
horrify those same parents if their children had
been girls. The teenage girls are then left to cope
with these undisciplined boys by themselves.
Parental laxity in matters of sexual morality leaves
boys with a selfish attitude toward sex and a
manipulative attitude toward girls. Some of this
comes from the boys' trying to "get somewhere" with
girls on dates. If this behavior is not corrected,
it can lead to the attitude that girls -- and later
on women -- are there to be used. All too often
parents are indifferent to such behavior on the part
of their sons when they would not be with their
daughters. Adolescence should be a period of
learning sexual self-discipline, but a lot of
parents seem to think that such self-discipline is
only for girls.
Many parents tolerate immature behavior in their
sons just because they are boys. They will let their
sons talk about a particular girl as being "a tease"
without correcting them. Being teased is a natural
part of growing up, of learning to control one's
sexual impulses, but too many parents despair of
helping their sons to come to understand this. Nor
do they always intervene when they find evidence of
masturbation. A teenager's problem of self-abuse can
be an excellent opportunity for parents to teach
their child the importance of sexual
self-discipline. When this opportunity is
disregarded, the boy runs the risk of developing an
overriding preoccupation with sex and growing up
with an enlarged sexual appetite that is hard to
keep satisfied without making improper demands on
his spouse and others.
Given the fact that boys are born with an innate
propensity for more misbehavior than girls, there
will always be limits to what parents can do to
instill in them a high moral standard. But not
trying to hold them to such a standard can only make
things worse. Then the boys become adults without
having grown up in their moral development. They
become immature men.
Men are not only immature emotionally and sexually;
they are also immature when it comes to financial
matters. This is due in part to their having less
self-discipline than women and due in part to their
not understanding people the way that women do. Con
artists know this very well [Tanouye, 1992]. Con men
involved in boiler-room operations prefer to deal
with men because they are more gullible than women.
One recurring problem that these criminals have is
that their victim's wife forces him to hang up on
them. This is common enough that they even have an
expression for it: "getting wifed."
Unfortunately it is the men -- the relatively
immature sex -- that is running the world. In
Marilyn French's novel The Women's Room,
fifteen-year-old Mira ponders this strange state of
affairs:
But there was another problem....It had to do with
the transformation of boys to men. Because everybody
despised boys, everyone looked down on them, the
teachers, her mother, even her father. "Boys!" they
would exclaim in disgust. But everyone admired men .
When the principal came into the classroom, the
teachers (all women) got all fluttery and nervous
and smiled a lot. It was like when the priest came
into the room when she was taking religious
instruction: the nuns bowed all the way down to the
floor, as if he were a king, and they made the
children stand up and say "Good afternoon, Father,"
as if he were really their father . And when Mr.
Ward came home from work, even though he was the
gentlest man in the world, all Mrs. Ward's friends
would scurry home and their cup of coffee still half
full.
Boys were ridiculous, troublesome, always fighting
and showing off and making noise, but men strode
purposefully to the center of every stage and took
up the whole surface of every scene. Why was that?
She began to realize that something was awry in the
world.
Because it is men who are at the center of the
stage, the spotlight is on the immature values of
men. Virginia Woolf, in her classic essay A Room
of One's Own, observes that "it is obvious that
the values of women differ very often from the
values which have been made by the other sex;
naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine
values that prevail." Men's inferior values end up
clothed in social prestige, while women's superior
values are discounted. Thus, continues Woolf,
"football and sport are 'important'; the worship of
fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial.'"
Women's concern with fashion reflects their
sensitivity to relationships with others; their
dressing up brightens the day for those around them.
It is something that they do for others. But
football glorifies the self-centeredness of most
men: it celebrates defeating other people as an end
in itself with no higher goal than victory for its
own sake. It focuses on the male's brute strength as
if this were the highest virtue. Fashion reflects a
sensitivity toward others, but football is a ritual
celebration of masculinity. And it is the crudity of
football, not the sensitivity of fashion, that has
the prestige in our society because our society is
run by men.
The fact that it is the men who are in command is in
turn communicated to the next generation, who are in
effect taught by the example of these role models to
consider men to be superior to women. Boys
learn to have contempt for girls; this is
learned behavior that is picked up from our
male-supremacist culture. In a now-classic study
[Smith, 1933], M. E. Smith questioned eight - to
fifteen - year old children on their views of the
relative status position of males and females and
found that boys, as they grew older, had an
increasingly poor opinion of girls while girls had
an increasingly improved opinion of boys. Harvard
sociologist Talcott Parsons has also analyzed this
phenomenon [Parsons, 1947]. According to Parsons,
the boy soon discovers that in certain vital
respects women are considered inferior to men, that
it would hence be shameful for him to grow up to be
like a woman. Hence...[the boys'] behavior tends to
be marked by a kind of "compulsive masculinity."
They refuse to have anything to do with girls.
"Sissy" becomes the worst of all insults. They get
interested in athletics and physical prowess, in the
things in which men have the most primitive and
obvious advantage over women. Furthermore they
become allergic to all expression of tender emotion;
they must be "tough." This universal pattern...is a
defense against a feminine identification.
Since our society is run by men, it is in their
interest for children to be taught these negative
attitudes toward females because they then come to
accept the continuing rule of men in society. Girls
as well as boys are encouraged to believe in male
superiority until all too many females come to
acquiesce in their own subordination. This
acquiescence can go so far that sometimes mothers
even reward their sons' bad behavior because they
see it as masculine. To quote Parsons again: The
mother therefore secretly -- usually unconsciously
-- admires such behavior and, particularly when it
is combined with winning qualities in other
respects, rewards it with her love -- so the "bad"
boy is enabled to have the best of both worlds. She
may quite frequently treat such a "bad" son as her
favorite as compared with a "sissy" brother who
conforms with all her overt expectations much
better.
Of course it is the father who provides the chief
encouragement for the son to engage in macho
behavior, but some mothers are so brainwashed by the
male supremacists that they too sometimes encourage
immoral behavior in their sons. As criminologist
Edwin Sutherland put it in his classic textbook
Principles of Criminology, "From infancy, girls
are taught that they must be nice, while boys are
taught that they must be rough and tough; a boy who
approaches the behavior of girls is regarded as a
'sissy.'" And so the innate difference in moral
sensitivity between boys and girls is reinforced by
the difference in the way the two sexes are raised.
No wonder 97 per cent of the convicted felons in our
prisons are men, while only three per cent are
women
As boys are taught to look down on girls they learn
to be afraid of femininity. We see evidence for this
every day. If a girl decides to walk down the street
wearing a boys' shirt and jeans, no one thinks
anything of it. But a boy would not wear his
sister's blouse and skirt, not even around the
house, because that would lower him to the level of
a mere girl. Consider the two words "tomboy" and
"sissy." Nowadays dictionaries define "sissy" as "an
effeminate male" and note that the word is a
corruption of "sister." Actually, the word (which is
American in origin) was originally applied to girls.
Bartlett's Dictionary of 1859 speaks of " Siss
and Sissy, contractions for sister, often
used in addressing girls, even by their parents."
This lies behind the usage in K. H. Digby's Short
Poems , published in 1865, where we find the
lines "The little one grasping with such a tight
hold, The frock of sweet sissy, herself not too
bold." But over time the word began to be applied to
boys, so that by 1926 an advertisement in the
Ladies Home Journal could admonish mothers
"Dress your boy in 'He-Boy' style. Don't set him
apart from other lads by dressing him in 'sissy
clothes'." So a sissy is a boy who acts like a girl,
either by wearing feminine clothes or by some other
type of girlish behavior.
Now the dictionary defines "tomboy" as a girl who
acts like a boy. So the two phenomena, the tomboy
and the sissy, are really mirror images of each
other. Each is a child who dresses or acts like the
opposite sex. But there the similarity ends. For it
is not an insult to call a girl a tomboy, nor do the
other children tease a girl for being one. But it is
an insult to call a boy a sissy, and children can
take a cruel delight in teasing a boy who is one for
his girlishness.
Why the difference between sissy and tomboy? It is
because the status of women is lower than that of
men in our society, and so a boy sees it as
degrading to be treated as a girl. Most boys look
down on girls, and they pick up this bad attitude
from our male supremacist culture. Women are more
moral than men, but it's still the men who are
running things. And this makes it humiliating for a
boy to have contact with anything feminine or be
treated as a girl in any way. Boys are infected with
a contempt for girls at an early age, and this
contempt tends to grow over time. And so football
becomes important to them but fashion does not.
Talcott Parsons is certainly right in saying that
the reason boys get involved in sports like football
where they have a physical strength advantage over
girls is because they are afraid of femininity. But
the mere fact that such athletic activities are
desired by boys does not explain why they exist.
These athletic programs are very expensive, and
someone has to pay for them. And they are funded
lavishly year after year, even as many legitimate
educational programs in our schools limp along with
inadequate budgets.
The real reason that so much money is being
funnelled into public school athletic programs is
because the men running our society want to
inculcate in children a belief in male superiority.
They want boys to grow up believing that males are
superior to females. They want girls to get the
message that what males do is important, and that
they can do something worthwhile in life only by
fitting into what the males around them want to do.
At a high school football game, the boys are the
center of attention doing the important stuff while
the girls are on the sidelines -- quite literally --
cheering them on. This is a model of how male
supremacists see proper relations between the sexes:
the males are out there doing what is important, and
the females are fitting into a subordinate,
supportive role.
The cost of maintaining this glorification of the
brute strength of the male is not only financial.
Participation in sports is advocated as a healthy
body-builder, but every year hospital emergency
rooms have to treat 300,000 football-related
injuries [Lapchick, 1986]. Damage is most severe
among professional football players: no fewer than
78 per cent of retired pros are burdened with
physical disabilities. The average life expectancy
of retired pro football players is now only 56 years
[Messner, 1990]. This wrecking of human bodies is
ignored only because of the important role that
football plays in reinforcing the myth of male
superiority. And it works: in our society, Super
Bowl Sunday has achieved the status of a national
holiday.
Football is also a health disaster at the college
level, as Dave Megessey observes in his
autobiography Out of Their League: "Young
men are having their bodies destroyed, not
developed. As a matter of fact, few players can
escape from college football without some form of
permanent disability. During my four years I
accumulated a broken wrist, separations of both
shoulders, an ankle that was torn up so badly it
broke the arch of my foot, three major brain
concussions, and an arm that almost had to be
amputated because of improper treat ment. And I was
one of the lucky ones."
Even if there were no significant injuries from
football and other sports, these activities would
not provide boys with rational physical education.
Public school physical education programs are
supposed to make boys healthier, but their long-run
effect is just the opposite. Boys are trained in
sports that they cannot for the most part remain
active participants in for more than a few years. By
the time that they turn 30, they are no longer
players and are relegated to watching the sports
activities that were to keep them in shape. The
training of teenage boys in these sports programs
causes them to self-destruct into couch potatoes,
spending endless hours watching sports events on
television. About the only exercise they get from
their favorite sports is in their jaws as they munch
bag after bag of chips while sprawled in front of
the TV.
This outcome could be avoided if coaches and
physical education teachers were to train boys in
activities that they could continue to participate
in throughout their lives. Perhaps the ideal choice
for this purpose would be dancing. Boys could be
taught to dance beginning in the seventh grade.
Classes could include the girls rather than be
segregated by sex.
The first year of such a program could concentrate
on basic dances done at parties. This would help the
boys to be more at ease socially and more
comfortable with the opposite sex. Then the dances
taught could become more complex and demanding until
in high school the students would receive an
introduction to the kinds of dances performed in
ballroom competitions. The same approach could also
be used in the extracurricular athletic program so
that students would compete on the dance floor
rather than on the football field. There would be
fewer injuries, and the cost of operating the
program would be far less, freeing up funds for
other school programs.
Such an approach to physical education would be much
more rational than the system in place now. But
there is one reason why it has not been adopted: in
a dance class, the boys do not have any real edge
over the girls. For the real purpose of physical
education and athletic programs is to teach students
that males are superior to females. Boys are taught
to look down on girls, who can't p lay football the
way they can, while girls are taught to look up to
the football-playing boys. And so the emphasis is on
activities which reward strength and height, because
boys tend to be taller and stronger than girls. The
male supremacists that run our society wouldn't want
it any other way.
Male Supremacy is in
Decline
Over time there are getting to be more and more
people -- both women and men -- who see the need for
men to accept the moral guidance of women. In the
course of human history this is a quite recent
phenomenon, one which started only with the
Industrial Revolution
We live in a society in which the morally inferior
sex, the males, are in control. But this is only a
carryover from an earlier stage of society when men
were more useful than they are now. Men tend to be
larger and stronger than women, and their brute
strength is their chief advantage. Back before the
Industrial Revolution, women were dependent on men
because their strength was necessary in order to be
able to eat. But then came the machine age, and
physical strength started to become progressively
less important until today most factory jobs require
less exertion than being a housewife did 150 years
ago. Of course, there are still jobs which require
great strength, and perhaps there will always be a
few such jobs, but the fact is that there are fewer
of them every year.
As work in our society has evolved away from any
requirement of great physical strength, women have
become less dependent on men for economic survival.
But the dead hand of the past-- in the form of male
control of society -- is still with us. And so we
live in the age in which many women are chipping
away at the old male-dominated order and preparing
to establish their own order on a higher moral
plane.
A second factor which traditionally kept women at
the mercy of the inferior sex was the need to have a
large number of babies. Mortality being what it was,
a technologically primitive tribe needed women to
generate a steady stream of babies just in order to
survive; at any one time in such a tribe most of the
women of childbearing age would be either pregnant
or nursing. Even in the early years of our country,
it was necessary for a woman to give birth to about
eight babies in order to ensure that two of them
would survive to adulthood. (See An Economic
History of Women in America by Julie A.
Matthaei.) Such an intensive preoccupation with
baby-making left women in a weak bargaining position
vis-a-vis the men, but now advances in public health
and medicine have reduced the time needed to
reproduce the population and have freed women to
assert themselves.
There is also a third and final factor which has
worked to keep women down: war. Because the women
were so desperately needed to produce the tribe's
next generation, the responsibility for fighting
fell to what anthropologist Margaret Mead has called
"the expendable sex" -- the men. A tribe could go on
if it lost some of its young men, but its very
survival could be in question if it lost very many
young women. But as the men came to monopolize the
fighting, there were severely negative consequences
for the women.
One obvious consequence was that the men controlled
the weapons and were therefore in a position to
intimidate the women. But there were other, more
subtle, consequences as well. One was that the men
began to go off by themselves, spending time
together with no women present. As they did this,
they began to develop the belief that they were the
important sex and that women didn't matter. What had
begun as the expendable sex was now claiming that it
was the only sex that had any value.
Armed with weapons, unified by male social bonding
and inspired by the beliefs they had invented about
their own superiority, the men then took over
society, freezing the women out of any
decision-making role. Collectively the men ran the
affairs of the society as a whole while individually
each man was to dominate his wife.
The men instituted procedures to reproduce male
supremacy in subsequent generations. They developed
initiation rituals for the boys to introduce them to
what they called manhood, a concept based on
military values. There were to be no initiation
rituals for girls, and this fact was enough by
itself to inculcate in the boys a belief in their
own superiority. Anthropologist
Peggy Reeves Sanday comments on these masculine
values in her book Female Power and Male
Dominance: "The male role is often defined as
what the female role is not. If female activities
are associated with the qualities of reproduction,
male activities are associated with the opposite
qualities. As femaleness is linked to fertility and
growth, maleness is linked to infertility and
death."
War is still with us today and will continue to be
with us for as long as men rule the world. In fact,
it is the chief ideological justification -- apart
from religion -- still available to men who wish to
assert their superiority over women. This is why
male supremacists are so adamant that women not be
drafted and that they not be allowed to participate
in combat. There is no good reason for such policies
now that women need not have as many babies as
before; it's just that some men are looking for a
justification for their continuing control of
society.
Apart from the male glorification of war and the
continued survival of male supremacist forms of
religion (among which should be counted the cult of
football), there are no longer any major obstacles
to the recognition of the superiority of women. And
even those two remaining obstacles can be defeated.
