Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site FLAIRMAX.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!decwrl!FLAIRMAX!ellis From: ellis@FLAIRMAX.UUCP (Michael Ellis) Newsgroups: net.women Subject: Re: A NEW MIND Message-ID: <220@FLAIRMAX.UUCP> Date: Tue, 20-Sep-83 08:53:32 EDT Article-I.D.: FLAIRMAX.220 Posted: Tue Sep 20 08:53:32 1983 Date-Received: Tue, 20-Sep-83 17:38:33 EDT Organization: Fairchild AI Lab, Palo Alto, CA Lines: 67 Apologies to those who feel this belongs elsewhere, but I contend net.women is the place for my continued ravings about children, mostly because this group is where men and women frequently discuss topics central to the `women's movement'. Anyway, to continue... Traditional roles for men and women do not exist because of some `male conspiracy' to keep women down. They exist because they've solved the problems of survival and reproduction better than any other social pattern to emerge (yet) -- evolution, pure and simple. A new solution that produced more creative, fertile, vigorous, and open-minded offspring would easily wipe out the old decaying `chauvinistic' paradigm. To date, however, most feminist proposals have been rejected by society at large. Even so obvious an idea as ERA has been shot down largely through the efforts of women themselves! And I believe the women's movement will remain the ineffective force it's devolved into until a satisfactory new solution has been found for the problems of child nurturing. The most popular feminist alternatives are either no children at all -- clearly an evolutionary dead end -- or dual-career send'em-to-daycare-centers marriages, which my experience leads me to believe, breed neglected, emotionally deprived, scientifically produced clones, who, I feel, are less likely to have or even want families. For a movement with the visionary intentions of women's lib to truly succeed, it must produce many happy, well adjusted children. Elitist hardcore libbers may not be pleased, but I'm afraid the time may have come to start treating sympathetic men as equals. I found Todd Schneider's experience (which is hardly unique) with feminism quite to the point... > ...the Centre's volunteers got involved in a Take Back The Night march > which was restricted to women. I raised a fuss about this... and > promptly found myself persona non grata around there. > ... > [I found that] the women's struggle is *primarily* a woman's struggle, > and that my energy, aid or whatever should only be employed to their > ends when enlisted by them. > ... > If the movement really cared about changing both sex' behaviour and > attitudes, it would take on another name that would reflect the > dual-gender concern it supposedly has. How many men out there are going to don aprons and change diapers when confronted with this kind of encouragement? A family model in which men and women share equally in ALL family responsibilities must become the focus of the movement. If you destroy the role of `nurturing mother', you must replace it with an equal or superior alternative. A balanced marriage, with husband and wife alternating between breadwinner/homekeeper is the only solution that comes to mind. And its totally fulfilled parental roles most definitely provide superior examples for children to emulate. This may require the women's movement to split between the most radical, man-and-home hating elements and the more moderate potential mothers. The second group is the only one with anything worthwhile to teach men, anyway. It would be a tragedy if the women's movement were responsible for the loss of that short period in our life (the 1st 6 years) free from the supervision of anonymous bureaucrats, institutions, and `teachers', when it could instead blossom into a `human lib' movement whose purpose is to merge the best of both sexes into total human beings. -michael `John Lennon lives' ellis