Cultural Survival Skills

When Girls and Women Were Special in America

Some of us will remember the day when we boys and men were taught that girls and women were special. They were to be respected and protected and treated with great care and kindness.  Though boys and men were to treat other boys and men respectfully and fairly, the treatment was definitely not to be equal between the sexes.

We were supposed to open doors for women, stand up when they entered a room, take our hats off when in their presence, treat them with great gentleness, and avoid harsh language and gestures when we were in their presence. We were to defend their honor and keep them safe

You may remember that if the ship was sinking, it was to be: ” women and children first”.

As a child, I was often instructed by my father that a boy should never hit or treat a girl roughly. I remember when a couple of older girls beat me up when I was a young boy. He let me know in no uncertain terms that I was to stay away from them and that if I fought back, I would be in very serious trouble with him. Later he told me that “A real man” would never strike or “man-handle” a woman.

That is the way the majority of my cohorts and I were raised and acculturated during the 1940’s and 50’s. I am proud of those old cultural rules and they are a  value system that I will take to my grave.

It is now increasingly difficult to hold onto these old ways, but I am hanging on.

I now have women screaming and cussing at me, and giving me the finger, when they do not like my driving. Why is it that women are fist-fighting with other women so often now days? As a professor, I commonly heard women using the “F” word and immodestly flaunting  their sexual equipment at the university. The pornification of all media has been accomplished, though it is still becoming more graphic. Female teachers are molesting their male students children (with relative impunity) and Mothers killing their children with what appears to be increasing regularity. The female prison population is increasing. Hundreds of thousands (millions?) of females display their formerly private, (now called XXX) nooks and crannies on the internet and wherever else they can.

Finally, where did America’s new cultural practice of  purposefully exposing our female citizens to great danger and lethal harm come from? America is now assigning women to fighting ships, to submarine crews, and also to combat teams. We are now preparing to assign females to our elite, most risky, but highly savage and lethal (thank God for them), Navy SEALs and other similar special operations combat units.

Many folks view these gender role changes as a positive cultural evolution. Those opposed to these changes angrily grumble about what they think are the causes: Liberal politics, the Woman’s Liberation Movement, the Pill, increasing employment opportunities, the decline of the family, a reduced respect for mothers and child rearing, and more.

Marvin Harris, the late cultural anthropologist, maintained that many of the recent sex role changes have  had to do with “infrastructural determinism”. By this he meant the ways in which the members of cultures made their livings (hunters, farmers, merchants, technical/information processing, etc.) and the effects that various changes have on families, sex roles, leisure activities, traditions, and religion.  His line of reasoning (which I admittedly over-simplify, abbreviate, and supplement here) was that women were once dependent upon men to do the things that they could not do well (physically protect themselves, lift very heavy weights, fight in hand to hand combat, and impregnate themselves, etc.).

Surrounding all of this was a young America that needed children, lots of them, and someone to stay with the children and look after their physical, emotional, and acculturation needs. Traditionally fathers could help with this, but earning a living normally required upper body strength, endurance, and a special proclivity for risk-taking and aggression that the women (due to both genetics and traditional American acculturation practices) generally were less effective at.

With the opening of  educational opportunities, suffrage, modern commerce, technological advancements, information processing, and professional fields opening to women, their physical and financial dependence upon  men decreased.

In America, World War II began a movement of women out of the home and into the work place. Also, the economics of marriage and child rearing changed dramatically. In the 1970’s double-digit inflation greatly decreased the cost-effectiveness of early marriage, pregnancy, and rearing children to independence. Marriages began to occur later in the lives of young adults and the reproductive rates of average families decreased. As women increasingly joined the work-force, the quality of America’s acculturation of its youth diminished and children’s mental health declined. Marriage and children became materially less advantageous to women and the rate of divorce increased.

At the National, State, and local level, it became more expensive to educate and acculturate our own home-born and home-grown children. It was more cost-effective for all concerned to allow immigrants, already educated and socialized at the expense of other citizens in other nations,  to enter America and supply our human capital needs. The unrestricted flood of  under-educated illegal aliens across our purposefully unguarded borders provided for America’s unskilled labor needs.

This chain of events is descriptively incomplete due to space considerations, and also to the limits to my own knowledge–even after much study. However one (and only one) of the many net results of this causal swirl of events has been the devaluing of women. Women have less cultural value in modern America than they did in the significantly more family, child, and  procreative-centered America of 50 to 60 years ago.

Women are now as expendable as men have historically been.  Historically, it would take relatively few men to populate America, but it would take a great number of women, dedicated to remaining home to rear their children. Now that home-grown children are a major expense and an encumbrance to social and economic success for individuals, families and the government, women can be used as cannon fodder and trained killers. They are expendable.

The children they leave behind to go to work, or  go to war, are also less valued by America than they once were. The dysfunctional, even barbaric, behaviors of increasing proportions of our youth provide glaring and incontrovertible evidence of America’s corrupted values and negligent ways.

It is an astonishing irony that, as our brighter middle class females reproductive rates have decreased, they have increasingly gone to war, or  work, in order to defend and improve their economic condition. As a consequence, they pay their taxes which sustain the least able amongst our female population to remain home in poor environments and have children. These often fragmented and female headed families have increasing rates of birth to children who will be raised in poverty, violence, social chaos and dependence upon America’s welfare system.

This is a disastrous, self-destructive procreational black-hole that will rapidly suck the viability from any post-industrial socioculture.

The forces that drive such massive cultural evolutions are huge, complex and highly interactive.  America, as we have known it, is being swept away by these and other changes not mentioned in this writing.

When did ever-advancing levels of  individual freedom in America devolve into social chaos? Can you  see that social chaos is now leading  to tyrannical levels of governmental control in the face of this chaos, just as world history would suggest that it will?.

An intelligent and ethically sophisticated electorate might help. But its existence, in a sufficient proportion of the population, is uncertain.

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D.  6/23/11