The New Left is trying to replace Sexual Complementarity with Angrogyny - Peter Myers, July 30, 2001; update February 1, 2021.

Write to me at contact.html.

You are at http://mailstar.net/engagement.html.

June Singer's claim that Androgyny is the Guiding Principle of the New Age comes close to the mark.

This is the idea that the individual human contains both sexual poles, instead of just one. It's the basis of the Unisex movement (unisex hairstyles, unisex toilets, unisex character-traits, abolition of complementary roles in marriage).

Compare this with Egyptian art, which depicts male & female figures in conjunction - unity obtained through the coming together of two sexes. Or the yin-yang symbol on the Korean flag: its basic idea is that, although each sex contains the germ of the other, it is through their harmonious mingling that unity is obtained.

The idea of Androgyny underlies the push for "Gay Marriage".

Androgyny was also a theme in early Soviet culture (before Stalin).

H. G. Wells proposes (in his 1906 essay Socialism and the Family) that the individual, not the family, be the basic unit of society, and that the state take over the parenting role, paying women to have children.

Dennis Altman, Professor of Politics at Latrobe University in Melbourne, says that Gay Liberation aims not just at freedom for gays to live as they wish, but to change the majority culture, in recognition that we are all androgynous.

Bronislaw Malinowski debates Robert Briffault on the Anthropology of Marriage: marriage-malinowski.html.

Facts of Life - how to have a home birth and how to rear children.

(1) The West is the new Soviet Union - the bastion of Marxism & Zionism it was meant to be before Stalin wrecked the plot
(2) Restoring Sexual Polarity
(3) Trotskyism and the Unisex Movement
(4) Communal Childrearing in Israeli Kibbutzes
(5) Arianna Stassinopoulos, The Female Woman
(6) Penelope Leach, Children First
(7) Hair, the Musical - the Anal/Androgyny theme
(8) Androgyny as Guiding Principle of the New Age, by June Singer
(9) Heterophobia: The Feminist Turn Against Men, by Daphne Patai
(10) Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, by Daphne Patai
(11) Dennis Altman on Gay Liberation
(12) Socialism and the Family, by H. G. Wells
(13) Melanie Phillips' book The Sex-Change Society - "a devastating attack on androgynous public policy"
(14) Feminism's debt to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
(15) Unstable modern partnerships affecting the birth rate - Bettina Arndt
(16) The West's move to Matriliny, and its justification in Anthropology and Archaeology
(17) The Civilized way of Birth
(18) Facts of Life - how to have a home birth and how to rear children
(19) Sex and Marriage
(20) Caesarean birth and Mother-Infant Bonding
(21) Michael Jackson a Role-Model for Androgyny - Brother Nathanael Kapner

(1) The West is the new Soviet Union - the bastion of Marxism (Trotskyist/Fabian/New Left) & Zionism it was meant to be before Stalin wrecked the plot

Behind Feminism, Gay Marriage, the World Court, and the Kyoto Protocol lies a revamped Communist movement. Being anti-Stalinist, it does not wear the Communist label, and instead disguises itself behind a multitude of single-issue lobbies.

There IS a need for Environmental Limits, but the One Worlders are using this as an excuse - a surrogate issue - to push World Government.

The Trotskyist/Fabian version of Communism is alive and well. Open-border immigation, casual relationships treated as equivalent to marriage, sex war, parents afraid of being "dobbed in" to the government, children equal to parents and the property of the state ... the wreckage of family life was brought to the West from the pre-Stalin period of the Soviet Union. We did not recognise it as Communist simply because we identified Stalin's modifications as Communism.

Max Shpak shows that "Neoconservatism" is actually a kind of Marxism, coupled with Zionism. It's only called "conservative" on account of its opposition to Stalinism. It demonises the Russian people because of their resistance to Jewish domination.

The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism", by Max Shpak, May 15, 2002: jewish-emigration-ussr.html.

In the early (Trotskyist) period of the Soviet Union, marriage was abolished, polygamy was abolished (this mainly affected the Islamic cultures of Central Asia), and homosexuality was legalised. Stalin restored marriage, gave advantages to married women over unmarried women, and made sodomy a crime.

The Marxist Cultural Revolution, begun in the West in the late 1960s, has taken the West down the path pioneered by the USSR. This change was engineered by the New Left, which had substantial non-theistic Jewish leadership: new-left.html.

One must distinguish between the theistic and non-theistic Jews in this respect.

To understand the change wrought by New Left, one needs to know the Marxist theory of the history of relations between the sexes. It may be expressed as follows:

<<Marriage as we know it arose only a few thousand years ago, when men enslaved women, making them their private property. Before that, descent was matrilineal, and a woman's children were supported by her relatives, no matter who the fathers were. Generally, the fathers were unknown. A woman had one or more husbands or lovers at a time, discarding them as she tired of them or fell out with them (or as they died). When this system was restored in the USSR, the state took over the role of the relatives, in looking after a woman's children. The woman joined the workforce, and the children were looked after in childcare centres.>>

On the implementation of this policy in the Soviet Union see sex-soviet.html.

H. G. Wells, a closet Trotskyist, advocate of One World, wrote of Marriage and the Family:

"Socialism, if it is anything more than a petty tinkering with economic relationships is a renucleation of society. The family can remain only as a biological fact. Its economic and educational autonomy are inevitably doomed. The modern state is bound to be the ultimate guardian of all children and it must assist, place, or subordinate the parent as supporter, guardian and educator; it must release all human beings from the obligation of mutual proprietorship, and it must refuse absolutely to recognize or enforce any kind of sexual ownership. It cannot therefore remain neutral when such claims come before it. It must disallow them." (Experiment in Autobiography, Gollancz, London, 1934, vol. ii, p. 481).

Wells' "socialism" is quite different from what I mean by that term.
More from Wells: opencon.html.

Likewise Bertrand Russell. He wrote, in In Praise of Idleness (London, Unwin Books, 1973):

{p. 35} All this would be changed if it were the rule, and not the exception, for married women to earn their living by work outside the home. ... {p. 36} The problem is to secure the same communal advantages as were secured in medieval monasteries, but without celibacy ... {p. 37} The separate little houses, and the blocks of tenements each with its own kitchen, should be pulled down. ... There should be a common kitchen, a spacious dining hall ... All the children's meals should be in the nursery school ... Fram the time they are weaned until they go to school, they should spend all the time from breakfast till after their last meal at the nursery school ...

{end quote}

Teenagers in the West are totally turned against religion, and their parents, by the music & Hollywood TV shows that fill their minds. Schoolteachers teach them about sex & contraception, but not about marriage. They begin to have sex (mostly) around the age of 16 or 17. Many leave home around 18 to 20, especially to escape parental control. By the age of 20, many have a double-bed, even if living in their parental home. Even if they are still at their parents' home, they occasionally have a boyfriend or girlfriend sleep the night with them. Their parents can do nothing to stop this.

The West is the new Soviet Union. People like me are the new dissidents.

I am no prude, but I believe in marriage, because it's for the long-term rearing of children. However, I don't believe that husbands & wives should be each other's private property. We all need to love more than one other person, and this may include sexual love, although not at the price of marital instability and divorce.

Is my position hypocritical? No - there's always been a certain amount of sex outside marriage. But to make that the norm, in place of marriage, to treat "relationships" as the equivalent of marriage - in effect to abolish marriage - that is another matter.

As social breakdown proceeds, desperation will force us back to the essentials of life. We'll be looking for ways to re-establish family ties, and the bonds between men and women.

I use the word "engagement" because it implies a dialectical relationship, in which neither side can control the other, but neither can do without the other.

The New Left always offered the prospect of easy sex but that has turned out to be a chimera: there's now a terrible, sad, coldness between the men and women of my baby-boomer generation. Since we've cast our traditions off, and the New Left has reached the end of sanity - offering "Gay Marriage", something not found in any prior society - we must break free of the New Left.

That will mean, in part, re-institutionalising marriage. Whilst institutions may be oppressive, they can also be liberating. Arranged marriages in traditional societies have often been happy, despite current ideologies to the contrary.

We need to distinguish between relationships oriented at having children, and those just between the partners. To this end, we must stop treating defacto couples with children, the same as married couples with children.

Marriage is an relationship where each sex dominates yet serves the other, in a relatively secure arrangement but short of actual ownership of the other person. The security of the arrangement has meant that marriages often survive an affair, while defacto relationships (based on more possessive boyfriend-girlfriend ideas) do not.

New rules for relationship between the sexes might just "evolve"; but a lack of suitable rules may, itself, be creating a gulf between the sexes, distance in place of closeness, aloneness, sterility & abnormality through the lack of fulfilment. The sexes exist in relation to each other ... we live for each other: we are each other's delight. The delight is suggested by the old euphemism for sex, as "knowing" another person.

The pornography and prostitution industries distort that delight. The problem with pornography is not the displaying of the body, but the separating of the body from the personality, the turning of sex into a purely mechanical act devoid of deep contact between two persons. Modern prostitution is conducted in factory-like settings with customers paying high fees by the half hour; what kind of meaningful contact can occur in such a rush?

Each culture produces its own male and female personalities. For each to take delight in the other, we must pay much more attention to the way we prepare boys and girls for their later lives as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.

Society needs to distinguish between having a boyfriend or girlfriend, and having a husband or wife. Having children should not be done wantonly. The 50s was cruel, but now there's been an excess the other way, and it's especially bad for kids. Girls have been led to embrace single motherhood as a "lifestyle choice", and society has got to shock them out of this fantasy.

Unintentional pregnancy is one of nature's (or God's) ways of keeping the species going. But all human societies have instituted marriage, because that's best for children.

Under Lenin & Trotsky, the USSR abolished marriage - that's the situation we're in now, and we might as well learn from the USSR experience. Stalin brought marriage back in, and gave married women privileges over unmarried ones.

There's no shame in adopting out; it need not be surrounded in secrecy. In traditional societies, one relative will look after (adopt) another's child, but there will be no attempt to isolate the birth mother - she becomes a sort of aunty.

Polygamy can be preferable to divorce.

(2) Restoring Sexual Polarity

Before Feminism, there were two sexes (male, female), and two genders (masculine, feminine).

Now, we are told that despite what nature gives you, you can remake yourself as any sex/gender you wish. You can be gay, or lesbian, have a sex-change to become a man or a woman. Your chromosomes can't be changed, but everything else can.

So, we are told, sex & gender are no longer a polarity but a continuum. There is only one sex - we are all androgynous.

Some thoughts on choosing a spouse

The choice of a spouse is largely about choosing character traits. As friends influence one another, so your spouse will influence you, usually for a long period of time.

One way to change one's life is to choose friends who are like what you want to be. Their company will move you in that direction. Similarly, choice of a spouse will shift your character.

You and your spouse pool your characteristics; as a result, each becomes more like the other. If you and your spouse have very similar characteristics, the effect will be minimal; if different, there will be more variety in the common pool, and more opportunity for each to change.

You should try to choose a spouse with certain admirable features - admirable to you - so that the character change induced by your marriage will be mutually beneficial.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on being a father

from his book Tao: The Three Treasures {I was never a Rajneeshi, and I will be ridiculed for displaying his writings, but Rajneesh makes more sense than either the Protestants who hounded him, or the "intellectuals" offering "Gay Marriage"}.

"When you love a person, many many times you will have to hate him too, but then it is part of love. A father loves his child, but many times he will be angry also and he will hit and beat the child. But a child is never offended by anger, never. A child is offended when you are simply angry without any cause, when you are destructive without any cause. When a child cannot understand why, then he cannot forgive you. If he can understand why - he has broken a clock - he can understand that the father will hit him, and he accepts it. In fact if the father does not hit him he will carry the guilt and that is very destructive; he will continuously be afraid that some day or other it is going to be known that he has broken a precious watch or a clock or something, and guilt will be there and a wound will be there. He wants to be cleared of it, he wants it to be finished, and the only way it can be finished is that the father becomes angry - now everything is in balance. He committed something wrong, father became angry, he is punished. Things are finished. He is clean. Now he can move unburdened.

"In the West, because of the psychologists of this century, much absurdity has happened in the relationship between the parents and the children. And one of the absurd things that they have taught is: never be angry with your child, never hit him, never hate him. Because of this teaching, parents have become afraid. It is something new. Children have always been afraid of parents. But in America parents are afraid of children. They are afraid that something may go wrong psychologically and then their child may be crazy or go mad or become schizophrenic or split or neurotic or psychotic - something may happen in the future, and they will be responsible. So what is happening? A father, if he loves the child, feels the anger - but what does he do? He suppresses the anger. and that a child can never forgive, because when a father suppresses anger, the anger becomes cold. ...

"When a father is really hot, perspiring, red in the face and hits the child, the child knows that the father loves him, otherwise why bother so much? When a father is cold, sarcastic, not angry, but in subtle ways showing his anger, in cold ways, the way he moves, the way he enters the house, the way he looks at the child or doesn't look at the child, this coldness shows that the father doesn't love him, doesn't love him enough to be hotly angry.

"And that has created the generation gap in the West. Nothing else" {Volume 1, Book IV}.

Bronislaw Malinowski, The Father in Primitive Psychology

{ W.W.Norton & Co, NY 1927; Malinowski was one of the pioneers of fieldwork Anthropology, famous for his studies of the matrilineal Trobriand Island people of Papua New Guinea, who allow unmarried girls sexual freedom, but still institutionalise marriage.}

'In all this the role of the husband is strictly laid down by custom and is considered indispensable. A woman with a child and no husband is therefore, in the eyes of tradition, an incomplete and anomalous group. The disapproval of an illegitimate child and of its mother is, then, a particular instance of the general disapproval of everything which goes against custom. ... The family, consisting of husband, wife, and children, is the standard set down by tribal law, which also prescribes to every member a rigidly defined part to play.' {p. 84}

'Paternity, unknown in the full biological meaning so familiar to us, is yet maintained by a social dogma which declares: "Every family must have a father; a woman must marry before she may have children; there must be a male to every household."' {p. 85}

E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Position of Women in Primitive Societies and in our own

in his book The Position of Women in Primitive Society and Other Essays in Social Anthropology {Faber & Faber, London 1965; Evans-Pritchard was another pioneer Anthropologist}.

"Now, I suppose that among those things that first strike a visitor to a primitive people is that there are no unmarried adult women. Every girl finds a husband, and she is usually married at what seems an unusually early age. ... in a society with a primitive technology and economy, running the home is a whole-time occupation, to which is added the care of small children ... The primitive woman has no choice, and, given the duties that go with marriage, is therefore seldom able to take much part in public life. But if she can be regarded as being at a disdadvantage in this respect from our point of view, she does not regard herself as being at a disadvantage, and she does not envy her menfolk what we describe as their privileges. She does not desire, in this respect, things to be other than they are; and it would greatly puzzle her if she knew that in our society many women are unmarried and childless." {p. 45}

The above quotations from leading Anthropologists show just how great is the Trotskyist revolution against human nature, wrought in the West through its Radical Feminist and Gay arms. This does not mean that women can't have careers and jobs, but it does suggest natural limits to "modernist" social-engineering. Third-world feminists have rejected the lesbian separatists from the West. In the Anglican Church, Africans and Asians defeated the push by Bishop John Spong & co to equate homosexuality with heterosexuality: http://barque.freeyellow.com/lambeth.html. People in third-world countries, less brainwashed by the Trotskyists and their NGOs, are increasingly defeating the latter in world forums, e.g. UN conferences.

This poster from a Canberra shopping centre shows what the Trotskyists have done to our women: dspwomen.jpg.

The "Stalinist" Governments of China, Vietnam, Cuba, Zimbabwe etc have no truck with the Trotskyists, seeing them for what they are. China's isolating of the Trotskyist NGOs at the 1995 UN World Women's Conference was an important defeat for them.

Michael Leunig, Thoughts of a Baby Lying in a Child Care Centre

"I can't believe it! My own mother - who I want to be with more than anything in the world; my mother - font of all goodness and warmth, dumps me in this horrendous creche. I can't believe it."  leunig-baby.jpg.

For this cartoon, Leunig was branded a misogynist (The Melbourne Age, April 29, 2000); the original cartoon, published in 1995, was reproduced in the above issue of The Age.

A Letter to this site - from someone I will call "P":

'Have you ever done any martial arts? Often an opponent can be beaten more easily by going with his flow rather than going directly against him. Many feminist and anti-family proponents can be beaten more easily by accepting their apparent lack of rules, rather than trying to impose rules. Their apparent (but not real) belief in personal freedom can be used to show that feminism is based on hypocrisy and many of its adherents are merely bigots.

'Your idea of including polygamy as an alternative legal form of marriage is a good example. After all, if society is so keen to have diversity in marriages, why should we discriminate against polygamy? I am willing to bet a number of feminists, gays, and hard-line socialists would find it anathema to their agenda, and therefore show they are not truly in favour of marriages without rules.

'A similar case can be put for abortion. Here is an unrefined argument. If it is "women's bodies, women's right to choose," then logically it must be "men's bodies, men's right to choose" in terms of child support. But let's not be sexist, after all feminism is *supposed* to be against sexism: the situation really should be described as "parent's bodies, parents right to choose", so men should be able to choose to have the (yet unborn) child, so long as they are willing to look after it and pay for any costs involved. What of the mother who bears the child. She ought to have an equal choice, but no stronger than that of the father. The "politically correct" folk are constantly telling us that pregnant women are not prevented from doing anything they want to do. Feminism suggests that pregnancy is irrelevant to a woman's performance at work. So a woman can carry the child for the father and hand it over to him at the end, if that is what he wants when she doesn't want the child.

'In another issue, feminists' push for women in the military is more interestingly exposed by forcing the issue of front-line conscription for women, and using gender equity arguments to allow no gender segregation of wartime tasks.

'There are many other areas where feminism can be shown to be a pack of cards supported by premises which must remain unspoken. We can expose the underlying assumptions and politically correct bigotry by continuing further in the direction of "gender equity" rather than fleeing to religion or the rigidity of old right-wing thinking.'

P is a true Taoist, without knowing it. In suggesting that polygamy be allowed, however, I am quite serious. After wars, for example, there's often a shortage of males; in China today there's a shortage of females. These imbalances are no problem if polygamy is allowed, with strict bans against harems for the rich. At present China is cracking down on men having multiple wives, because that only worsens the sexual imbalance. As for the jealousy, that's partly a matter of culture; in Islamic societies, apparently it is not a problem. A Vietnamese Australian told me that in Vietnam after the war in 1975, there was such a shortage of men that polygamy was common; further, an older wife unable to have sex with her husband any more does not face divorce - he can take a second wife. Polygamy in such cases is much more sensible than divorce: better for the first wife, and better for the children. The New Left's hostility to polygamy is very deep, and an unadmitted carry-over from Christian puritanism. That puritanism has led New Leftists to advocate Gay Marriage, even while opposing polygamy. Whilst the New Left is very big on Nature, it denies and "reconstructs" Human Nature.

There is a mysogenist tinge to the Gay movement, a preference for the security of one's own sex to deep knowledge of the other; it is no accident that English boarding-schools, modelled on the Gymnasia of Ancient Greece, produced a Gay subculture. This is the problem with excessive segregation of the sexes; excessive familiarity in our mixed schools would probably not be the problem it is, were Hollywood & the pornography industry brought to heel. Pornography is quite different from the beautiful sexual paintings and sculptures of previous civilisations: the former should be banned and the latter promoted; puritans can't tell the difference, and even use the former to discredit the latter.

The in-your-face style of the Gay movement seems to have alienated today's teenagers. Therefore, it would be foolish to ban the Gay Mardi Gras & Gay Games: they drive many more people away from identifying with them, than to their cause.

(3) Trotskyism and the Unisex Movement

The Unisex (Androgyny) Movement ultimately denies that there are TWO sexes; it's really saying that there is only ONE, that the apparent differences between the sexes are superficial or illusory; this is the meaning of its promotion of sex-changes. The idea that there are five or six "genders", rather than two "sexes", is a way of saying that sexuality is a continuum, a linear thing, rather than a polarity.

The Unisex movement arose from within the Communist movement, even though Marx and Engels themselves saw homosexuality as bourgeois decadence (see sex-soviet.html), a product of alienation between the sexes. Since Stalin made sodomy a criminal offense, the Gay movement can be identified with the anti-Stalin faction, with Trotskyism. The Trotskyist organisations Socialist Alliance, the Democratic Socialist Party, the International Socialist Organisation etc, still make "Gay liberation" a core part of their ideology.

Dennis Altman, a Gay Jewish academic who made a name for himself when a Lecturer at Sydney University, does not explicitly call himself a Trotskyist, but in his book Homosexual he writes,

'Women's, gay and now men's liberation are embarked on a revolution that is so unlike our traditional concept of revolution that we tend not to recognize it for what it is. It is hardly surprising that old and large sections of the new left fail to relate to these developments. I quote from a mimeographed sheet distributed during the Washington convention by a group called the International Socialists whose views are typical of many: "Newer movements like Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation are growing fast - but big sections of both are more and more into consciousness-raising. Nothing wrong with this in itself - but it isn't matched by a real growing power of these movements"' (p. 213).

As a Lecturer in Politics, Altman must have known that the International Socialists are Trotskyist. The divide in the Left between the Old Left and the New, is basically that between Stalin and Trotsky. So deep and bitter is it, that no Stalinist quotes Trotskyist literature approvingly, or lists any of Trotsky's books in a bibliography; any politically knowledgable person who quotes Trotskyist literature approvingly or authoritatively can be assumed to be a Trotskyist sympathiser, even if not a member of a Trotskyist organisation.

One can learn to read Newspeak if one has the right dictionary

To identify a Trotskyist writer, one must know the tell-tale clues, in particular the accusation that during the 1930s the USSR was lapsing into fascism, sexual repression or counter-revolution. Such accusations are made, for example, by Wilhelm Reich in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, where he writes, "In 1935 it was clear that the development of the Soviet Union was about to be stricken with a severe misfortune. ... They failed to go back to the genuinely democratic efforts of Engels and Lenin ... " (p. 209).

The back cover of Alix Holt's book Alexandra Kollontai reads "Alexandra Kollontai - the only woman member of the Bolshevik central committee and the USSR's first Minister of Social Welfare - is known today as a historic contributor to the international women's movement, and as one of the first Bolshevik leaders to oppose the growth of the bureaucracy in the young socialist state." Decoded, this "opposition to bureaucracy" means that she was on Trotsky's side.

Numerous New Left writers, claiming alliegance to a synthesis of Marx with Freud, make statements like those above. The New Left is so Trotskyist, and its brand of Communism so pervades our minds and culture in the West today, that we cannot see that the fall of the USSR was not the fall of "Communism" at all, but only the fall of Stalinism - and to the hardcore Trotskyists, he was just another Hitler, the one who stole their conspiracy from them.

Germaine Greer came under Trotskyist influence, but grew out of it. In her first book The Female Eunuch she wrote, "Hopefully, this book is subversive ... the oppression of women is necessary to the maintenance of the economy ... If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible. ... The most telling criticisms will come from my sisters of the Left, the Maoists, the Trots, the I.S., the S.D.S., because of my fantasy that it might be possible to leap the steps of revolution and arrive somehow at liberty and communism without strategy or revolutionary discipline" (Paladin edition, p.21). The I.S. are the International Socialists, a Trotskyist group; by "the Trots", she probably meant the Socialist Workers' Party, now renamed the Democratic Socialist Party.

John Lennon donated money to a Trotskyist group.

The following report, dated March 2, 2000, is from a Trotskyist website which, unlike most, has a civil tone: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/lenn-m02.shtml: "A former agent for the British Security Service (known as MI5) has alleged in a sworn statement that the agency received reports from a high-level spy inside the Workers Revolutionary Party during the late 1960s. The ex-agent, David Shayler, is currently living in exile in France, where he has fled to escape prosecution for his exposure of state secrets. In his February 18 affidavit, Shayler asserts that the spy provided MI5 with reports of financial support given by John Lennon to the WRP."

John Lennon's philosophical song Imagine can thus be assumed to reflect Trotskyist utopianism.

Imagine, the Trotskyist anthem by John Lennon {my comments thus}

Imagine there's no heaven {no religion}
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries {world government}
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too {i.e. official Atheism - suppression of religion}
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace... {peace = world government}

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one {world government}

Imagine no possessions {communism}
I wonder if you can {John certainly had plenty}
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world... {open borders, one world government}

You may say I'm a dreamer {Your son Julian certainly thought so}
But I'm not the only one {A whole generation has been led astray}
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one {world government}. {end quote}

Lennon's philosophy may sound idyllic, but he's a Pied Piper. Young people are led astray by people promising "a good time" and "living for the present", as in the story of Pinocchio.

Lennon's son Julian complained bitterly about John's lack of care for him. The following news item, Julian's poignant message, is from the Sydney Morning Herald of December 8, 2000, at http://www.smh.com.au/news/0012/08/entertainment/entertain6.html.

'London: Julian Lennon, the son of murdered Beatles star John, has bared his soul about the death and spoke of the anger he felt about the breakdown of his relationship with his absent father. And in a message timed to mark the 20th anniversary of the shooting, he told how John was a "guiding light" who was "sucked into a black hole". ... In his 500-word statement, 37-year-old Julian spoke of how his father lived with him and his mother Cynthia for only a few years. "After that I only saw him a handful of times before he was killed. Sadly, I never really knew the man," he said.'

Julian would have been 17 when John died - yet John only saw him a handful of times in all those years. So much for the Messiahs of Trotskyism.

In criticising John Lennon, I will be branded a total reactionary. I do agree that he was a great musician - the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Bee Gees made beautiful music, from which heights, sadly, rock music descended to the depths of punk, heavy metal, rap, and satanism.

The album cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) included sorceror Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) at John Lennon's insistence:

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/occult-figures-20130912-2tla9.html

Occult figures

Artists cast a wicked spell as popular culture embraces all things supernatural, mystical and demonic

By John McDonald

Sydney Morning Herald, 14 September 2013

Perhaps the sealer for Crowley's second coming was his inclusion on the album cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), at John Lennon's insistence.

{endquote}

John Lennon stated that Crowley was included because of his "Do what thou wilt" philosophy:

https://ac2012.com/2012/08/05/aleister-crowley-myths-actually-true/

Top 10 Crowley Myths which are actually true

[...] Most people are quite aware of Aleister CrowleyÕs censored appearance on the cover of Sgt. Pepper among the BeatlesÕ other heroes. Few, though, have gone on to ask why Aleister Crowley made the cut. John Lennon made the connection clear in an interview with Playboy when he said that "The whole Beatle idea was to do what you want, right? To take your own responsibility." Lennon was paraphrasing "Do what thou wilt," which is one of the central precepts of Thelema, the religion founded by Aleister Crowley. Thelema is the Greek word which means "will" and teaches that we each must discover our individual inmost nature, described as the "True Will."

The Beatles were only the first of many counterculture rock musicians in the 1960s to openly cite Aleister Crowley as an influence. Led ZeppelinÔs guitarist Jimmy Page was very interested in Aleister Crowley and he remains a prominent Thelemite today. We have even recently learned that Frank Zappa was reading Crowley in 1968.

{endquote}

What kind of sex happened in the rock scene? Drunken sex with strangers. Drugged sex. Mindless sex. Non-volitional sex. Sex one regretted in the morning. Unplanned pregnancy. Marriages made in Hell, which spawned a new generation of orphans. Marriages made on the basis of fleeting sexual attraction, rather than long-term suitability.

Marriage is for children, not parents; parents sacrifice themselves for their children. Marriage is for lineages over time, by which society is structured; this is why arranged marriages often work. Abolishing marriage, we stopped shaping our boys and girls in preparation for it. Girls grew up knowing dolls not babies, witnessing neither birth nor death. In childcare, we replaced parental love with impersonal "professional" expertise, taught via college courses by "qualified" people often lacking the same first-hand experience as their students. In "mental health", we replaced religion with psychiatric drugs. The Sydney Morning Herald of July 16, 2001, reported, "Sixty per cent of people who visit general practitioners have a mental disorder, according to a groundbreaking study of 46,000 patients". Implying, of course, that they need mind-changing drugs: the lesson, perhaps, is, "don't visit general practitioners".

People have been having sex for millenia: in every culture, they have sex, both in and out of marriage. Beautiful sex. Aware sex. Jolan Chang's book The Tao of Love and Sex, drawing on ancient sources, is far better than any modern sex manual. The New Left's idea that through rock music a superior kind of sex was available, was an infantile delusion. The "Stalinist" governments branded the rock scene "bourgeois"; along with jeans & other Western exotica, it became part of the underground movement undermining those regimes in the name of "freedom". But now that they have "freedom", they wish they had some order as well.

Today's rock music has a frenetic quality; and in rock dancing, the partners do not touch each other. Whereas rock music is jarring, folk music and folk dancing are melodic and graceful; they are traditional, i.e. they look to the past (whence they come), whereas rock music lives only in the present.

Siegmund Levarie (formerly Professor of Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York) on Noise as the new barbarism:

"Noise has emerged as the standard bearer of the forces rejecting civilization ... The new barbarism, with its pre-musical, precivilized worship of noise, glissando, and indistinct pitches, offers no vision and denies natural and artistic norms." glass-bead-game.html.

Millions of children have been deprived of their fathers by Radical Feminism's attack on the family. Trotskyists had a big influence on that movement; here's a Feminist poster of the Democratic Socialist Party in Canberra: dspwomen.jpg

It's the "stolen generation" we dare not mention, a reckless social experiment for which we are about to pay.

Trotskyism is all around us; we only need to learn to see it: sex-soviet.html.

The Communists I know are not bad people: they just don't understand what Lenin & Trotsky were really up to, because the truth was kept from them. My communist acquaintances believe that China stopped being Marxist when Deng Xiaopeng took over; they uniformly opposed him, and their NGOs are trying to undermine the government there, in UN "Women's" conferences, "Green" Reports trying to undermine the economy etc. The sides have changed: the great danger is now in the West itself; China and Russia are a barrier to World Government.

How to Speak Newspeak

In 1997, I enrolled in the Dip. Ed. course at the University of Canberra. On March 26, we were given a lecture on Gender policy. The lecturer stated that it was wrong to say "good morning, ladies and gentlemen" or "good morning, boys and girls", because this language is not "gender inclusive". Instead one must say, "good morning, people".

The lectures were recorded on audio cassette, for the benefit of absent students. A transcript showed that the lecturer stated, in answer to questioning from me, that the reason it is wrong to say "good morning, ladies and gentlemen" is because "the Education Department has a policy on gender inclusive language". He further stated, "I am saying that if I said, 'good morning, ladies and gentlemen', that a number of people would complain about it, and have previously."

Nobody mentioned the Five (or 6 or 7) Genders, but everyone in the class of 200 presumably knew that the Lecturer was thinking of the rights of the Other Three (or 4 or 5) Genders. If only I had thought to ask him whether, on his logic, schools need more than two kinds of toilets. Unable to endure this indoctrination for nine months, I quit the course, and sent a copy of the tape to The Canberra Times; one commentator mentioned it in his column, noting that the tape bore out my account. I also sent a copy of the tape to Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald; he commented, "they're brainwashing our teachers". Of what value, then, is a degree or diploma in Education?

I have since remained unemployed; better poverty with dignity.

The Canberra Times published a letter from me attesting the above, on Sunday July 6, 2002. I checked its Letters page every day for the next week, but the University did not reply, even though its reputation was on the line. Clearly, the University could not reply, because my account was true.

You mustn't say "Ladies and Gentlemen"

I have now placed the first 6 minutes 41 seconds of the lecture on the internet, where I draw out from the lecturer the reasons for his prescription. You can hear for yourself how new schoolteachers are being brainwashed in Trotskyism.

Many who have been to university before will be shocked to discover how they have changed; it's a clear example of the Thought Police in action.

For Windows users: gender.mp3; to download: gender.zip. Allow a few minutes for it to play.

The Rulers in George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 say:

(From George Orwell, George Orwell: Animal Farm, Burnese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up-Or Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Secker & Warburg/Octopus, London, 1976)

"We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares to trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm." (p. 898; p. 215 in the Penguin paperback, Harmondsworth 1955).

" ... a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words ... excluding all other meanings ... This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings." (p. 917; p. 241 in the Penguin).

"What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods' (p. 921; p. 246 in the Penguin).

"History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. ... A great deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed." (p. 924; p. 250 in the Penguin).

It's incorrect to say that George Orwell's book 1984 is about Nazism or Communism. It's set in Britain in the future, AFTER Nazism & Communism. And it's based on INGSOC, the acronym for "English Socialism". This is the ruling system in Oceania, i.e. the Anglo-American block.

O'Brien's Inquisitor says to him,

"Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. They were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths ... And yet after only a few years ... The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. ... In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind." (p. 889; pp. 203-4 in the Penguin paperback).

This passage proves conclusively: Orwell is warning us NOT about the SOVIET UNION but about OUR OWN SOCIETY. Here. Now. In the novel, 1984 is the year the Dictatorshgip becomes entrenched:

"In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or in writing." (p. 917; Penguin p. 241).

"In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings." (p. 924; Penguin p. 250).

Dissolving Sexual Polarity

Trotskyists, and the New Left (which, I argue, is inherently Trotskyist), reduce people to mere individuals, dissolving all polarities including the sexual one. Thus women should have the same life as men, and be freed from marriage.

They even wanted to break the tie between mother and children, i.e. children would be reared not by their mother, but by professionals. This is one of the most sinister aspects of Trotskyism; see Sex in the Soviet Union: sex-soviet.html. Kibbutzes in Israel did the same.

The domestic home, in which the mother cooks for the family, would be replaced by the "mess hall", in which just a few people cook and wash up for hundreds. I have lived in such circumstances: (1) in Catholic seminaries, from 1966 to 1969 (2) in work camps of the Hydro-Electric Commission in the remote west coast of Tasmania, in 1980. They are ok in such situations, but no substitute for the domestic hearth. Everyone needs parents; the anonymous "state" can't be one's parents. To attempt such would amount to rearing all children as orpans, in orphanages. What nerve the Trotskyists had, to attempt to impose such a system.

Anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis wrote in his book Millenium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World (Viking Penguin, New York, 1992):

{p. 125} The ancient Egyptians believed that a totality must consist of the union of opposites. A similar premise, that the interaction between yin (the female principle) and yang (the male principle) underlies the workings of the universe, is at the heart of much Chinese thinking. The idea has been central to Taoist philosophy from the fourth century B.C. to the present day {p. 126} and is still embraced by many Chinese who are not Taoists. Nor is the idea confined to the Egyptians and the Chinese. Peoples all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, have come to the conclusion that the cosmos is a combining of opposites and that one of the most important aspects of this dualism is the opposition between male and female. {endquote}

From the Tao Te Ching

"When the great Tao is lost, spring forth benevolence and righteousness. When wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites. When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents. When a nation is in confusion and disorder, patriots are recognized." (chapter 18)

Dr H. C. Coombs on Feminism

- from Coombs: midwife to the University adviser to the Nation

by Rosemary Mayne-Wilson

Australian National University News, July 1974

{p. 5} However I don't know that I altogether go along with the request for a course in women's studies. It may be interesting to study in itself but I don't like to think of it polarising men and women'. ...

'But although I sympathise fully with the women's movement I don't like to see the extremist women's groups wanting power and to be like men. I realise that they, like other oppressed groups, may see the holding of power as the only way to bring about changes, but I hope it is only a transitional phase. I would rather see more attention in our society paid to what might be called 'feminine' characteristics or values - tenderness, concern for others, kindness, sympathy - ideally found in both sexes.

{endquote} coombs.html

(4) Communal Childrearing in Israeli Kibbutzes

(4.1) Israeli ideal ends as last kibbutz opts for a return to family values

By Patrick Cockburn
Canberra Times, Sunday July 27, 1997 {sourced from The Independent}

BARAM, Northern Israel Saturday: "We changed because we were the last one left," says Yacob Zohar, 67, as he laments the abandonment last month by his kibbutz at Baram in northern Israel after 50 years of one of the more radical social experiments of the 20th Century.

"We did not fail," he said. "It was a wonderful way of educating children."

Since 1949 the children of the kibbutz, the Israeli communal village, at Baram in northern Galilee have been reared together in special children's houses and not by their parents.

Tsvi Benayoun, the kibbutz's economic manager, says: "Children lived together and performed all activities together from the age of eight months until they entered the army.

"I was a long sustained - and by no means unsuccessful - attempt to bypass the nuclear family as the centre of a child's life. Instead, children were expected to give their first loyalty, not to their parents, brothers and sisters but to each other and to the members of the kibbutz as a group."

After prolonged and angry debate, Baram, a prosperous community of 566 adults and children just south of the border with Lebanon, last month became the first kibbutz out of 250 in Israel - many of whom once brought up their children together - to abandon the system.

For the first time this month the children sleep at home and the neat four-bed rooms in the children's houses are empty at night.

Many kibbutzniks argued against the decision, seeing it as a final surrender of the original ideal of the kibbutz, whereby property, work and living arrangements - including the rearing of children - were all organised collectively.

"The prestige of the kibbutz movement has fallen a long way since its height in Israel and abroad in the 1950s and 1960s. Started in 1909 by soialist Zionists it was once een as producing the prototype Israeli - part pioneer-farmer, part-soldier - who lived in an egalitarian comunity and was ready for any sacrifice in pursuit of the common good.

It was a Utopian vision with deep roots in the European intelligentsia which inspired generations of foreign teenagers to labour in kibbutz orchards for minimal return.

The reality was always different. Many of the kibbutzim were built on land Palestinian farmers had worked before. In 1949 Mr Zohar says he was brought to northern Galilee "although I had never seen a cow before". When he asked Israeli government officials how much land he could have they told him: "As much as you can see."

Bhere had been a Palestinian Baram, now a field full of ruins, with only its Maronite church surviving. Abu Yusuf, 85, recalls how as a young teacher he saw "the Israeli army come here and put a white flag on the church. Then they gave us 48 hours to leave the village for two weeks. We slept under the trees."

The Palestinians were never allowed to return. In 1953 they watched from a neighbouring hilltop as Israeli planes bombed their houses into rubble.

The kibbutzniks were nationalists as well as socialists. But their idealism was genuine. {end}

(4.2) First closure signals dwindling of the kibbutz ideal

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Sydney Morning Herald, May 16, 2001 {sourced from The Guardian}

For years, numbers have been dwindling at the Mishmar David kibbutz south of Tel Aviv, in common with most of the other 278 kibbutzim in Israel. Mishmar David will shortly become the first kibbutz to be disbanded. It will be a historic moment, in Israel and beyond.

Although only a small, and steadily decreasing, minority of Zionist settlers or Israelis ever lived on one, "kibbutz" -"collective" in Hebrew - was the essence of e socialist-Zionist ideal of collectivism and egalitarianism. Its appeal extended far beyond the Zionist movement. Anyone of a certain age brought up in a progressive home, Jewish or not, will remember the aura surrounding the very name.

For young people from Western countries, a summer on a kibbutz was a rite of passage, and even Jews on the Left who were detached from Zionism revered the kibbutz ideal. With all his mixed feelings about Israel, Noam Chomsky continues to speak affectionately of the kibbutz, and the British socialist historian E. J. Hobsbawn has said that the klbbutz was a purer form of collective society than anything achieved in Soviet Russia.

Such fondness always involved a degree of evasion. Those who live in kibbutzim always denied they were colonial, insisting they were progressive, socialist and indeed anti-colonial. That is not how it seemed to Palestinians nor to a radical like Israel Shahak, a "non-Zionist Israeli". He says the official Left of Labour, unions and kibbutzim excelled in the pretence that there need be no conflict between a Zionist state and Palestinians, but were the first to discriminate against Arabs.

{Shahak wrote, "... the kibbutz, widely hailed as an attempt to create a Utopia, was and is an exclusivist Utopia; even if it is composed of atheists, it does not accept Arab members on principle and demands that potential members from other nationalities be first converted to Judaism. No wonder the kibbutz boys can be regarded as the most militaristic segment of the Israeli jewish society." (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, p.7) shahak1.html}

Leaving those charges aside, there is more to the dwindling of the kibbutz idea than colonialism and anti-colonialism, or even the struggle between Jew and Palestinian. Kibbutzniks complain that Likud Povernments have diverted money to the settlements. But the truth is also that people have been voting against the kibbutz ideal with their feet.

Those who do stay are ever less enthusiastic about the principles of communal living and payment according to need rather than status. Shalom Nakar, an Iraqi-born member of Mishmar David complains "there is more ego and less togetherness, and less social life together, fewer people come to committees to discuss important things. They prefer to watch television". That is true of society anywhere in the industrial or post-industrial West.

And yet this goes beyond the triumph of television, consumer society or capitalist greed. Collectivism once exerted a thrall far beyond Jewish socialism.

Kibbutzim epitomised the Zionist attempt "to create and shape the Isaeli-born Jew as a new kind of Jew", in the words of the Israeli scholar Yaron Ezrahi.

In this attempt, the kibbutz came to mean not merely socialist production and collectivist agriculture, but collectivised family life and socialised child-rearing. Parents saw almost nothing of their own children, boys and girls were encouraged to think of the kibbutz itself as their parent, and the most despised values were individuality and privacy.

In that heyday of collectivism, as Ezrahi says, Zionist ideology waged war on the whole Western liberal tradition of individual rights and personal destiny. What he calls a heroic collective national narrative rejected "the solitary self, the lyrical personal voice of the individual".

But such collective narratives are passing out of fashion across the world, just as they are in Israel {end}

(4.3) Uproar over kibbutz sex crime claims

Ciaims of rape and child abuse have shattered the utopian imaae of Israels kibbutzim, writes Sam Kiley in Jerusalem
The Australian, January 23, 2001 {sourced from The Times}

ISRAEL'S kibbutzim, once championed as among the few socialist successes, has been exposed as a hotbed of rape and child sexual abuse after a young academic sued the collective system in which he grew up.

The revelations of sex crimes in Israel's 260 secular and 15 religious kibbutzim, parents allegedly covering up abuse of their own children, have sparked outrage in Israel.

The uproar was triggered by Nahshon Golatz, 31, who grew up in Kibbutz Ruhama. He has filed a suit against the state of Israel and the Kibbutz Movement, which was started by early Zionists - many of them refugees from Eastern Euroean pogroms who wanted to live up to the ideals of Marx and Engels.

He alleges he was the victim of a grotesque human experiment in which, with thousands of other children, he was an unwilling guinea pig. The idea "to create a new human being while injecting new, imaginary content into basic concepts such as parents, home, money, work, land" has left him incapable of love and bereft of any abilities as a father, he told Israel's Haaretz daily newspaper, prompting a national debate.

Until the 1980s, most kibbutz children were taken from their parents soon after weaning and raised in dormatories. They spent a compulsory few hours a day with their immediate families and were told to see all kibbutz members as step-parents or near-siblings.

As a result, says Mr Golatz: "Inside I'm a cripple." His complaints have been compared by the movement's defenders as the equivalent of "suing your parents because they were poor".

The Kibbutz Movement has stopped collectivised child rearing, but Mr Golatz's attack has led to far nastier revelations.

The latest statistics from the Haifa area's rape crisis centre show 71 complaints were received from kibbutz women and girls.

They included allegations of gang rape, incest and other forms of abuse affecting females aged three to 30. No incident was reported to police.

Women's advocacy groups say the problem is nationwide, with one in three women being sexually abused, and trafficking in women commonplace. The difference, they insist, is that those abused on a kibbutz are living in an environment close to a religious cult, which prefers to cover up the ugly realities of life.

Kibbutz Movement executive director Gavri Bar Gil said he was horrified by the revelations, but insisted at the weekend that the incidence of abuse was probably lower than in society as a whole.

He added: "We have to reform ourselves ... we have to recognise that we have been closed so for many years and that anything could be covered up."

Mr Golatz also says his only contact with a babysitter at night, when he had bad dreams, was through an intercom. Now scores of people sald they still shudder at the sight of an intercom - a form of contact that has left them psychologically scarred. ... {end}

(4.4) And on the seventh day

By Ze'ev Chafets
Sydney Morning Herald, March 20, 1999, in the Good Weekend magazine section

... Haogen is one of Israel's most prominent kibbutzim: the idealistic Jewish communes that for decades represented a simple collective life based on agricultural toil. Now here it was, selling linen. More than that, it was selling it on the Sabbath. ...

"These days it's live and let live - every man for himself," Ruth says. "Truthfully, I don't look out for my neighbours any more." ...

Long-time Socialist orthodoxies, such as equality of income, are out. Flexibility is the new watchword. This flexibility has done more than brighten balance sheets; it has ensured that the kibbutzim are now on a collision course with religious fundamentalists.

From the pork-sausage plant at Kibbutz Mizra in Galilee to the Sabbath-busting amusement park operated by Kibbrah in the Judean hills, kibbutzniks or residents, are doing lucrative business suplying the public with things the rabbis don't want them to have. As a result, the capitalist kibbutzim have become, for the rabbis, public enemy number one. They have been thrust, quite unexpectedly, into the middle of a cultural battle that, paradoxically, may prove to be their salvation. ...

Once, the kibbutz was a venerated institution.

"We were like monks," says Benny Katznelson, whose cousin Berl is said to have been a co-founder of Labour Zionism, with Ben-Gurion, at the turn of the century. "Monks are the purest distillation of Christian behaviour, and even less religious Christians admire and aspire to be like them to some degree. That's what we were for Israeli society. We led by example. People looked up to us." ...

On the kibbutz itself, agriculture has long since been replaced as the only source of income. The top kibbutz industries are tourism and plastics. High-tech is on the rise. Where once kibbutzniks argued about the legitimacy of employing outsiders, today Palestinian factory workers and Thai farmhands are commonplace.

Fifteen years ago, for example, 70 per cent of Kibbutz Shefayim's income came from agriculture; today less than 30 per cent does. Shefayim's residents used to live off its rich soil. These days they are getting rich off its location, just 20 minutes north of Tel Aviv, where it has hotel, a water park, a wedding hall and a large shopping mall. This is a kind of socialism that only a capitalist could love, wholly devoid of the poetry, romance and idealism of earlier generations. It aims at creating not values but net worth.

Once the model kibbutznik was a patriotic pioneer-farmer - a rifle in one hand and a hoe in the other. ...

The kibbutz has long ceased trying to produce New Jewish Men and Women. ...

As the Arab-lsraeli conflict limps along, the fight between democrats and theocrats has emerged as Israel's most divisive and emotional issue. In Jerusalem, morality posses have assaulted women they consider immodestly dressed. In the small town of Pardes Hanna, when ultra-Orthodox rabbis set up a school, non-religious residents responded by trying to burn It down. Most Israelis, according to polls, feel increasing hostility towards the religious Right.

Of course, this enmity is mutual, and kibbutzniks have historically been special targets. Several years ago, Rabbi Eliezer Shach, spiritual leader of Degel HaTorah, a leading theocratic party, castigated them as "goyim, eaters of rabbit and pork". At the time, the attack seemed anachronistic, even silly; the kibbutzim were still caught up in a Garbo-like withdrawal from the public arena. But lately it seems that Rabbi Shach's words may have been prescient.

More than 100 kibbutzim now operate businesses - from antiques shops to amusement parks - that are open on Saturdays. This is mostly a question of opportunity and geography. On the Sabbath, city shops are generally closed by municipal laws. Kibbutzim, however, are subject to no such restrictions. Saturday is the day most Israelis are free to spend with their families. As a result, kibbutz malls are so packed that there often traffic jams coming off the highway. Around the country, Saturdays now account for half the income that Kibbutzim derive from commerce. This makes the kibbutz the most visible, and vulnerable, transgressors of the sabbath.

The Netanyahu Government has sought to prosecute kibbutz enterprises under a social-welfare law that guarantees all Israelis a day of rest on their respective Sabbaths. The Ministry of Labour has interpreted this as a prohibition against Jews working on Saturdays and it has dispatched non-Jewish inspectors to fine those who do business on the Sabbath. So far the kibbutzim have successfully challenged these fines in court on the novel grounds that the government can't prove that the offending employees are Jews. But last year, under pressure from the rabbis, Netanyahu increased fines and promised to step up enforcement.

For the kibbutzim, this is a genuine "cause", the first in a generation. "What's happening on Saturdays is not just an effort to deal a death blow to our economies," says Avshalom Vilan, head of the Kibbutz Artzi Federation. "It's part of an Orthodox war to change Israel into a fundamentalist State." Vilan gets dozens of calls and donations each week from mainstream Israelis who see the kibbutzniks as the natural leaders in the fight against religious coercion. {end}

(5) Arianna Stassinopoulos, The Female Woman, Fontana/Collins, Glasgow 1974.

{p. 11} Whether we regard the Women's Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a movement that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships - whether or not it is dangerous, it is certainly offensive and it needs exploding. My total rejection of Women's Lib may surprise those familiar with Greek society. The road from tradition-bound Athens to 'infidel' Girton would seem to lead naturally towards the Women's Liberation Movement. I grew up in a society which Women's Lib must regard as a patriarchal purgatory - a baby-crazy land, a land where the position of the unmarried woman is precarious, a land where dowries still predominate and where every husband's chief ambition is to be able to display his economic prowess by removing his wife from her job. Having seen a rigid traditional and discriminatory society in action and then plunged into the self-consciously progressive world of an English university, I was the obvious, enthusiastic recipient for the Women's Lib message. An outraged rejection of the society I came from, and a whole-hearted espousal of the Women's Lib ideology, would provide a very tempting, fashionable and self-righteous justification for my departure from its norms. Instead, I found Women's Lib repulsive: I felt that Women's Lib was not simply a movement for the fuller emancipation of women, it was not concerned only with expanding the freedom and opportunities which English and American women already have, relative to their Greek counterparts. It is not a movement calling for equal opportunities, equal pay, equal status for woman's

{p. 12} role in life, in fact as well as in law; instead it attacks the very nature of women and, in the guise of liberation, seeks to enslave her.

I have no doubt that there is a great need to combat the prejudice and social conventions that still impose on women a purely traditional role which conflicts with the changed economic and social conditions. But this is the domain and plea of emancipation. Liberation makes claims and demands that go far beyond this; it completely rejects the 'otherness' of men and women and seeks to abolish all differences between them. All such differences are defined as harmful, as inflicted on women by men, and as the result of social conditioning, never of inherent factors and qualities. It is a short step from such beliefs to advocacy of sexual politics, of bitter conflict between men and women. Men are defined as the enemy, not as human beings to be persuaded, but as an adversary to be fought. I found and find this introduction of the language of politics and conHict into the realm of personal relationships between the sexes utterly objectionable. Equally objectionable is the contempt the 'liberated' elite shows for the great mass of 'unliberated' women, and for all distinctively female qualities, attitudes and values. Their contempt for these specifically female qualities stems from their belief that these qualities are totally incompatible with the intelligence and self-reliance that, for them, are the paramount virtues. The truth is that there is no contradiction between femaleness and independence; between femaleness and self-realization; between femaleness and intelligence - today's female woman integrates and fuses these qualities without strain, without inner conict. The 'female woman' is not an abstract concept derived from a grand theory. There is no stark dichotomy here, as there is between the liberated super-woman of the Women's Lib Utopia and the women we see every day - the idea of the female woman is an extension of what we are and does not involve the favourite sport of Women's Lib, the denigration of women as they are today:

{quote} The adult voman has already established a pattern of

{p. 13} perversity in the expression of her desires and motives 2vhich ought to fit her for the distorted version of motherhood; it win not disappear if she is allo7ved alternatives. Any substi- tuted aim is likely to be fonoved in a 'feminine' way, that is, servilely, dishonestly, inefficiently, inconsistently. {Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, MacGibbon & Kee, London 1970, p. 65} }

... a lifetime of camouflage and idiotic ritual, full of forebodings and failure. ... {ibid., p. 85}

... all human (as distinct from biological or reproductive) pursuits interesting or uninteresting, [are] designated male territory. ... {Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, Rupert Hart-Davis, London 1971, pp. 186-7}

Sexual politics obtains consent through the 'socialization' of both sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role and status. ... The first item temperament involves is the formation of human personality along stereotyped lines of sex category ('masculine' and 'feminins') based on the needs and values of the dominant group and dictated by what its members cherish in themselves and find convenient in subordinates: aggression, intelligence, force and efficacy in the male; passivity, ignorance, docility, virtue and ineffectuality in the female. {ibid., p. 26}

None of these is meant as a description of a small, odd atypical group but all are applied in their entirety to most women. If you are an average female reader of this book, you are seen by the leaders of Women's Lib as perverse, servile, dishonest, inefficient, inconsistent, idiotic, passive, ignorant, and ineffectual. The moral excuse for this display of contempt and derision is that women are not responsible for their condition; Women's Libbers can safely revile all other women by portraying them as the victims of a male-dominated society. Whatever the excuse, these remarks reveal a deep contempt for women, and for all concepts of womanhood which differ in the least from the Women's Lib ideal. Indeed, they despise the present world of women so much that their Utopia could not possibly incorporate any part of it. After all, who would wish to preserve what

{p. 14} is valued by a group so perverse, servile, dishonest and ignorant?

Of the insulting characteristics ascribed to the female by the Libbers - passivity, ignorance, docility, virtue, ineffectuality - one, virtue, seems out of place. Yet it is very clear that Women's Lib regards virtue, altruism and sacrifice as signs of weakness, as the marks of a slave mentality. It weighs up the world in terms of sheer utilitarian egotism. 'Ultimately the greatest service a woman can do her community is to be happy' - much like Adam Smith's butcher. The 'pursuit of happiness' rides again, but now harnessed to the needs of a more passive, sedentary group. Even marriage is seen not as a deep human relationship but as two separate individuals consuming two separate meals of 'satisfaction' - as utility for two. Altruism is neatly disposed of by a piece of crude reductionism: all unselfish acts are really selfish since they are performed to appease one's conscience, to enter into a commercial arrangement of favours and counter-favours, to please a person who is so close as to be an extension of oneself. Altruism in their view is inauthentic, but what is worse, it is less satisfying than selfishness. The ideal which is to replace altruism is the autonomous, calculated search for individual self-realization - relationships are seen simply as an aspect of the individual's egocentric fixation. This crude view of ethics underlies their concept of society as a whole as well as of specific personal ties; it leads them to see the relationship between the sexes purely in terms of confrontation. The hard egoism of one group is pitted against the newly awakened self-interest of the other. Beyond the struggle lies a diffuse harmony, characterized by a vague love for mankind, and uninterrupted by more intense feelings for particular individuals. The harmony is rarely depicted, but the struggle is painted in all too vivid colours.

The Female Woman parts company with Women's Liberation because of the fundamental qualitative difference between liberation and emancipation. Liberation is not an extension of emancipation: it is not merely a furthering of

{p. 15} women's legal, social and political rights in society. Emancipation insists on equal status for distinctively female roles. Liberation demands the abolition of any such distinctive roles: the achievement of equality through identical patterns of behaviour. Emancipation means the removal of all barriers to female opportunities - it does not mean compelling women into male roles by devaluing female ones. It means adults freely choosing the way they run their own lives - it does not mean children being brought up without any clear models to follow. It refuses to allow the State to set out deliberately to alter the early upbringing of children so as to enforce greater sameness between the sexes. The fanatical dolls-for-boys-and-engines-for-girls brigade should be firmly resisted, and children allowed to grow up as boys or as girls, without being confused and cross-pressured by interfering liberators. Of course there will always be individuals unable or unwilling to fit into the commonly accepted male and female patterns of behaviour. Society must firmly recognize and accept their right to diverge from the norm.

It is curious that the Libbers, who in all other contexts are solely concerned with the individual, exalt the group when it comes to dealing with opportunity and performance. Emancipation demands that all individuals must have access to equal opportunities. The liberators want all groups to perform equally well. The believers in emancipation recognize that there are innate differences between men and women but stress that an individual's opportunities cannot be formally determined in advance by group characteristics - this is our test of whether discrimination is present or not. The believers in liberation deny that any innate differences exist and declare that unless there are equal numbers of men and women in all jobs and at all levels, discrimination must exist. If women are to be equally represented in all occupations, they must be compelled to adopt all male values and repudiate whatever they have in them that is 'different'.

With the arrogance of their detached intellectualism, the Women's Libbers fail to draw a distinction between an exciting career and an average, run-of-the-mill, nine to five job.

{p. 16} They become so intoxicated with their own vehemence against the roles of woman as wife and mother that they endow any job outside the family with the qualities of non-stop fascination that very few jobs do, in fact, possess. In idealizing institutionalized work, they seem to yearn after a kind of security that comes from the familiar routine of conventional masculine work. This is not only wrong in itself - it is also a peculiarly anachronistic sentiment at a time when there is a move away from manufacturing towards service industries. In such a service society, expressive roles acquire a much greater irnportance. In any small group, whether the family, an expedition, or the work unit, both instrumental and expressive leaders are needed - one pushing to get things done, the other holding the group together. Traditional manufacturing industry has had far more use for instrumental qualities and instrumental leaders, but in a society geared to the sale or provision of services, the emphasis will shift. The nature of the work, the size of the work group, the needs of the customer, client or recipient, all change and expressive qualities become far more important: it is these qualities that Women's Lib derides as distinctively female and that emancipation recognizes and encourages.

Liberation is a doctrine of mass egotism - emancipation stresses individual fulfilment, but it recognizes that this is best achieved within a framework of relationships and secure mutual expectations. Liberation is only concerned with the individual's frustration at not fulfilling his full potential- it ignores the fact that in prosperous societies, the most important growing problem is not frustration, but meaninglessness. Increasingly, the unfulfilled individual is not someone prevented from doing what he wants, but someone who suspects that nothing he wants or can do is really worthwhile. Historically, emancipation, by presenting women with a wider choice of life-styles has weakened the security of having one definite pattern to follow. One index of the new uncertainty and the loosening of group ties that inevitably accompanied these new freedoms, has been the steady rise in the female suicide rate since the end of the nineteenth cen-

{p. 17} tury. The male rate has, overall, remained steady at a higher level, reflecting the man's even greater, but relatively unchanging degree of uncertainty and potential social isolation. The result has been a steady narrowing of the gap between the two rates. Perhaps when the two meet, we can say that women are as 'emancipated' as men and that the degree of choice, freedom and variety they enjoy is essentially similar. This does not mean that their roles will be identical, merely that they will have to make equally demanding and complex choices between competing roles. Men will remain men, and women wiU remain women, but their maleness and femaleness will be expressed in a bewildering variety of ways.

Liberation involves a qualitatively different challenge to the individual's sexual identity that would precipitate a chronic state of anomie for both men and women. This acute sense of insecurity, as specific expectations of behaviour from men and women become blurred, would create a pattern of diffuse anxiety, of a general sense of meaninglessness. To the question 'Who am I?' an individual would no longer even be able to reply: a man, or a woman.

A favourite tactic in argument of experienced Women's Lib casuists is to compare woman's position in society with that of 'other deprived groups' - the poor, the blacks, slaves, untouchables. Although women considerably outnumber men in all industrial societies, Women's Lib, in a new arithmetic all of their own, regard women as a deprived minority group. The success of the movement seems assured - women wield the strength of being in the majority and yet gain all the rhetorical power which accrues to the underdog by being thought of as a minority. The strategy for success advocated by many of the more radical Women's Libbers is to team up with other minorities in a grand coalition of the under-privileged. It is difficult, though, to see why these real 'underclasses' should feel a sense of solidarity with women as a group, for their social situation is totally different. The comparison merely gives the Women's Lib movement an added spurious radicalism, an easy access to the rhetoric of

{p. 18} inequality and deprivation.

If women remain an underclass in industrial societies, they must be the only such group that lives longer, owns more wealth and enjoys more deference than its oppressors. In general, in modern societies the upper classes live longer than the middle classes who in turn live longer than the working classes and all successfully outlive the poor and destitute. This is especially true of America, where the whites considerably outlive the blacks. Ironically, the converse is true of men and women, for the poor downtrodden woman can expect to outlive her male oppressor by several years. Recently, one of the pioneers of women's education who was prevented by the regulations of the time from taking her degree at the end of her examinations at Oxford, was given an honorary M.A. by the university at the age of 1OO - all the men who graduated when she should have done have long been dead.

Another index of how inappropriate the rhetoric of inequality is when applied to women is that they own collectively over half the wealth of the richest country in the world. In part their ownership is nominal, the titles of the wealth being in their names for tax purposes. But few oppressors would place their wealth in the hands of the oppressed in this dangerous fashion. Middle-class widows in America may not be merry but they are one of the wealthiest groups in the country and the average woman can expect to be a widow for eight years. What is a striking refutation of the view that it is woman's emotional life that is dependent on man, is the death rate of widowers: 40 per cent above the expected rate for married men, within six months of bereavement!

Women's Lib finds the high regard men profess for women, nauseating, and declares that 'the chivalrous stance is a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level'. Other real forms of stratification never exhibit this curious permanent inversion of roles. The slave owner, the Brahmin and the factory owner do not put the slave, the untouchable, or the labourer on a pedestal. Status

{p. 19} and virtue are attributes always reserved for the dominant group, yet men ascribe them to women. Once again, the Women's Lib rhetoric of inequality is seen to be bogus, and its moral indignation based on false analogies.

It is true that men hold most of the top political and commercial positions, but it is equally true that in industrial societies, women often predominate in the three key sources of influence and power - numbers, wealth, and status. Power is not exercised only through decision-making; it can be esercised equally effectively through constraining the decision-making process. It is simplistic to argue that power is just a matter of the overt decision-making structure, and to confuse the subjective sense of exercising power enjoyed by the office-holder, with the actual effects of the decisions made and the question of who the beneficiaries of these decisions are.

I have tried to disentangle certain general themes in the Women's Lib ideology, but it has proved very difficult to establish the application of these general themes in specific areas. Neither Women's Liberation as a movement, nor any one of its leading protagonists have put forward a coherent ideological programme - the nature of the movement renders it impossible for them to do so. There is a millenarian quality about the movement, which is antithetical to rational argument. It is characterized by a belief that there is an inexorable move towards the stage of liberation in which all existing structured relationships deeply involving women will disappear. It is paradoxical that this vanguard with time so assuredly on its side, should exhibit such a hysterical sense of urgency. Because the Women's Lib argument is so chaotic it is not really possible to attempt to refute it step by step in a syllogistic manner - it can only be dealt with by dealing in turn with the critical common assumptions and propositions that it makes in certain crucial areas. Each section of the book deals with the core arguments of the Women's Liberation movement in the most vital areas. Femininity

{p. 20}

Nature

{Women's Lib} Apart from reproduction, there are no innate differences between the sexes. Equality is sameness.

{The Female Woman} There are important innate differences between the sexes. between the sexes. Men and women are equal but different

Sex

{Women's Lib} The sexual nature of men and women is identical. Promiscuity is to be encouraged.

{The Female Woman} There are important differences in the sexual nature of the two sexes. Sex is much more fulfilling within a deep personal relationship.

Feminity

{Women's Lib} Intelligence and femininity are incompatible.

{The Female Woman} Intelligence enhances femininity.

The Family

{Women's Lib} A crumbling institution to be abolished.

{The Female Woman} An important institution to be fostered.

Work

{Women's Lib} The whole of life. Only the routine, the efficient, the paid for, is valuable. The mere housewife is contemptible.

{The Female Woman} A part of life. Women have two efficient, the paid for, equally important fields open to them; their families and their careers - they should be able to choose either or both.

Men

{Women's Lib} The oppressors, a highly privileged group

{The Female Woman} Men's fate is more extreme than women's - sometimes more privileged, sometimes much more deprived.

{p. 21} Liberators

{Women's Lib} An enlightened elite.

{The Female Woman} Muddled intellectuals projecting their hangups on to all women.

Each of these propositions must be exploded separately for there is no central structure to the building of Women's Liberation - it is a building without support, where the roof-top of liberation floats mysteriously over entrenched, dogmatic foundations. The roof will, in time, fall of its own accord - it is the more modest purpose of this book to dynamite the foundations.

{p. 22} The Natural Woman

The fundamental tenet of the Women's Lib ideology is that there are no innate differences between men and women - other than reproduction.

The best medical research points to the conclusion that sexual stereotypes have no bases in biology. {Kate Millet, op. cit., pp. 27-28.}

... it is the threadbare tactic of justifying social and temperamental dierences by biological ones. For the sexes are inherently in everything alike save reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, orgasmic capacity, and genetic and morphological structure. Perhaps the only things they can uniquely exchange are semen and transudate. {Ibid., p. 93}

In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. {Greer, op. cit., p. 29}

These are fine strident, confident assertions - the confidence displayed is, as with many other ideological polemicists, in inverse proportion to the factual evidence cited or even existing, just like the preacher who wrote against a passage in his notes: 'Argument weak - SHOUT'. For Women's Libbers there are no facts, there are only ideologically convenient assumptions. The truth is not deterrnined empirically but is defined as that which accords with the aims of their movement and its current ideology. When Millett descends to dealing with the facts, she undermines her own assertions - indeed she is forced to do so, forced to enumer-

{p. 23} ate a string of exceptions which completely destroy her case. She does not seem aware of how all-pervasive these differences in 'genetic and morphological structure' are. Men and women differ in every cell of their bodies, and body and mind are not separate entities in the simple and rigid way the Women's Libbers believe. There is a definitely dated air about the way in which they assume that bodily differences between men and women have no implications for differences in mind and personality.

Those Women's Libbers who are not atheists on the subject of innate differences are militant agnostics. John Stuart Mill is a clear case of the dogmatic agnostic on this: 'I deny that anyone knows, or can know the nature of the two sexes.' From this position of splendid ignorance he and his followers draw strong policy condusions. Militant agnosticism is an uncomfortable position from which to pontificate on policy; Mill retreats into an assertion of starkly contradictory nature: 'It may be asserted without scruple that no other class of dependants have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters.'

It is strange that without knowing, or being able to know, what woman's essential nature is, Mill can assert that women differ from it, and by implication in a particular direction. In fact, there is no reason why an agnostic should not believe that society's roles for women do coincide with their essential nature or that their 'natural' character is a grotesque eaggeration of society's 'stereotypes'.

The modern Women's Libbers tend to slip out of agnosticism by a different route: they invert Pascal and argue that, in the absence of definite proof that innate sex differences do exist, we should assume that they do not. They seem to believe that to assume zero innate differences between men and women is somehow less arbitrary than accepting any positive statement about their existence based on anything less than a final proof derived from unassailable evidence. Their argument involves a false dichotomy between the view that no irmate differences ecist and the view that these innate

{p. 24} differences correspond exactly to those observed in society. The position of the 'non-liberated' believers in emancipation is that differences do exist, that there is no one-to-one correspondence between these and the social roles men and women play, and that opportunities should be adjusted so that there is a greater correspondence between the two.

The Women's Lib explanation for all observed differences between the sexes is standardized, predictable and unvaried - it is all a matter of conditioning. Conditioning is of course 'a bad thing' except when it is used to eradicate differences between the sexes. Some of the ways in which men and women behave differently are undoubtedly the result of differential conditioning, and this can be easily observed. Women's Lib wishes to extend this form of explanation into areas where no such differential conditioning can be perceived. In the absence of evidence they assert that such condihoning must be present in a form too subtle to be detected. As each suggestion on the nature of this conditioning has to be discarded, they retreat into an 'infinite regression' of explanation - each explanation assumes a form of conditioning more subtle, more vacuous, more vague, more intangible than the one before. When confronted with the universality of certain sex differences found in diverse societies, diverse cultures and even diverse mammalian species, they postulate an ever more tenuous, ever more pervasive form of conditioning - a modern version of the Victorian 'aether', an extreme attempt to remodel the universe to fit the theory.

The universality of conditioning as an explanation is conveniently dropped when a sex difference is discovered that can be explained in terms of the innate superiority of women: 'About thirty other disorders (as well as colour-blindness) are to be found in the males of the species and seldom in the females for the same reason. There is much evidence that the female is constitutionally stronger than the male; ... there is no explanation for the more frequent conception of males. ... It is tempting to speculate whether

{p. 25} this might not be a natural compensation for the greater vulnerability of males.' {Greer, op. cit., pp. 26-27}

This quotation reveals two characteristic aspects of Women's Lib - inconsistency and malice. Greater vulnerability is graciously conceded, without any difficulty, to be an innate male trait but any suggestion that this is true of positive qualities like persistence would be hysterically repudiated. There is just such a touch of hysteria about Millett's 'the best medical research' or 'the most reasonable ... sources'. She has introduced the superlatives of the advertising industry into scientific research. ...

{p. 28} One of the most striking differences between men and women - the much greater individual variability of men - provides additional strong evidence for the existence of innate differences between the sexes. Men are less average

{p. 29} than women. They are the geniuses and the idiots, the giants and the dwarfs - although women are, on average, shorter than men it is always Snow White who towers over the seven dwarfs, almost always male dwarfs who feature in circuses and pantomimes. The greater variability of men cannot possibly be explained on environmental grounds, as a simple difference in averages might be. If women are not found in the top positions in society in the same proportions as men because, as Women's Lib claims, they are treated as mentally inferior to men and become so, why are there so many more male idiots? Why are the remedial classes in schools full of boys? Why are the inmates of hospitals for the mentally subnormal predominantly male? Discrimination produces a consistency of inferiority, not a greater concentration around a common average - fewer at the top but also fewer at the bottom.

The reason why Women's Lib does not mention this conspicuous difference between the sexes is that it can only be explained on purely biological grounds. The male Y-chromosome induces greater genetic variety, and at all stages of growth the development of the male is slower with more time for variation to occur: 'The delay in the emergence of a characteristic suggests that the variance of that characteristic for males will be greater than that for females. Relatively more males will be represented at the extreme of the spread of the characteristic.'

Women's Lib, of course, refuses to acknowledge any of these differences - the only difference they effectively admit is that between male and female reproductive systems, a difference which they might have some slight difficulty in denying. However, reproduction is safely relegated to a totally unimportant position in their new scale of values. The idea that there may be other differences, particularly in the sacred area of the brain and the central nervous system, is anathema; they have a chronic fear that if any such differences were proven, women would necessarily be shown to be inferior. Such is their faith in woman's nature that it never occurs to tlhem that the differences might be in her favour.

{end}

(6) Penelope Leach, Children First (Michael Joseph, London, 1994):

{Penelope Leach is the author of Baby and Child, an excellent guide to the care of young children}

{p. 31} CHAPTER TWO

Mother, Father or Parent?

LAST YEAR in New York I gave a talk that referred to 'mothers' and 'fathers' and was taken to task by a joumalist for being politically incorrect. These terms, she explained, are unacceptably sexist and elitist. I was not altogether surprised - there is real difhculty here - or unrepentant: I had not intended to challenge, let alone to distress. But I was, and I remain, stymied. Mother and father are biological terms; as such they clearly differentiate both genders and genes but equally clearly they imply no value judgements. Biology is often sexual but never sexist; it is naturally selective but never elitist. The political incorrectness - and cruel stupidity - of sexual and genetic discrimination is not in the rootstock of the human species but grafted on to it by human behaviour.

The individualist social ethic of Western societies makes everyone responsible for his or her own success or failure but promises each an equal chance. Many individuals frown on differential opportunities resulting from accidents of blood and birth, and take an egalitarian view of natural justice. But sympathetic though such attitudes may be, they are neither generally shared, even in the West, nor problem-free. The more determined we become to rid ourselves of discriminatory attitudes and practices, the more we are inclined to reject the gene and gender differences that provoke them, as if those differences were themselves reprehensible. Differences between mother and father, and between parent or other, are in the rootstock of our species. If we try to get rid of them in our anxiety to be rid of what people have grafted on to them, we risk throwing out the babies along with the dirty bathwater. We must try to see where our biological and social heritages meet.

{end}

(7) Hair, the Musical - the Anal/Androgyny theme

John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (Duckworth, London, 1970).

{John Passmore was Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, at ANU, Canberra: http://socpol.anu.edu.au/passmore.html}

{p. 312} Even the most bizarre 'Romantic rebel' behaviour can turn out, indeed, to have its roots in a long-standing mystical perfectibilist tradition. Take, for example, unisexuality. According to Genesis, God first of all created Adam; he did not create Eve directly, as a pure expression of his creative pover; he made her out of Adam's rib. Man and voman, according to Genesis, are 'one flesh'. The implication vas not lost on mystical perfectibilists: in the state of perfection, they tell us, there will indeed be only one flesh. In the apocryphal Gospel according to the Egyptians Jesus tells Salome that the final secrets Till not be unveiled until 'ye have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female'. In the so-called 'Second epistle of

{p. 313} Clement' this becomes: 'When the two shall be one and the outside (that which is without) as the inside (that which is within), and the male with the female neither male nor female.'

The sixteenth-century mystic, Jacob Boehme, was convinced that imperfection entered the world with Eve's creation. No longer were all created things direct emanations of God - Eve was the prime exception. The German mystically-inclined poet, Gottfried Benn - at one time an enthusiastic follower of Hitler - took as his ideal that 'pre-logical' stage of human consciousness, when religion reflected 'the original monosexuality of the primitive organism, which performed seed-formation, copulation and impregnation within itself'. In many Indian sects, male and female are but different aspects of the one deity. 'Margot' - one of the 'hippies' in Lawrence Lipton's The Holy Barbarians - has been told by her male associates that 'the gods were conceived of in their pure primitive form as androgynous ... hermaphroditic'. To be godlike, it follows, one must first ignore the differences between the sexes. In search of 'Paradise Now', men and women must dress alike, act alike, and in their sexual relationships be indifferent to the sex of their partner.

That is one of the striking features of the 'tribal-love rock musical' Hair (Note the typical 'community' reference to 'tribal-love'; the young American rebels are 'playing Indians', rejecting the traditional view that the true hero was the individualistic, aggressive, tribe-destroyer, pioneering cowboy.) In the sharpest possible contrast to the traditional 'musical', which has always emphasized sexual differentiation, Hair makes it hard to distinguish which of the characters are men and which women. And the sexual actions which are casually simulated appear to be determined only by proximity, indifferently directed towards male or female.*

{At one stage during Hair, the naked hippies form a heap. One lies face-down on the ground. One by one, the others - male and female - jump on top of those already in the heap, also face-down. Passmore implies that this is a simulated sodomy}

{footnote} * It is women who suffer from this identification, as is very clearly brought out in Hair. Women are mere 'hangers-on', no longer sexually neccssary. Girls are dressed as boys rather than - for all their long hair and decorative garb - boys as girls. The sexual relationships suggested and simulated are not, for the most part, of a genital kind: they are anal and oral relationships, for which women are not necessary. What we are perhaps witnessing, in the name of 'community', is a revolt against women - but a revolt in which women themselves participate because it can be represented, as by Simone de Beauvoir, as a revolt against the conception of a 'feminine role'. It is Eve, not Adam, who must vanish if the original state of perfect humanity is to be regained; she must take her old place, in Adam's rib, no longer separate flesh. ...

{p. 314} Unisexuaiity is a reversion to early childhood, to a point where sex-roles were made apparent by differentiation in clothing and behaviour. At the same time, it is a special application of the mystical search for total unity, for a total community in which, as in Fichte's and Winwood Reade's dream, all mankind thinks and feels as one. So long as the role of the sexes is sharply distinguished that total community remains inaccessible. It is no accident that in Mao's China, too, differentiation between the sexes is reduced to a minimum.

Hair is notorious for its naked scene rather than for its unisexuality. But the nakedness, also, is presented as a mystical revelation, a revelation which makes unimportant, in the act of revealing, the difference between the sexes. More significantly, it suggests a ritual sloughing-off, a purification, through the casting away of 'inessentials', mystical and perfectibilist in its inspiration. ... {end}

(8) Androgyny as Guiding Principle of the New Age, by June Singer

June Singer, Androgyny: the Opposites Within (Sigo Press, Boston, 1989).

{p. 3} Chapter 1

Androgyny as Guiding Principle of the New Age

... Human sexuality is natural enough. It begins with the proposition that we are male or we are female, which is surely incontrovertible. Androgyny is a work against nature, or seems to be. The sky over mid-America is an appropriate place to begin a consideration of the androgyne.

{p. 5} The theme of my writing presents itself in eidetic imagery. The theme is androgyny, which in its broadest sense can be defined as the One which contains the Two; namely, the male (andro-) and the female (gyne). Androgyny is an archetype inherent in the human psyche. C. G. Jung has stated that his use of the term archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of Plato's eidos and this is the sense in which I am using it here. The term archetype is helpfui in this co text because it indicates the presence of an archaic or primordial type, a universal and collective image that has existed since the remotest time. Archetypes give rise to images in primitive tribal lore, in myths and fairy tales, and in the contemporary media. They are, by definition, unconscious; their presence can only be intuited in the powerful motifs and symbols that give definite form to psychic contents. Androgyny is just such an archetype, it continually represents itself in myths and symbols, which have the capacity - if recognized and invoked - to energize the creative potency of men and women in ways that most people hardly imagine today.

Androgyny may be the oldest archetype of which we have any experience. It derives from, and is second only to, the archetype of the Absolute, which is beyond the possibility of human experience and must remain forever unknowable. The archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of a primordial cosmic unity, having existed in oneness or wholeness before any separation was made. The human psyche is witness to the primordial unity; therefore, the psyche is the vehicle through which we can attain awareness of the awe-inspiring totality.

First, there is nothing in existence except the indescribable void, the ineffable nothingness. Second comes the primordial unity, the One in which all the opposites are contained, but not as yet differentiated. Like the yolk and the white in an egg, they are locked together, imprisoned and immovable. When the appointed time comes the primordial unity is broken open; then there exist the Two, as opposites. Only when the Two have become established as separate entities can they move apart and then join together in a new way to create the many and to disperse them. In time, pairs of opposites tend to polarize. The polarities are expressed in a variety of ways; for example - light and dark, positive and negative, eternal and temporal, hot and cold, spirit and matter, mind and body, art and science, war and peace.

One pair, male and female, serves as the symbolic expression of the energic power behind all of the other polarities. It does not matter what the order, for as creating principles, one is invalid without the other. For the spark of creation to be engendered, the male and the female must come together in all their sexual maleness and femaleness. Before they can be joined they must first have been apart, differentiated, separated from one another. Before they

{p. 6} were separated they were bound together in one body, and that body was the Primordial Androgyne.

The idea of a Divine Androgyne is a consequence of the concept that the Ultimate Being consists of a unity-totality. Within this unity-totality are seen to exist all the conjoined pairs of opposites at all levels of potentiality. Creation occurs when the cosmogonic egg is broken. Then the world is born. Or it occurs when male and female, having been incorporated in one spherical body, are separated by the supreme power of creation. Cosmic energy is generated by the surge of longing in each one of the two for the other.

We have come to know about the primal quality of the androgyne from its traces in the myths and legends and sacred traditions of many primitive peoples. Ancient mythology abounds with tales of a time when the eternal male and the eternal female where locked in an unending embrace. A Greek myth tells of a time when out of Chaos were born Night and also Erebus, the unfathomable depth where Death dwelt. From Darkness and from Death, Love was born, and from Love, Light. Then Mother Earth emerged and lay in union with Father Sky. There they remained for eons in an unending embrace. In other versions, Earth-Sky was seen as an androgynous deity. This non-dual constitution of the Primal Being, which contains within itself the potentialities of duality and multiplicity, has come down to us by way of the more sophisticated religions also, especially in elements of Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism, as well as in the Platonic tradition of the West.

The Androgyne has been nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition, for it apparently threatens the idea of a patriarchal God-image. Male dominance has been the keystone of the Judeo-Christian civilization. ...

Androgyny refers to a specific way of joining the "masculine" and "femi- nine" aspects of a single human being. We see much evidence of the trend toward androgyny in our Western world today in social customs, manners, morals, and also in the awareness of millions of people who are searching out ways to expand their consciousness of themselves and their world. ...

{p. 7} The recent expansion of androgynous consciousness, brought about largely through the catalytic effect of the Women's Movement, has increased our awareness of the necessity for questioning the nearly impregnable fortress of male-oriented values. The Women's Movement has confronted us with the historic undermining of women and has challenged us to utilize the potency of the female in our society. The Women's Movement may turn out to be the decisive step in the direction of androgyny, inasmuch as it confronts directly some of the obstacles that lie in the path toward androgyny.

... The radical feminist of today recalls the mythic Amazon, a fearsome warrior who could defeat man at his own game. ...

Chapter 2

Hermaphrodites, Bisexuals, Androgynes and the Uncarved Block

A new consciousness is rising out of the morass of a declining society that has bent too far toward rationalism, toward technology and toward the acquisition of power through unbridled competition - or whatever other means have been considered necessary by those in charge to achieve dominance and control over less sophisticated people. The new consciousness takes note that our society has become overbalanced in favor of the so-called "masculine" qualities of character.

The new orientation that is gaining in influence may be characterized as emphasizing "feminine" values, or values that in the past, at least, have been associated more with the feminine than with the masculine. Among these values is a preference for co-operation rather than competition, for a team approach to problems rather than a strictly individualistic approach, for giving credit to intuition at times over and above a deliberate thinking process and for emphasizing sexuality and relationship over and above power and violence. ...

{end}

(9) Heterophobia: The Feminist Turn Against Men, by Daphne Patai

Daphne Patai

Partisan Review, Fall 1996

{p. 580} Something very strange happened toward the end of the twentieth century. Women turned against men. Lives of human complexity, filled with both atfection and antagonism, began to be perceived as intolerable, perhaps despicable. Heterosexual intercourse was reclassified as rape and women's power to consent dismissed as powerlessness to resist patriarchal impositions. Heterosexual women had to be wary of revealing conflicts in their personal lives, since any such admission seemed to carry the expectation that they should turn away from men and set out on their own. Even Simone de Beauvoir, formerly seen as a feminist heroine, a fighter for women s rights, became suspect because of her attachment to Jean Paul Sartre. Intellectual companionship and lifelong love and friendship were now recast as craven subservience, while feminist critics scurried to deal with the discovery that their former idol had failed to lead the exemplary life they prescribed for her.

Heterosexuality has gone from being the norm to being on the defensive in the face of the phenomenon I call heterophobia - fear of difference, fear of the other - a term I use to refer specifically to the feminist turn against men .and against heterosexuality. ...

Heterophobia is by no means an entirely new phenomenon ...

{p. 581} Yet these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women did not support any sort of double standard which would have encouraged and promoted homosexual sex, while branding heterosexual sex as corrupting and contemptible. ...

(10) Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, by Daphne Patai (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (Lanham, Maryland, 1998):

{p. 34} By now sexual harassment is generally construed to include not only unwanted erotic attention but also any questionable behavior on the basis of gender. Thus the SHI has succeeded in creating a situation in which either merely expressing romantic interest or engaging in the second kind of "soft" behavior - for example, commenting on someone's appearance, or making a general remark about women - arguably constitutes an unwanted sexist intrusion, made worse by the implicit suspicion that an aggressive carnal interest must be at work. Even if "wanted," both kinds of "soft" behavior - until recently considered unobjectionable - are now being challenged, as we shall see in examining some recent feminist writing later in this book.

{p. 35} ... In the preface to their volume, Sandler and Shoop remind us how new a campus issue sexual harassment really is. They note, however, that by the late 1990s, we are in the "second stage" of policy development. Awareness of sexual harassment as a social problem can now be taken for granted, and it is time to inaugurate more effective measures to deal with it. The purported aim of their book is to guide "institutions involved in that process." Note the wording: institutions, not individuals. The latter are, in the main, treated as mere subjects of the institutional policies being formulated with the help of the SHI.

Sexual Harassment on Campus is a large book. It contains nineteen chapters covering, with much reiteration, matters of law, policy articulation and implementation, the setting up of formal and informal procedures, newly identified problems such as peer and electronic sexual harassment, and consensual relations policies, as well as a number of personal stories of "those whose lives have been changed as a result of

{p. 36} sexual harassment" (p. v).

... Joel Best's work also gives us a better understanding of the ideological fervor animating sexual harassment as a public concern. Using a

{p. 37} variety of recent "victim" categories, Best demonstrates how society's perception of the existence and gravity of a problem is constructed by media coverage and by activists' rhetorical strategies. The Sexual Harassment Industry, and the spate of instructional books published for its officials and functionaries, confirms Best's detailed description of how "the rhetoric of claims-making" works and how it develops hand in hand with organizational arrangements that sustain it and in turn are sustained by it.

{end}

(11) Dennis Altman on Gay Liberation

Dennis Altman is Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

He gives a classic rendition of "Marxist Anti-Communism" (on which see kostel.html).

He portrays Gay Liberation as returning from Jewish to (ancient) Greek values. Yet the Greeks & Romans, while condoning homosexuality, never confused it with marriage, never tried to undermine marriage as a fundamental institution.

This, however, was done by Lenin's regime: sex-soviet.html ; but, as Altman says, Stalin reversed it.

Altman portrays the Counterculture movement, which became the New Age movement, as revolutionary and introducing many features pioneered by the early USSR.

He posits "our essential androgynous" nature, arguing that to a large extent "our concepts of society and human nature are human constructs".

(11.1) Dennis Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1972).

{p. 62} Freud linked his theory of patriarchal authority with the rise of religion, and in particular the triumph in the Western World of monotheism. Support for this connection is found in Rattray Taylor's argument that "a remarkable psychological change" emerged in the classical world after 500 B.C. This change, he claims, led to an increasing repression of sexuality and the development of a sense of guilt, both of which factors facilitated the triumph of the more repressive Jewish view of sex over that of the early Greek view.

A related explanation of sexual repression sees its cause in just this fact, the dominance of the Western Judaeo-Christian

{p. 63} tradition. Unlike Freud's view, this explanation stresses the particular as against the universal form of sexual repression, seeing religion as not merely a rationaliztion and legitimation of sexual repression but as a major cause. Certainly there is considerable evidence that the Western religious tradidion has placed great stress on sexual repression. At times indeed, especially during the Middle Ages, to repress sexual desire totally was considered a mark of virtue, and the resulting hysteria, masochism and persecution set the tone of much of the underside of life in Medieval Europe. ...

Religion may well have been a particularly important influence on the repression of bisexuality, for as the Jewish view of sex came to supplant the Greek in the Western World, homosexuality was more and more frowned upon, and Biblical evidence was produced to show its inherent sinfulness. ...

To the Jewish heritage, so much bound up with the history of the patriarchal family, was added the Christian theology of "natural law," whence a long line of Popes (denied, one assumes, any first-hand experience) have derived the Catholic views on sex.

{p. 82} Millet, like most women's liberationists, is primarily concerned here with sex roles, which she sees as underlying the nuclear family structure (which in turn, as Reich saw, "forms the mass psychological basis for a certain culture, namely the patriarchal authoritarian one in all of its forms"). I would not dispute Millett's aims. Yet it seems to me that liberation requires, as well, a general erotization of human life - by which I mean an acceptance of the sensuality that we all possess, and a willingness to let it imbue all personal contacts - and a move toward polymorphous perversity that includes more than reassessment of sex roles. ...

{p. 83} Liberation, then, in the restricted context with which we are primarily concerned implies freedom from the surplus repression that prevents us recognizing our essential androgynous and erotic natures.

{p. 84} Liberation demands a renunciation of the traditional puritan ethic, so successfully imitated by Communist states, that sees hard work and expanding production as goods in themselves.

{p. 106} No longer is the claim made that gay people can fit into American society, that they are as decent, as patriotic, as clean-living, as anyone else. Rather, it is argued, it is American society itself that needs to change.

{p. 107} But gay liberation represents a new self-affirmation and a determination that if anyone will be "cured", it is those who oppress rather than those oppressed. ...

Gay liberation, like black radicals before them, has reversed this: there is almost perverse delight in playing up to the stereotypical image, of shocking rather than persuading society.

{p. 140} The counter-culture has been, I believe, the most significant development in America over the past decade, and we need first to examine it as a general phenomenon before examining its relation to gay liberation. Its emergence is intimately bound up with the two great political upheavals of the sixties, the new militancy of blacks and other non-white Americans, and the agony of Vietnam.

{p. 141} More accurately what has happened over the past decade is that there has been an increasing disjuncture between politics and culture, to the point where the most revolutionary features of American life are in fact cultural.

America exhibited by and large a situation of the sort that the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci has described as hegemonic, that is a situation where "one concept of reality" is diffused throughout society so that the direction and control of the dominant class is supported by norms and perceptions that have been internalized by all classes. ...

{is the new hegemony Jewish? Benjamin Ginsberg, like Altman a Professor of Political Science, but at John Hopkins University, provides much evidence that it is: ginsberg.html. But Altman, and Robert Manne, also Jewish, and also a Professor of Politics at Latrobe University in Melbourne, insist on depicting Jews as victims}

{206} Gay Liberation and the Left: Toward Human Liberation

The traditional Marxist left has been as contemptuous, as disregarding, as - once given the chance - oppressive of homosexuals as anyone else. Despite Lenin's moves towards sexual freedom in the Soviet Union, which involved repeal of anti-homosexual legislation, these laws were reintroduced in 1934, and prejudice against homosexuality as "a bourgeois degeneracy" became strongly imbued in Communist parties throughout the world.

{end}

(11.2) Dennis Altman, Coming Out In The Seventies (Penguin Books, Ringwood, Victoria, 1980).

{p. 10} I believe strongly that society has need of philosophers, not in the academic Anglo-Saxon sense but rather in the more common European mould, that is women and men who have the time and energy to raise basic questions about the social order and postulate alternatives to the existing state of affairs.

If the aim of the social sciences is to understand the world as it is constructed by humans, the definition itself suggests that there is a powerful incentive to change it. For as soon as we recognise the extent to which our concepts of society and human nature are human constructs, we recognise as well that what is can be changed; attempts to radically restructure society are based on precisely this recognition.

This is central to much of writings, as Gramsci has shown. But it is not just Marxists whose work is engage. Freud, in postulating the existence of the libido and the unconscious, ensured that future generations would explain themselves in terms of his theory and thus he contributed to changing society as much as any declared revolutionary. It is one of the greatest defects of Anglo-American social science, particularly of its variants in Australia, that it seems by and large scared of Marx and Freud precisely because they pose large questions.

{p. 13} I believe the Marxist critique is correct in insisting that all research and writing ultimately serves some interests more than others.

{p. 30} HECTOR: Although it would seem to me, reading your book, that you were not working in a Marxist framework, you were nevertheless working in reaction to a Marxist framework in a way that Americans are not.

ALTMAN: One of the things that really struck me in talking to people in Gay Lib in America is that none of them were even aware that say in Eros and Evolution Marcuse talks quite specifically about the homosexual as being a potential revolutionary. Now this was something that the Gay Movement in the States had just not hit on and I think that this is probably due to this total lack of any sort of Marxist background. It's of course becoming less and less true. The present generation of young American radicals are in fact becoming more interested in Marxist thought. ... people on the Left here have been aware of Stalinism, have been aware of the dangers of a terribly crude economic determinism.

{p. 107} There is of course one important tradition which stems from the Frankfurt School of the twenties and has sought to deal with the area described by Ralph Ellison as 'that blind spot in our knowledge of society, where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx, but where approaching, both grow wary and shout insults lest they actually meet ... ' And in the late sixties and seventies the revived feminist and gay movements have made much of the political implications of sexuality. It is the intent of this paper to examine some of the problems implicit in that set of theorists from Fourier through to Marcuse who have argued for a connection between sexual and political repression.

{p. 112} It is odd, but perhaps not surprising, that Marxist puritanism is more effectively enforced nowadays than that of Judaeo-Christianity.

{p. 117} Like Jews, homosexuals may choose to cling to their separateness, even if this provokes persecution from the dominant majority.

{p. 167} Marcuse belonged to that tradition which has sought to synthesise Freud and Marx, and hence he sees the social management of sexuality as essential to understanding the way in which the contemporary social order is legitimised. This is basically a position with which I would agree; I shall try to sketch out the dialectic relationship between the changing norms of modern capitalist society and the challenge to those norms in the case of one critical area of sexual control, namely the stigma against homosexuality.

{p. 168} Gay liberation demanded not just civil liberties for homosexuals, but rather a change in the social ordering of sexuality and an end to the dominance of the heterosexual nuclear family model. In these demands the gay movement was influenced by the counter-culture in general, and by the reborn feminist movement in particular.

{p. 172} Likewise, the counter-culture's flirtation with non-Western cultures. In Australia, particularly, there has been something of a counter-cultural infatuation with things Asian; but this is largely confined to a borrowing of symbolic artifacts, such as Indian shirts, Indonesian sarongs, incense. Even those who took up Eastern philosophy or travelled on the 'hippie route' to Bali, Penang, Nepal, were for the most part adopting Asia as a symbolic way of rejecting their society, and as a result avoided for the most part any genuine confrontation with the reality of Asian society.

At this level, the counter-culture can be seen as a myth or even as a spectacle, to use a term popularised by the French Situationists which offers a symbolic means of escape from existing society without really demanding the full commitment that such an escape would in reality require.

{p. 173} It is where the counter-culture merges with current ecological concern that its importance is most apparent. The new consciousness expressed by the counter-culture is basically an attemt to foreshadow ways of de-development ...

{p. 200} I was not always so: at school, as already related, being Jewish was a cause for embarrassment. Children find it very difficult to bear with being different, and the sheer ignorance of my peers was perhaps a greater cross than open anti-semitism would have been. But perhaps the most valuable part of being Jewish is that it offers some insight into the plight of other minority groups and the unending and unresolved tension between preserving one's cultural identity and 'making it' in the wider world. I am sure that my understanding of American blacks has been enhanced by being Jewish, though I am equally sure no black would appreciate this comment being made. More poignantly, it should be possible for Jews, just because of their own experiences, to understand and empathise with Arab anger and frustration, of which we have become the principal target.

Unfortunately though, for most people experience of persecution makes them no more likely to be tolerant themselves: indeed, if anything, persecution corrupts both persecutor and persecuted equally. One does not have to deny the dreadful realities of historical anti-semitism to regret the reaction it has created in many Jews. In America the most obvious manifestation of this is the New York Jewish Defence League. In Australia it lies perhaps in the very crude anti-Communism that many Jews have adopted, and that leads them into strange support for right wing policies and politicians.

The Soviet Union, it is argued, persecutes Jews. (A fact hardly to be doubted.) Thus Communists are racists. Thus we should support all those who oppose Communism - and rally behind Thieu and Ky. A crude stereotype? No, the actual logic of an argument put to me as to why Jews should support the war in Vietnam . It is an argument helped by the fact that the right in Australia has by and large been less tainted with anti-semitism than in most countries, Eric Butler being perhaps the most notable exception.

{p. 201} That is, Jews in Australia are often simultaneously great boosters of the Australian way of life while retaining almost total social (and in many cases political) isolation from it. There is a crudeness and a coarseness about Melbourne Jews that grates, albeit it is part of the whole nouveau riche pattern of the society. It shows itself in the fifty dollar a head dinner for Gorton, or the loud henna-ed Jewish women who pack Chequers and have invaded the Gold Coast in antipodean imitation of Miami. It is revealed in the narrowness of the Jewish press, which is very much a version of the Australian suburban weeklies, with some Israel-boosting thrown in.

{p. 212} I shall therefore address myself to two major questions:

1. Why I have adopted an anti-anti-Communist position (accepting for the moment the role given me by the organisers of the conference, and

2. the inadequacies of anti-Communism as a political doctrine.

Some initial words in definjtion. I take Communist here to mean both/either those governments that refer to themselves as Communist or socialist in the Cuban or Czech sense of the word, and those parties that regard themselves not just as Communist but as somehow linked to an international Communist movement. Needless to say there are many Marxists who are not, by this definition, Communists; equally one could claim that there are many Communists who are in no real sense Marxists.

{p. 213} I came from a tradition, more common in America than here, of anti-Communist yet left-wing Jews. My maternal grandfather, Aaron Patkin, had been a supporter of Kerensky and left Russia after the Revolution as an opponent of both Czar and Bolsheviks. My father l came here from Vienna in 1938 as a victim of the Nazi invasion; he spoke llttle about politics and my mother's fairly consistent, if non-activst, support for the A.L.P. was accepted by me. As I went to a private school I fairly early in life became accustomed to being in a political minority.

When I was at the University of Tasmania in the early sixties my political stance could be largely summed up as liberal anti-Communist.

{p. 215} I have no doubt that for me Communism was particularly unacceptable because of my homosexuality, and this it is this that has influenced me to adopt both a fairly anarchist type of socialism and a general distrust of all political parties and ideologues.

{p. 217} To be an anti-anti-Communist is not, as I have already stressed, at all equivalent to espousing Communism in any of its current varieties, though it may - I shall return to this - be compatible with a Marxist analysis of society.

{end}

(12) Socialism and the Family, by H. G. Wells

David C. Smith writes in H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986):

{p. 209} What is clear is that by the time In the Days of the Comet appeared, Wells had a reputation as a philanderer. He was being chased, and very steadily, by the young women in the Fabian kindergarten ... Several memoirs ... suggest that Wells seduced, or was seduced by, several Fabian wives ... He did have a reputation as a free-thinker on matters of sex, and as a libertine. It is into this atmosphere that the Comet came with its message of free and group love.

... This, taken together with Socialism and the Family (1906), led the wolves to howl after Wells' scalp.

{endquote}

The Works of H. G. Wells Atlantic Edition, Volume XVI (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1926).

SOCIALISM AND THE FAMILY

{p. 519} The Family, and not the individual, is still the unit in contemporary civilisation, and indeed in nearly all social systems that have ever existed. The adult male, the head of the family, has been the citizen, the sole representative of the family in the State. About him have been grouped his one or more wives, his children, his dependents. His position towards them has always been - is still in many respects to this day - one of ownership.

{Wells himself was a polygamist. His son by Rebecca  West, Anthony West, narrates the saga of these various part-time wives, in his book H.G.  Wells: Aspects of a Life (Hutchinson, London, 1984). Wells' income from his fiction and  nonfiction books was sufficient for him to maintain these women in independent  households. While he, typically, had several relationships on the go at once, his women  had one one - him - at a time. His fame and notoriety meant that each relationship was  centred on him and oriented to his needs. So in his personal life he lived no differently  from the upper classes he criticised}

{p. 524} The family proper becomes a numerically smaller group. Enormous numbers of childless families appear; the middle-class family with two, or at most three, children is the rule rather than the exception in certain strata. This makes the family a less various and interesting group, vith a smaller demand for attention, emotion, effort. Quite apart from the general mental quickening of the time, it leaves more and more social energy, curiosity, enterprise free either to fret within the narrow family limits or to go outside them. The Strike against Parentage takes among other forms the form of a strike against marriage; great numbers of men and women stand out from a relationship which every year seems more limiting and (except for its temporary passionate aspect) purposeless. The number increases of intelligent and healthy women inadequately employed, who either idle as wives in attenuated modern families, childless or with an insufficient child or so, or who work for an unsatisfying subsistence as unmarried women. To them the complete conceptions of Socialism should have an extraordinary appeal.

The appearance of the feminine mind and soul in the world as something distinct and self-conscious is the appearance of a new engine of criticism against the individualist family, against this dwindling property of the once-ascendant male - who no longer effectually rules, no longer, in many cases, either protects or sustains, who all too often is so shorn of his beams as to be but a vexatious power of jealous restriction and interference upon his wife and

{p. 525} children. The educated girl resents the proposed loss of her freedom in marriage, the educated married woman realises as well as resents the losses of scope and interest marriage entails. If it were not for the economic disadvantages that make intelligent women dread a solitary old age in bitter poverty, vast numbers of women who are married to-day would have remained single and independent. This discontent of women is a huge available force for Socialism. The wife of the past was, to put it brutally, caught younger - so young that she had had no time to think - she began forthwith to bear babies, rear babies, and (which she did in a quite proportionate profusion) bury babies - she never had a moment to think. Now the wife with double the leisure, double the education and half the emotional scope of her worn prolific grandmother, sits at home and thinks things over. You find her letting herself loose in clubs, in literary enterprises, in schemes for joint households to relieve herself and her husband from the continution of a duologue that has exhausted its interest. The husband finds hilnself divided betweenl his sympathetic sense of tedium and the proprictary tradition in which we live.

For these tensions in the disintegration of the old proprietary family no remedy offers itself to-day except the solutions that arise as essential portions of the Socialist scheme. The alternative is hypocrisy and disorder.

There is yet another and still more effectual system of strains at work in the existing social unit, and that is the strain beteen parents and children.

{p. 526} That has always existed. It is one of our most transparent sentimental pretences that there is any natural subordination of son to father, of daughter to mother. As a matter of fact a good deal of natural antagonism appears at the adolescence of the young. Something very like an instinct stirs in them, to rebel, to go out. The old parental habits of solicitude, control, and restraint become more and more hampering, irksome, and exasperating to the offspring. The middle-class son gets away in spirit and in fact to school, to college, to business - his sister does all she can to follow his excellent example. In a world with vast moral and intellectual changes in progress the intelligent young find the personal struggle for independence intensified by a confict of ideas. The modern tendency to cherish and preserve youthfulness, the keener desire for living that prevents women getting fat and ugly, and men bald and incompetent by forty-five, is another dissolvent factor among these stresses. The daughter is not only restrained by her mother's precepts, but infamed by her example. The son finds his father's coevals treating him as a contemporary.

Well, into these conflicts and disorders comes Socialism, and Socialism alone, to explain, to justify, to propose new conventions and new interpretations of relationship, to champion the reasonable claims of the young, to mitigate the thwarted ownership of the old. Socialism comes, constructive amid the wreckage.

Let me at this point, and before I conclude, put one thing with the utmost possible clearness. When

{p. 527} he proposes a new set of institutions, and a new system of conduct to replace the old proprietary family, the Socialist does not propose to destroy some thing that conceivably would otherwise last for ever. He no more regards the institution of marriage as a permanent thing than he regards a state of competitive industrialism as a permanent thing. In the economic sphere, quite apart from any Socialist ideas or Socialist activities, it is manifest that competitive individualism destroys itself. This was reasoned out long ago in the "Capital" of Marx; it is receiving its first gigantic practical demonstration in the United States of America. Whatever happens, we believe that competitive industrialism will change and end - and we Socialists at least believe that the alternative to some form of Socialism is tyranny and social ruin. So, too, in the social sphere, whether Socialists succeed altogether or fail altogether, or in whatever measure they succeed or fail, it does not alter the fact that the family is weakening, dwindling, breaking up, disintegrating.

{p. 528} In relation to all these most intimate aspects of life, Socialism, and Socialism alone, supplies the hope and suggestions of clean and practicable solutions. So far, Socialists have either been silent or vague, or - let us say - tactful, in relation to this central tangle of life. To begin to speak plainly among the silences and suppressions, the "find out for yourself" of the current time, would be, I think, to grip the middle-class woman and the middle-class youth of both sees with an extraordinary new interest, to irradiate the dissensions of every bored couple and every squabbling family with broad conceptions, and enormously to enlarge and stimulate the Socialist movement at the present time.

I DO not think that the general reader appreciates the steady development of Socialist thought during the past two decades. Directly one comes into close contact with contemporary Socialists one discovers in all sorts of ways the evidence of the synthetic work that has been and still is in process, the clearing and growth of guiding ideas, the qualification of primitive statements, the consideration, the adaptation to meet this or that adequate criticism. A quarter of a century ago Socialism was still to a

{p. 529} very large extent a doctrine of negatives, a passionate criticism and denial of the theories that sustained and excused the injustices of contemporary life, a repudiation of social and economic methods then held to be indispensable, and in the very nature of things. Its positive proposals were as sketchy as they were enthusiastic, sketchy and, it must be confessed, fluctuating. One needs to turn back to the files of its every-day publications to realise the progress that has been made, the secular emergence of a consistent and continually more nearly complete and directive scheme of social reconstruction from the chaotic propositions and hopes and denials of the earlier time. In no direction is this more evident than in the steady clearing of the Socialistic attitude towards marriage and the family; in the disentanglement of Socialism from much idealist and irrelevant matter with which it was once closely associated and encumbered, in the orderly incorporation of concep-tions that at one time seemed not only outside of, but hostile to, Socialist ways of thinking. ...

{p. 530} The formulce of Anarchism and Socialism are, no doubt, almost diametrically opposed; Anarchism denies government, Socialism would concentrate all controls in the State, yet it is after all possible in different relations and different aspects to entertain the two.

{p. 532} As a matter of faet we are living in an epoch of extraordinary freedom in sexual matters, mitigated only by certain economic imperatives. Anti-socialist writers have a way of pretending that Socialists want to make Free Love possible, while in reality Free Love is open to any solvent person to-day. People who do not want to marry are as free as air to come together and part again as they choose; there is no law to prevent them; the State takes it out of their children with a certain mild malignancy - that is all. Married people are equally free, saving certain limited proprietary claims upon one another, claims that can always be met by the payment of damages. The restraints are purely restraints of opinion that would be as powerful tomorrow if legal marriage was altogether abolished.

{p. 523} There was a time, no doubt, when there were actual legal punishments for unchastity in vomen, but that time has gone, it might seem, for ever. Our State retains only, from an age that held mercantile methods in less honour, a certain habit of perseculting women who sell themselves by retail for money, but this is done in the name of public order and not on account of the act.

{p. 534} The birth-rate falls - and falls. The family fails more and more in its essential object. This is a process absolutely independent of any Socialist propaganda; it is part of the normal development of the existing social and economic system. It makes for sterilisation, for furtive wantonness and dishonour. The existing system produces no remedies at all. Prominent people break out ever and again into vehement scoldings of this phenomenon; the newspapers and magazines re-echo "Race Suicide," but there is no sign whatever in the statistical curves of the smallest decimal per cent. of response to these exhortations.

Our existing sexual order is a system in decay. What are the alternatives to its steady process of collapse? That is the question we have to ask ourselves. To heap foul abuse, as many quite honest but terror-stricken people seem disposed to do, on any one who attempts to discuss any alternative, is simply to accelerate this process. To me it seems there are three main directions along which things may go in the future, and between which rational men have to choose.

The first is to regard the present process as inevitable and moving towards the elimination of weak and gentle types, to clear one's mind of the prejudices of one's time, and to contemplate a disintegration of all the realities of the family into an epoch of Free Love, mitigated by mercantile necessities and a few transparent hypocrisies. Rich men will be free to live lives of irresponsible polygamy; poor men will do what they can; women's lives will be adventurous,

{p. 535} the population will decline in numbers and perhaps in quality. (To guard against that mischievous quoter who lies in wait for all Socialist writers, let me say at once that this state of afairs is anti-socialist, is, I believe, socially destructive, and does not commend itself to me at all.)

The second direction is towards reaction, an attempt to return to the simple old conceptions of our past, to the patriarchal family, that is to say, of the middle ages. This I take to be the conception of such a Liberal as Mr. G. I. Chesterton, or such a Conservative as Lord Hugh Cecil, and to be also as much idea as one can find underlying most tirades against modern morals. The rights of the parent will be insisted on and restored, and the parent means pretty distinctly the father. Subject to the influence of a powerful and well-organised Church, a rejuvenescent Church, he is to resume that control over wife and children of which the modern State has partially deprived him.

{p. 536} ... The third direction is towards the developming conceptions of Socialism. And it must be confessed at once that these, as they emerge steadily and methodically from mere generalities and confusions, do present themselves as being in many aspects, novel and untried. They are as untested, and in many respects as alarming, as steam traction or iron shipping were in 1830. They display, clearly and unambiguously, principles already timidly admitted in practice and sentiment to-day, but as yet admitted only confus-

{p. 537} edly and amidst a cloud of contradictions. Essentially the Socialist position is a denial of property in human beings; not only must land and the means of production be liberated from the multitude of little monarchs among whom they are distributed, to the general injury and inconvenience, but women and children, just as much as men and things, must cease to be chattels. Socialism indeed proposes to abolish altogether the patriarchal family amidst whose disintegrating ruins we live, and to raise women to an equal citizenship with men. It proposes to give a man no more property in a woman than a woman has in a man. To stupid people who cannot see the difference between a woman and a thing, the abolition of the private ownership of women takes the form of having "wives in common," and suggests the Corroboree. It is obviously nothing of the sort. It is the recognition in theory of what in many classes is already the fact, - the practical equality of men and women in a civilised state. It is quite compatible with a marriage contract of far greater stringcncy than that recognised throughout Christendom today.

Now what sort of contract will the Socialist state require for marriage? Here again there are perfectly clear and simple principles. Socialism states definitely what almost everybody recognises nowadays with greater or less clearness, and that is the concern of the State for children. The children people bring into the world can be no more their private concern entirely, than the disease germs they disseminate or the noises a man makes in a thin-floored flat. Social-

{p. 538} ism says boldly the State is the Over-Parent, the Outer Parent. People rear children for the State and the future; if they do that well, they do the whole world a service, and deserve payment just as much as if they built a bridge or raised a crop of wheat; if they do it unpropitiously and ill, they have done the world an injury. Socialism denies altogether the right of any one to beget children carelessly and promiscuously, and for the prevention of disease and evil births alike, the Socialist is prepared for an insistence upon intelligence and self-restraint quite beyond the current practice. At present we deal with all that sort of thing as an infringement of private proprietary rights; the Socialist holds it is the world that is injured.

It follows that motherhood, which we still in a muddle-headed way seem to regard as partly self-indulgence and partly a service paid to a man by a woman, is regarded by the Socialists as a benefit to society, a public duty done. It may be in many cases a duty full of pride and happiness - that is beside the mark. The State will pay for children born legitimately in the marriage it will sanction. A woman with healthy and successful offspring will draw for each one of them a wage from the State, so long as they go on well. It will be her wage. Under the State she will control her child's upbringing. How far her husband will share in the power of direction is a matter of detail upon which opinion may vary - and does vary widely among Socialists. I suppose for the most part they incline to the conception of a joint control. So the monstrous injustice of the present time which

{p. 539} makes a mother dependent upon the economic accidents of her man, which plunges the best of wives and the most admirable of children into abject poverty if he happens to die, which visits his sins of waste and carelessness upon them far more than upon himself, will disappear. So too the still more monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children in their spare time, as it were, while they "earn their living" by contributing some half mechanical element to some trivial industrial product, will disappear.

That is the gist of the Socialist attitude towards marriage; the repudiation of private ownership of women and children, and the payment of mothers. Partially but already very extensively, socialistic ideas have spread through the whole body of our community; they are the saving element in what would otherwise be a moral catastrophe now, and the Socialist simply puts with precise definition the conclusions to which all but foolish, ignorant, base or careless people are moving - albeit some are moving thither with averted faces. Already we have the large, still incomplete edifice of free education, and a great mass of legislation against child labour; we have free baths, free playgrounds, free libraries, more and more people are coming to admit the social necessity of saving our children from the private enterprise of the milkman who does not sterilise his cans, from the private enterprise of the schoolmaster who cannot teach, from the private enterprise of the employer who takes them on at small wages at thirteen or fourteen to turn them back on our hands as ignorant

{p. 540} hooligans and social wastrels at eighteen or twenty. ... But the straightforward payment to the mother still remains to be brought within the sphere of practical application. To that we shall come.

{end}

(13) Melanie Phillips' book The Sex-Change Society - "a devastating attack on androgynous public policy"

Phillips was a prominent writer in LM Magazine (formerly Living Marxism), whose leaders were once members of the (Trotskyist) Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).

She and they (Mick Hume was the editor) have since "come out" as Zionists. I oppose their Zionism, but side with them on many other issues.

(13.1) Melanie Phillips' website on The Sex-Change Society (buy it there)

http://www.melaniephillips.com/books/#scs

The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male

Melanie Phillips Paperback, 370 pages (1999) Social Market Foundation. ISBN: 1-874097-64-X

The Sex-Change Society issues a devastating attack on androgynous public policy, arguing that feminism has distorted its own agenda of equality by replacing it with sameness. The results are startling. Men have been demonised through a distorted view that they are intrinsically violent and feckless while all women are essentially 'saint-like'. At the same time, women are being encouraged to work at all times, whether they want to or not. In this timely critique Melanie Phillips tells the disturbing story of the attempt to feminise the state, to reverse the roles of men and women and to run masculinity out of town altogether. The result has been an anti-family policy in which everyone has become a potential loser.

(13.2) Review of The Sex-Change Society

http://mensightmagazine.com/reviews/Svoboda/sexchange.htm

... While the author focuses on the UK, much of her message is equally applicable to North America, as when she laments: "The undermining of marriage as a meaningful institution has played a crucial role in collapsing the equilibrium between the sexes and driving men away from their families." The writer effortlessly shreds feminist theory suggesting that men seek highly compensated work so as to exercise economic power over their wives in their families, demonstrating instead that women retain significant power in traditional marriages and also that men have their own biological and social imperatives motivating them to become effective providers in order to create a useful role for themselves. Phillips is a big fan of marriage and places its systematic destruction as perhaps the most critical change on the gender front in recent decades. She rightly takes to tasks the "pervasive non-judgmentalism" which has led us to paradoxes where marriage's importance is ostensibly acknowledged while society all too often refuses to back up this lip service with appropriate social support for this increasingly fragile institution. Phillips also pinpoints no-fault divorce for "legitimis[ing] illegitimacy," which "in turn encouraged more women to get divorced, thus creating a socially devastating feedback loop."

The author pinpoints an important yet rarely discussed issue: "the threshold of what is tolerable in a relationship has become extremely low. What would once have been considered an irritating problem is now the trigger for marriage collapse." A "culture of divorce" has displaced a culture of marriage. Phillips proposes that marriage where children are present should not be dissolvable in the absence of wrongdoing by the non-petitioning partner and asks in effect, why not turn back the clock on this issue? Why should marriage be cancelable at will when other less socially critical contracts are binding on both parties?

Where are we heading with our "sex-change society"? "Men are to be re-engineered into the emotionally literate unemployed so that women can take their jobs and the state can perform the women's role - with fathers turned into au pairs. The aim is nothing less than the removal of the distinctive social and cultural role for fathers that has defined civil society [for centuries]." Phillips calls for an end to the virtually unique taxation system in the UK which levies separately on husbands and their wives without offering the possibility of joint filing or acknowledging the reality of married couples with a wage-earning husband and a stay-at-home wife.

Melanie Phillips is a careful wordsmith, and her clever and telling phrases tend to stick in one's memory. A few examples: "The idea that women were repressed until the sexual revolution in the 1960s is absurd É they were certainly restrained, a crucially different matter." "The term Ôsingle-parent family' by definition excludes the second parent from the institution, while at the same time sanitising the loss." "Fear of giving offence has left people so reluctant to criticise irresponsibility that irresponsible behaviour has itself been redefined as blameless, even heroic." The author brooks no nonsense and positively brims with common sense. "Men and women have more in common and more differences than either feminists or socio-biologists care to acknowledge." "The general emphasis on personal autonomy and individual rights undermined parental authority and with it parental responsibility É. Children were invested with adult responsibilities as fast as the adult world divested itself of them." Phillips forthrightly confronts the somewhat mind-boggling yet pervasive claims that social policies and laws have no effect on decisions regarding marriage and children.

The writer also has a facility at succinctly summarizing complex and far-reaching social developments in a few sentences, as when she notes that there are "three key characteristics of the new social order. The first is the spread of sexual relationships outside marriage, free from social disapproval. The second is the erosion of stable marriages É. The third is the widespread toleration of illegitimacy and the exclusion of the father from the family unit, now defined as the mother and child alone." Phillips emphasizes the critical role of this trio of changes: "In detaching sex from permanent union between individuals, they have robbed men and women of the freedom to build relationships with each other in which they can place reliance and trustÉ. Fathers have increasingly been turned into an optional bolt-on extra." ...

The writer rightly calls attention to a number of glaring contradictions in feminist thinking, such as the remarkable claim that fathers in intact families cannot effectively parent while holding full-time jobs that require them to be away from home, but yet somehow mothers with full-time jobs become better parents and also after divorce the father's physical presence is unnecessary as long as he pays the all-important child support "Male breadwinning is thus forbidden inside marriage but compulsory when the marriage is over." She also points to the clash of the concepts that on the one hand, women should be treated the same as men and androgyny is a laudable goal, and on the other hand, women are quite different from and superior to men. Regarding domestic violence, she highlights the irony that women have come to rely on men's refusal to respond to physical provocation and have themselves become more violent and men less violent while the law continues to act as if only men can commit domestic violence. (Astoundingly, a British government produced a report admitting heavy female involvement in domestic violence was met with public silence, and the government made no changes in its policies to bring them into even minimal compliance with its own findings.) Unfortunately, the author does not always avoid her own brand of inconsistency, as when this straight-laced conservative forthrightly calls for government spending to privilege matrimony and at another point proposes cash payments to mothers. {end}

(13.3) Review of The Sex-Change Society, by Trevor Berry

http://www.fnf.org.uk/mck/mck46/mck46_22.html

THIS BOOK considers the implications of androgynous public policy. The author argues that feminism has distorted its own agenda of equality by replacing it with sameness. By pursuing an anti-family policy (albeit unacknowledged) everyone has become a potential loser. One of the most prescient passages is a quotation from Carol Smart's 1984 book 'The Ties That Bind':

"The idea of abolishing marriage may sound as attractive as the classical communist call to abolish the family, but such demands are probably as unpopular as they are unrealistic. It would be far more effective to undermine the social and legal need and support for the marriage contract. This could be achieved by withdrawing the privileges which are currently extended to the married heterosexual couple."

Sure enough, this is precisely what has happened. The supporters of both ordinary and alternative families will find food for thought in a book that should be read by anyone concerned with the theory and/or practice of family law, be they members of the judiciary, barristers, solicitors, court welfare officers, social workers, mediators and, not least the users, whom the system exists to serve. Although Prime Minister Tony Blair has repeatedly stressed that he understands the importance of stable family life and the place of marriage in bringing that about, there has been, writes Phillips, almost "no one in the government who agreed that it should promote marriage."

Phillips reminds her readers that, "Ministers have immediately qualified every statement of this kind - about marriage and the strong foundation it provides for stable relationships - by saying that other family structures are just as good, which is not only contradictory but tendentious."

"The freedom of individuals to act as if they had no responsibility for the consequences of their behaviour had become the libertarian shibboleth that defined so-called progressive attitudes." The author claims opinion formers have advanced an agenda which, whilst claiming to promote freedom and independence for women, has in fact delivered the opposite. She shows that from a genuine campaign for equality of opportunity it became subsumed to a gender vendetta which used women and children as a smoke-screen for an attack on men. "The ill effects on children of family breakdown were either concealed or misrepresented as being good for children."

"The distorted view that men are always the violent or feckless victimisers and women their victims has become embedded in our cultural bloodstream. It is a kind of group libel which distorts public policy, not least in the attitude of the Child Support Agency and the divorce courts."

"The family court process gives women incentives to dispense with their husbands and take the children and the home. Men who are told they must cease to be breadwinners when married suddenly find they are treated as walking wallets after divorce." The final chapter, 'A Policy For All The Family', concludes: "Men need work; women need choice; children need both parents. Government policies should not promote a sex-change for society. They should support... the sensitive and complex network of interdepen-dence between men and women." Phillips has performed a valuable social service in enunciating and exposing the shortcomings of some government policies. This fascinating treatise should be essential reading to enable FNF readers to make sense of their negative experiences. It deserves a place in every public library - why not get your copy via that route?

Trevor Berry {endquote}

{end}

(14) Feminism's debt to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

There is little in Feminist theory that is not contained in outline, in Frederick Engels' book on the origin of the family. And Engels says that he wrote this book at Marx' bequest, and only because Marx died before he could do it himself.

F. Engels

On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1948)

{Since Marx and Engels proclaimed that they wanted to do away with the state, and with private property, it's clear that they wanted to do away with the family too}

{p. 5} PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 1884

The following chapters constitute, in a sense, the fulfilment of a bequest. It was no less a person than Karl Marx who had planned to present the results of Morgan's researches in connection with the conclusions arrived at by his own - within certain limits I might say our own - materialist investigation of history and thus to make clear their whole significance. For Morgan rediscovered in America, in his own way, the materialist conception of history that had been discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilization was led by this conception to the same conclusions, in the main points, as Marx had arrived at. And just as Capital was for years both zealously plagiarized and persistently hushed up on the part of the official cconomists in Germany, so was Morgan's Ancient Society1 treated by the spokesmen of "prehistoric" science in England. My work can offer but a meagre substitute for that which my departed friend was not destined to accomplish. However, I have before me, in his extensive extracts from Morgan,2 critical notes which I reproduce here wherever this is at all possible. ...

{footnote} 1 Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress frorn Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization. By Lewis H. Morgan, London, MacMillan & Co., 877. This book was printed in America, and is remarkably difficult to obtain in London. The author died a few years aoo. [Note by Engels.]

{footnote} 2 The reference is to Karl Marx's Abstract of Morgan's "Ancient Society", published in Russian in 1945. See Marx-Engels Archive, Vol. IX. - Ed.

{p. 56} The property had to remain within the gens. ... The children of the deceased, however, belonged not to his gens, but to that of their mother. In the beginning, they inherited from their mother, along with the rest of their mother's blood relatives, and later, perhaps, had first claim upon her property; but they could not inherit from their father, because they did not belong to his gens, and his property had to remain in the latter. On the death of the herd owner, therefore, his herds passed, first of all, to his brothers and sisters and to his sisters' children or to the descendants of his mother's sisters. His own children, however, were disinherited.

Thus, as wealth increased, it, on the one hand, gave the man a more important status in the family than the woman, and, on the other hand, created a stimulus to utilize this strengthened position in order to overthrow the traditional order of inheritance in favour of his children. But this was impossible as long as descent according to mother right prevailed. This had, therefore, to be overthrown, and it was overthrown, and it was not so difficult to do this as it appears to us now. For this revolution - one of the most decisive ever experienced by mankind - need not have disturbed one single living member of a gens. All the members could remain what they were previously. The simple decision sufficed that in future the descendants of the male members should remain in the gens, but that those of the females were to be excluded from the gens and transferred to that of their father. The reckoning of descent through the female line and the right of inheritance through the mother were hereby overthrown and male lineage and right of inheritance from the father instituted. As to how and when this revolution was effected among the civilized peoples we know nothing. It falls entirely within prehistoric times. That it was actually effected is more than proved by the abundant traces of mother right which have been collected, especially by Bachofen. How easily it is accomplished can be seen from a whole number of Indian tribes, among whom it has only recently taken place and is still proceeding, partly under the influence of increasing

{p. 57} wealth and changed methods of life (transplantation from the forests to the prairies), and partly under the moral influence of civilization and the missionaries. Of eight Missouri tribes, six have male and two still retain the female lineage and female inheritance line. Among the Shawnees, Miamis and Delawares it has become the custom to transfer the children to the father's gens by giving them one of the gentile names obtaining therein, in order that they may inherit from him. "Innate human casuistry to seek to change things by changing their names! And to find loopholes for breaking through tradition within tradition itself, wherever a direct interest provided a sufficient motive!" (Marx.) As a consequence, hopeless confusion arose; and matters could only be straightened out, and partly were straightened out, by the transition to father right. "This appears altogether to be the most natural transition." (Marx.) As for what the experts on comparative law have to tell us regarding the ways and means by which this transition was effected among the civilized peoples of the Old World - almost mere hypotheses, of course - see M. Kovalevsky, Outline of the Origin and Evolution of the Family and Property, Stockholm 1890.

The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of the mans lust, a mere instrument for breeding children. This lowered position of women, especially manifest among the Greeks of the Heroic and still more of the Classical Age, has become gradually embellished and dissembled and, in part, clothed in a milder form, but by no means abolished.

The first effect of the sole rule of the men that was now established is shown in the intermediate form of the family which now emerges, the patriarchal family. Its chief attribute is not polygamy - of which more anon - but "the organization of a number of persons, bond and free, into a family, under the paternal power of the head of the family. In the Semitic form, this family chief lives in polygamy, the bondsman has a wife and children, and the purpose of the whole organization is the care of flocks ...

{p. 60} The Roman family, too, has been traced back to this type, and in consequence the absolute power of the head of the house, as also the lack of rights of the remaining members of the family in relation to him, has recently been stronly questioned. ...

In India, the household community with common tillage of the soil was already mentioned by Nearchus, in the time of Alexander the Great, and exists to this day in the same area, in the Punjab and the entire North-Western part of the country. ...

At any rate, the patriarchal household community with common land ownership and common tillage now assumes quite another significance than hitherto. We can no longer doubt the important transitional role which it played among the civilized and many other peoples of the Old World between the mother-right family and the monogamian family. We shall return later on to the further conclusion drawn by Kovalevsky, namely, that it was likewise the transition stage out of which developed the village, or mark, community

{p. 61} with individual cultivation and at first periodical, then permanent allotment of arable and pasture lands. ...

A few words more about polygamy and polyandry before we deal with monogamy, which developed rapidly following the overthrow of mother right. Both these marriage forms can only be exceptions, historical luxury products, so to speak, unless they appeared side by side in any country, which, as is well known, is not the case. As, therefore, the men, excluded from polygamy, could not console themselves with the women left over from polyandry, the numerical strength of men and women without regard to social institutions having been fairly equal hitherto, it is evident that neither the one nor the other form of marriage could rise to general prevalence. Actually, polygamy on the part of a man was clearly a pric of slavery and limited to a few exceptional cases. In the Semitic patriarchal family, only the patriarch himself and, at most, a couple of his sons lived in polygamy; the others had to be content with one wife each. It remains the same today throughout the entire Orient. Polygamy is a privilege of the rich and the grandees, the wives being recruited chiefly by the purchase of female slaves; the mass of the people live in monogamy. Just such an exception is provided by polyandry in India and Tibet, the certainly not uninteresting origin of which from group marriage requires closer investigation. In its practice, at any rate, it appears to be much more tolerable than the jealous harem establishments of the Mohammedans. At least, among the Nairs in India, the men, ir groups of three, four or more, have, to be sure, one wife in common, but each of them can simultaneously have a second wife in common with three or more other men, and, in the same way, a third wife, a fourth and so on. It is a wonder that McLennan did not discover a new class - that of club marriae - in these marriage clubs, membership of several of which at a time

{p. 62} was open to the men, and which he himself described. This marriage club business, however, is by no means real polyandry; on the contrary, as has bccn noted by GiraudTeulon, it is a specialized form of group marriage, the men living in polygamy, the women in polyandry.

4. The Monogamous family. As already indicated, this arises out of the pairing family in the transition period from the middle to the upper stage of barbarism, its final victory being one of the signs of the beginning of civilization. It is based on the supremacy of the man; its express aim is the begetting of children of undisputed paternity, this paternity being required in order that these children may in due time inherit their father's wealth as his natural heirs. The monogamous family differs from pairing marriage in the far greater rigidity of the marriage tie, which can now no longer be dissolved at the pleasure of either party. Now, as a rule, only the man can dissolve it and cast off his wife. The right of conjugal infidelity remains his even now, sanctioned, at least, by custom (the Code Napoleon expressly concedes this right to the husband as long as he does not bring his concubine into the conjugal home), and is exercised more and more with the growing development of society. Should the wife recall the ancient sexual practice and desire to revive it, she is punished more severely than ever before.

We are confronted with this new form of the family in all its severity among the Greeks. While, as Marx observes, the position of the goddesses in mythology represents an earlier period, when women still occupied a freer and more respected place, in the Heroic Age we already find women degraded owing to the predominance of the man and the competition of female slaves. ...

{p. 63} As regards the Greeks of later times, we must differentiate between the Dorians and the Ionians. The former, of whom Sparta was the classical example, had in many respects more ancient marriage relationships than even Homer indicates. In Sparta we find a form of pairing marriage - modified by the state in accordance with the conceptions there prevailing - which still retains many vestiges of group marriage. Childless marriages were dissolved; King Anaxandridas (about 650 B.C.) took another wife in addition to his first, childless one, and maintained two households; King Aristones of the same period added a third to two previous wives who were barren, one of whom he, however, let go. On the other hand, several brothers could have a wife in common. A person having a preference for his friend's wife could share her with him; and it was regarded as proper to place one's wife at the disposal of a lusty "stallion," as Bismarck would say, even when this person was not a citizen. A passage in Plutarch, where a Spartan woman sends a lover who is pursuing her with his attentions to interview her husband, would indicate, according to Schomann, still greater sexual freedom. Real adultery, the infidelity of the wife behind the back of her husband, was thus unheard of. On the other hand, do-

{p. 64} mestic slavery was unknown in Sparta, at least in its heyday; the Helot serfs lived segregated on the estates and thus there was less temptation for the Spartiates1 to have intercourse with their women. That in all these circumstances the women of Sparta enjoyed a very much more respected position than all other Greek women was quite natural. The Spartan women and the elite of the Athenian hetaerae are the only Greek women of whom the Ancients speak with respect, and whose remarks they consider as being worthy of record.

Among the Ionians - of whom Athens is characteristic - things were quite different. Girls learned only spinning, weaving and sewing, at best a little reading and writing. They were practically kept in seclusion and consorted only with other women. The women's quarter was a separate and distinct part of the house, on the upper floor, or in the rear buiIding, not easily accessible to men, particularly strangers; to this the women retired when men visitors came. The women did not go out unless accompanied by a female slave; at home they were virtually kept under guard; Aristophanes speaks of Molossian hounds kept to frighten off adulterers, while in Asiatic towns, at least, eunuchs were maintained to keep guard over the women; they were manufactured for the trade in Chios as early as Herodotus' day, and according to Wachsmuth, not merely for the barbarians. In Euripides, the wife is described as oikurema, a thing for housekeeping (the word is in the neuter gender), and apart from the business of bearing children, she was nothing more to the Athenian than the chief housemaid. The husband had his gymnastic exercises, his public affairs, from which the wife was excluded; in addition, he often had female slaves at his disposal and, in the hey-day of Athens, extensive prostitution, which was viewed with favour by the state, to say the least. It was precisely on the basis of this prostitution that the sole outstanding Greek women developed, who by their esprit and artistic taste towered as much above the general level of ancient womanhood as the Spartiate women did by virtue of their character. That one had first to become a hetaera

{footnote} 1 Spartiates: Class of citizens of ancient Sparta enjoying full civil rights, in contrast to the Helots. - Ed.

{p. 65} in order to become a woman is the strongest indictment of the Athenian family.

In the course of time, this Athenian family became the model upon which not only the rest of the Ionians, but also all the Greeks of the mainland and of the colonies increasingly moulded their domestic relationships. But despite all seclusion and surveillance the Greek women found opportunities often enough for deceiving their husbands. The latter, who would have been ashamed to evince any love for their own wives, amused themselves with hetaerae in all kinds of amours. But the degradation of the women recoiled on the men themselves and degraded them too, until they sank into the perversion of boylove, degrading both themselves and their gods by the myth of Ganymede.

This was the origin of monogamy, as far as we can trace it among the most civilized and highly developed people of antiquity. It was not in any way the fruit of individual sex love, with which it had absolutely nothing in common, for the marriages remained marriages of convenience, as before. It was the first form of the family based not on natural but on economic conditions, namely, on the victory of private property over original, naturally developed, common ownership. The rule of the man in the family, the procreation of children who could only be his, destined to be the heirs of his wealth - these alone were frankly avowed by the Greeks as the exclusive aims of monogamy. For the rest, it was a burden, a duty to the gods, to the state and to their ancestors, which just had to be fulfilled. In Athens the law made not only marriage compulsory, but also the fulfilment by the man of a minimum of the so-called conjugal duties.

Thus, monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes entirely unknown hitherto in prehistoric times. In an old unpublished manuscript, the work of Marx and myself in 1846,1 I find the following: "The first division of labour is that between man and woman for child breeding." And

{footnote} 1 The reference is to Die deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology); Eng. translation of parts I and III published in New York, 1939. - Ed.

{p. 66} today I can add: The first class antagonism vhich appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative regression, in which the well-being and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other. It is the cellular form of civilized society, in which we can already study the nature of the antagonisms and contradictions which develop fully in the latter.

The old relative freedom of sexual intercourse by no means disappeared with the victory of the pairing family, or even of monogamy. "The old conjugal system, now reduced to narrower limits by the gradual disappearance of the punaluan groups, still environed the advancing family, which it was to follow to the verge of civilization. ... It finally disappeared in the new form of hetaerism, which still follows mankind in civilization as a dark shadow upon the family." By hetaerism Morgan means that extramarital sexual intercourse between men and unmarried women which exists alongside of monogamy, and, as is well known, has flourished in the most diverse forms during the whole period of civilization and is steadily developing into open prostitution. This hetaerism is directly traceable to group marriage, to the sacrificial surrender of the women, whereby they purchased their right to chastity. The surrender for money was at first a religious act, taking place in the temple of the Goddess of Love, and the money originally flowed into the coffers of the temple. The hierodules1 of Anaitis in Armenia, of Aphrodite in Corinth, as well as the religious dancing girls attached to the temples in India - the so-called bayaderes (the word is a corruption of the Portuguese bailadeira, a female dancer) - were the first prostitutes. This sacrificial surrender, originally obligatory for all women, was later practised vicariously by these priestesses alone on behalf of all other women. Hetaerism among other peoples grows out of the sexual freedom permitted to girls,

{footnote} 1 Hierodules: Female slave temple attendants. - Ed.

{p. 67} before marriage - hence likewise a survival of group marriage, only transmitted to us by another route. With the rise of property differentiation - that is, as far back as the upper stage of barbarism - wage labour appears sporadically alongside of slave labour; and simultaneously, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution of free women appears side by side with the forced surrender of the female slave. Thus, the heritage bequeathed to civilization by group marriage is double-sided, just as everything engendered by civilization is double-sided, double-tongued, self-contradictory and antagonistic: on the one hand, monogamy, on the other, hetaerism, including its most extreme form, prostitution. Hetaerism is as much a social institution as any other; it is a continuation of the old sexual freedom - in favour of the men. Although, in reality, it is not only tolerated but even practised with gusto, particularly by the ruling classes, it is condemned in words. In reality, however, this condemnation by no means hits the men who indulge in it, it hits only the women: they are ostracized and cast out in order to proclaim once again the absolute domination of the male over the female sex as the fundamental law of society.

A second contradiction, however, is hereby developed within monogamy itself. By the side of the husband, whose life is embellished by hetaerism, stands the neglected wife. And it is just as impossible to have one side of a contradiction without the other as it is to retain the whole of an apple in one's hand after half has been eaten. Nevertheless, the men appear to have thought differently, until their wives taught them to know better. Two permanent social figures, previously unknown, appear on the scene along with monogamy - the wife's paramour and the cuckold. The men had gained the victory over the women, but the act of crowning the victor was magnanimously undertaken by the vanquished. Adultery - proscribed, severely penalized, but irrepressible - became an unavoidable social institution alongside of monogamy and hetaerism. The assured paternity of children was now, as before, based, at best, on moral conviction; and in order to solve the insoluble contradiction, Article 312 of the Code Napoleon decreed: "L'enfant conu pendant le mariage a pour pere le mari." "a child conceived

{p. 68} during marriage has for its father the husband." This is the final outcome of three thousand years of monogamy.

Thus, in the monogamous family, in those cases that faithfully reflect its historical origin and that clearly bring out the sharp conflict between man and woman resulting from the exclusive domination of the male, we have a picture in miniature of the very antagonisms and contradictions in which society, split up into classes since the commencement of civilization, moves, without being able to resolve and overcome them. Naturally, I refer here only to those cases of monogamy where matrimonial life really takes its course according to the rules governing the original character of the whole institution but where the wife rebels against the domination of the husband. That this is not the case with all marriages no one knows better than the German philistine, who is no more capable of ruling in the home than in the state, and whose wife, therefore, with full justification, wears the breeches of which he is unworthy. But in consolation he imagines himself to be far superior to his French companion in misfortune, who, more often than he, fares far worse.

The monogamous family, however, did not by any means appear everywhere and always in the classically harsh form which it assumed among the Greeks. Among the Romans, who as future world conquerors took a longer, if less refined, view than the Greeks, woman was more free and respected. The Roman believed the conjugal fidelity of his wife to be adequately safeguarded by his power of life and death over her. Besides, the wife, just as well as the husband, could dissolve the marriage voluntarily. But the greatest advance in the development of monogamy definitely occurred with the entry of the Germans into history, because, probably owing to their poverty, monogamy does not yet appear to have completely evolved among them out of the pairing marriage. This we conclude from three circumstances mentioned by Tacitus: Firstly, despite their firm belief in the sanctity of rnarriage - "each man is contented with a single wife, and the women lived fenced around with chastity" - polygamy existed for men of rank and the tribal chiefs, a situation similar to that of the Americans among whom pairing marriage prevailed. Secondly, the transition from mother right to father right could only

{p. 69} have been accomplished a short time previously, for the mother's brother - the closest male gentile relative according to mother right - was still regarded as being an almost closer relative than one's own father, which likewise corresponds to the standpoint of the American Indians, among whom Marx found the key to the understanding of our own prehistoric past, as he often used to say. And thirdly, women among the Germans were highly respected and were influential in public affairs also - which directly conflicts with the domination of the male characteristic of monogamy. Nearly all these are points on which the Germans are in accord with the Spartans, among whom, likewise, as we have already seen, pairing marriage had not completely disappeared. Thus, in this connection also, an entirely new element acquired world supremacy with the emergence of the Germans. The new monogamy which now developed out of the mingling of races on the ruins of the Roman world clothed the domination of the men in milder forms and permitted women to occupy, at least with regard to externals, a far freer and more respected position than classical antiquity had ever known. This, for the first time, created the possibility for the greatest moral advance which we derive from and owe to monogamy - a development taking place within it, parallel with it, or in opposition to it, as the case might be, namely, modern individual sex love, previously unknown to the whole world.

This advance, however, definitely arose out of the circumstance that the Germans still lived in the pairing family, and as far as possible, grafted the position of woman corresponding thereto on to monogamy. It by no means arose as a result of the legendary, wonderful moral purity of temperament of the Germans, which was limited to the fact that, in practice, the pairing family did not reveal the same glaring moral antagonisms as monogamy. On the contrary, the Germans, in their migrations, particularly south-east, to the nomads of the steppes on the Black Sea, suffered considerable moral degeneration and, apart from their horsemanship, acquired serious unnatural vices from them, as is attested to explicitly by Ammianus about the Taifali, and by Procopius about the Heruli.

Although monogamy was the only known form of the family unut of which modern sex love could develop, it does

{p. 70} not follow that this love developed within it exclusively, or even predominantly, as the mutual love of man and wife. The whole nature of strict monogamous marriage under male domination ruled this out. Among all historically active classes, that is, among all ruling classes, matrimony remained what it had been since pairing marriage - a matter of convenience arranged by the parents. And the first form of sex love that historically emerges as a passion. and as a passion in which any person (at least of the ruling classes) has a right to indulge, as the highest form of the sexual impulse - which is precisely its specific feature - this, its first foorm, the chivalrous love of the Middle Ages, was by no means conjugal love. On the contrary, in its classical form among the Provenals, it steers under full sail towards adultery, the praises of which are sung by their poets. The "Albas," in German Tagelieder [Songs of the Dawn], are the flower of Provencal love poetry. They describe in glowing colours how the knight lies with his love - the wife of another - while the watchman stands guard outside, calling him at the first faint streaks of dawn (alba) so that he may escape unobserved. The parting scene then constitutes the climax. The Northern French as well as the worthy Germans, likewise adopted this style of poetry along with the manners of chivalrous love which corresponded to it; and on this same suggestive theme our own old Wolfram von Eschenbach has left us three equisite Songs of the Dawn, which I prefer to his three long heroic poems.

Bourgeois marriage of our own times is of two kinds. In Catholic countries the parents, as heretofore, still provide a suitable wife for their young bourgeois son, and the consequence is naturally the fullest unfolding of the contradiction inherent in monogamy - flourishing hetaerism on the part of the husband, and flourishing adultery on the part of the wife. The Catholic Church doubtless abolished divorce only because it was convinced that for adultery, as for death, there is no cure whatsoever. In Protestant countries, on the other hand, it is the rule that the bourgeois son is allowed to seek a wife for himself from his own class, more or less freely. Conseequently, marriage can be based on a certain degree of love which, for decency's sake, is always assumed, in accordance with Protestant hypocrisy.

{p. 71} In this case, hetaerism on the part of the men is less actively pursued, and adultery on the woman's part is not so much the rule. Since in every kind of marriage, however, people remain what they were before they married, and since the bourgeois of Protestant countries are mostly philistines, this Protestant monogamy leads merely, if we take the average of the best cases, to a wedded life of leaden boredom, which is described as domestic bliss. The best mirror of these two ways of marriage is the novel - the French novel for the Catholic style, and the German novel for the Protestant. In both cases "he gets it": in the German novel the young man gets the girl; in the French, the husband gets the cuckold's horns. Which of the two is in the worse plight is not always easy to make out. For the dullness of the German novel excites the same horror in the French bourgeois as the "immorality" of the French novel excites in the German philistine, although lately, since "Berlin is becoming a metropolis," the German novel has begun to deal a little less timidly with hetaerism and adultery, long known to exist there.

In both cases, however, marriage is determined by the class position of the participants, and to that extent always remains marriage of convenience. In both cases, this marriage of convenience often enough turns into the crassest prostitution - sometimes on both sides, but much more generally on the part of the wife, who differs from the ordinary courtesan only in that she does not hire out her body, like a wage-worker, on piecework, but sells it into slavery once for all. And Fourier's words hold good for all marriages of convenience: "Just as in grammar two negatives make a positive, so in the morals of marriage, two prostitutions make one virtue." Sex love in the relation of husband and wife is and can become the rule only among the oppressed classes, that is, at the present day, among the proletariat, no matter whether this relationship is officially sanctioned or not. But here all the foundations of classical monogamy are removed. Here, there is a complete absence of all property, for the safeguarding and inheritance of which monogamy and male domination were established. Therefore, there is no stimulus whatever here to assert male domination. What is more, the means, too, are absent; bourgeois law, which protects this domination,

{p. 72} exists only for the propertied classes and their dealings with the proletarians. ...

{end}

Fine in theory. But in the early USSR, "abolishing the family" meant taking childcare away from the parents, and bestowing it on "trained" professionals: sex-soviet.html.

At least in the Catholic and Protestant methods the authors mention, the parents were able to rear their own children.

Perhaps the Catholic method offered the best of both worlds. But it was based on the indissubility of marriage; once divorce is permissible for adultery, that method breaks down.

(15) Unstable modern partnerships affecting the birth rate - Bettina Arndt

Wedding bells will ring in higher fertility

Sydney Morning Herald, March 29 2004

http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2004/03/28/1080412233994.html

The unstable nature of modern partnerships is affecting the birth rate, writes Bettina Arndt.

... So, it's hazardous partnering patterns that are screwing up our fertility levels. Increasing numbers waste precious child-rearing years in de facto relationships and end up partnerless as their fertility declines. The number of partnerless women in their 30s nearly doubled between 1986 and 2001, according to the Birrell data. ...

{end}

(16) The West's move to Matriliny, and its justification in Anthropology and Archaeology

(16.1) John Campion, of The Cheltenham Group, says (below) that "we live in an increasingly matrilineal society".

This is followed by quotes from Lewis H. Morgan, Marija Gimbutas et al on the matrilineal societies that preceded patrilineal ones. Returning to such systems is part of the Marxist idea of restoring Primitive Communism, albeit in a modern form supported by the state.

This can be considered in dialectical form:

Thesis: matriliny in Primitive Communism
Antithesis: introduction of the State, whereby one group in society subjugates another
Synthesis: restoration of Primitive Communism, no longer kinship-based but State-based.

The implementation in the USSR, and on Israeli kibbutzes, involved parents yielding up the rearing of their children to "trained" child care workers.

While the West goes matrilineal, East Asia (Japan, China, Korea etc) and India remain mostly patrilineal.

Bronislaw Malinowski found the Trobrian Islanders (a matrilinial society in Papua New Guinea) unaware of the father's role in paternity. Malinowski recorded that Trobriand society freely allowed premarital sex. With marriage, however, this free time came to an end. The woman then had family responsibilities, and if the man had other women he risked losing not only his wife but his children too, because they remained with her. However, a man remained the guardian of his sister's children; so, regardless of divorce, he partipated in the rearing of children.

I doubt that a Trobriand man divorced by his wife had to pay for the upkeep of his children; that role would have belonged to their mother's brother. I must look up what Malinowski says on this.

Robin Fox wrote, of Lewis H. Morgan, in his book Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective (Penguin, 1967):

"He had good reason, he thought, to believe that the primitive Greeks had kinship groups based, like the Iroqois, on kinship in the female line. ... Out of promiscuity came 'kinship through females only' in the more primitive societies, then there was a change to 'kinship through males only' and the development of cities and civilization. With the growth of the complexity of civilization the larger kinship groups withered away - as happened in historical times in Rome. It was a very imaginative scheme, but is was based on facts which were wrongly interpreted, and by no means represented a universal process." (p. 20).

Most tribal peoples in Australia and Papua New Guinea were patrilinial, but a portion were matrilineal. Ancient Egypt was matrilineal, but aware of paternity.

Patrilinial societies often require "Brideprice" for the girl, at marriage; this is refundable if she quits the marriage. But Fox noted the converse too:

"The dowry is a very 'Indo-European' institution and is in many ways the opposite of bride-wealth. In many parts of peasant Europe, such as Ireland and Greece, it still survives, and families can ruin themselves in providing suitable dowries for their daughters" (op. cit., p. 238).

This Indo-European practice applies in India too.

Looking at Greece and other parts of south-east Europe, Marija Gimbutas discerned vestiges of a pre-Indo-European culture, which was matrilineal and had a Great Goddess - e.g. Minoan Crete and early Malta.

(16.2) The Engine of a Matrilineal Society: Alternative Routes, by John Campion

John Campion, The Cheltenham Group

http://www.ukmm.org.uk/publics/flj.htm

... This paper ... makes the following three claims:

We live in an increasingly matrilineal society, and this is undesirable
This matrilineal society is engineered by the State
Because it is engineered by the State, it may be changed by the State

... When the court started creating a matrilineal society, it had nothing to do with the grounds for divorce or, indeed, statute at all. It started when they started awarding custody of children to mothers regardless of their matrimonial conduct. The last element of conduct to remain was adultery but this was removed in the landmark case of Allen in 1948. He was a prisoner of war who returned to find his wife and his eight-year old daughter living with another man. He was initially awarded custody on the usual grounds that an adulterous wife would be unlikely to provide a stable home for the daughter, but this was overturned on appeal.

The pretence in Statute and associated public discussions is that two parents can equally appear before a court and argue for custody of their children. As anyone involved in divorce knows, this is not the case. Custody to the mother regardless of her adultery, desertion or other matrimonial offence is the powerful default which a father has to overturn. This default exists even with boys up to 11 and 12 years old and irrespective of whether the mother is working full time or not.

This outcome (which is pre-determined) is probably the most important factor motivating divorce. Most parents feel they can walk away from money and property but not from their children. The stance adopted by the father is also powerfully motivated by the information he will be given by his solicitor that, in the event of the mother or her new partner flouting a court order over access, the courts will do nothing to protect his rights. He will also know that, in the event of his failing in a custody dispute, he will have to pay his wife's costs.

(16.3) Removal of all rights men once held in marriage

http://www.c-g.org.uk/about/content.htm

About Cheltenham Group

... During the last 30 years or so we have experienced something not previously known. This is the elimination of men's legal rights within the family, in effect the deliberate destruction of legal marriage, coupled with massive state support for lone motherhood.

Our research indicates that over the last 25 years of the 20th Century, in about 100,000 cases per year, honest and decent men have experienced the destruction of their families, entirely against their wishes. They have seen the removal of their children, confiscation of their home and life savings, and forced payments from their future income. History shows that this has happened in increments, largely without public knowledge, and not through any democratic process. From 1948 fathers lost legal control of their children, and from 1973 control of their life savings and future income.

(6.4) Female Centered Proto-Culture and Promiscuous Social Structures - Matrilineal Studies: Part 2

http://www.humanevolution.net/a/matrilineal.html

Library of Excerpts

"My archeological research does not confirm the hypothetical existence of the primordial parents and their division into the Great Father and Great Mother figures or the further division of the Great Mother figure into a Good and a Terrible Mother. There is no trace of a father figure in any of the Paleolithic periods. The life-creating power seems to have been of the Great Goddess alone. A complete division into a "good" and a "terrible" Mother never occurred: the Life Giver and the Death Wielder are one deity." (Gimbutas, Marija (1989) The Languages of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 316)

Description of Strabo, a 1st century B.C. Greek, discussing that the Crete inhabitants had a woman's brother bring up her children. Also Sparta discussion of matrilineal culture and the calculation of mother's brother as vital to early Greek culture. (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. pp. 346-7)

"The caves, crevices, and caverns of the earth are natural manifestations of the primordial womb of the Mother. This idea is not Neolithic in origin; it goes back to the Paleolithic, when the narrow passages, oval-shaped areas, clefts, and small cavities of caves are marked or painted entirely in red." (Gimbutas, Marija (1989) The Languages of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 151)

"Kindred were linked together chiefly through the bond of their maternity. In the ancient gens descent was limited to the female line. " (Morgan 1877: 68, Ancient Society.)

"In summary, the cemetery evidence in central and east-central Europe during the 5th millennium B.C. speaks for the existence of kinship based societies. Graves were arranged in rows or in groups of twenty to thirty-five people, which may refect kin-related units. The most honored members of the Old European society were elder females, perhaps heads of the stem or queens, and girls who were very likely members of a hereditary line or priestesses. Their graves do not indicate the accumulation of personal possessions but are marked by symbolic items, sometimes of exceptional quality, and by the erection of gigantic mounds and consecrated structures. The graves of girls and female infants were consistently equipped with exceptional ritual objects not found in other graves. Analysis of blood groups testify to a pronounced indogamous society which may suggest that these girls were important heiresses in a hereditary female line." (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 338)

"Judging from mythologies and surviving kinship terminology, the brother of the queen (or priestess, as representative of the Goddess), rather than her consort, played a major role. In Neolithic times, the queen-priestess presided over agriculture and religious life. Her brother may have assumed leadership responsibilities (but not dominating control) over public works, craft organization, and trade." (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 344)

"codes of Roman Law vestigial features can be recognized to a matrilineal order of inheritance" in first European recognition of matristic order in 1861 by Johann Jakob Bachofen. (Gimbutas, Marija (1989) The Languages of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. forward, 1st page by Joseph Campbell)

"The major aspects of the Goddess of the Neolithic --- the birth-giver, portrayed in a naturalistic birth-giving pose; the fertility-giver influencing growth and multiplication, portrayed as a pregnant nude; the life of nourishment-giver and protectress, portrayed as a bird-women with breasts and protruding buttocks; and the death-wielder as a stiff nude ("bone") --- can all be traced back to the period when the first sculptures of bone, ivory, or stone appeared, around 25,000 B. C. and their symbols --- vulvas, triangles, breasts, chevrons, zig-zags, meanders, cupmarks --- to an even earlier time." (Gimbutas, Marija (1989) The Languages of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. xix)

"Greek Artemis, Eileithyia, Thracian Bendis, Venetic Rehtia, and Roman Diana, as well as the living Fate in European folk beliefs --- particularly the Baltic Laima and the Irish Brigit --- are unquestionable descendants of the prehistoric Life-giving Goddess. This Goddess has nothing to do with the Indo-European pantheon of gods. She must have survived the process of Indo-Europeanization and was carried over to our times from generation to generation by the grandmothers and mothers of countless families. The historic and prehistoric Life-giver was a Mistress of mountains, stones, waters, forests, and animals, and incarnation of the mysterious powers of nature. Being an owner of wells, springs, and healing waters, she was a miraculous bestower of health. Through prehistory and history she appeared as a bird woman, bird, or woman. As a waterbird she was a nourisher of humanity and an increaser of material goods. She was the guardian of the well-being of the family and from Paleolithic times must have been considered to be the ancestress and progenetrix of the family or clan." (Gimbutas, Marija (1989) The Languages of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p.111)

"The beautiful Hera, one of the most revered of the Greek Goddesses, is the likely descendant of the prehistoric Snake Goddess." "Homer called her "cow-faced." boopis. Egyptian Hathor was also a cow and is described as the primeval serpent who ruled the world." (Gimbutas, Marija (1989) The Languages of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p.134)

"Where descent is in the female line, as it was universally in the archaic period, the gens is composed of a supposed female ancestor and her children, together with the children of her female descendants, through females, in perpetuity..." (Morgan 1877: 63, Ancient Society.)

"The gens has passed through successive stages of development in its transition from its archaic to its final form with the progress of mankind. These changes were limited, in the main, to two: firstly, changing descent from the female line, which was the archaic rule, as among the Iroquois, to the male line, which was the final rule, as among the Grecian and Roman gentes; and, secondly, changing the inheritance of the property of a deceased member of the gens from his gentiles, who took it in the archaic period, first to his agnatic kindred, and finally to his children. These changes, slight as they may seem, indicate very great changes of condition as well as a large degree of progressive development." (Morgan 1877: 64, Ancient Society.) ...

{end}

(17) The Civilized way of Birth

In 1974, I did a study of reports of birth among "primitive" peoples, for my B. A. Honours thesis in Anthropology. I was interested in discerning whether there was some commonality which could be called "human nature". Margaret Mead had claimed that there was not.

One commonality I found in these births was that the postures were overwhelmingly upright (kneeling, squatting, sitting on a birth stool with a hole in the middle, standing while holding a rope or supported by other people). The advantages are that the pelvic cavity is expanded, gravity lends assistance, and the woman is able to exert more abdominal pressure.

Another commonality was that breast-feeding lasted about 3 years.

I found that the medical textbooks for the training of doctors and nurses, in our universities and colleges, completely omitted any mention, let alone investigation, of upright posture. So much for the notion that they were the "experts".

One other important finding is that in our system, there is a changeover of expert just after the birth, from obstetrician - who has handled the pregnancy up to that point - to pediatrician, who takes over then. There was a lack of continuity, which might explain the problems in getting bonding and breast-feeding established.

The obstetrician, for example, judged his sucess by whether mother and baby survived. It was not his business whether interventions during the birth (induction, cesarean, drugs etc) affected the ability of mother and baby to bond afterwards.

Bonding occurs as a hormonal reaction in the mother soon after birth if interferences have not disturbed her. In the case of farm animals, touching the newborn before the mother has bonded can cause her to reject it.

This instinctive bonding is an instant falling-in-love with the baby, that makes the arduous task of looking after it seem a joy. Fathers, siblings, and mothers who don't bond at birth, can still bond gradually, the slow way. You know you've bonded when you can't imagine life without the new child.

The baby instinctively looks at human eyes, and smiles at them. These elicit caring responses.

In Home Birth methods, upright posture is commonly used, and the same midwife attends the woman throughout - during the pregnancy, at the birth, and for the first 10 days after, to help mother and baby settle in together.

One thing I was not interested in, in my study, was the religious aspect of birth; I edited this out of my reports.

Yet later, when I looked through the reports again, I noticed that, in every case, the people were praying to their spirits, gods or goddesses, requesting safe delivery and thanking them for it afterwards.

The spirits or gods were different from group to group, so the details of each religion seemed - to the outside observer - to be man-made. Yet, man-made or not, these religions were crucially important to the peace of mind of all these people, and the smooth functioning of their social relations.

(18) Facts of Life - how to have a home birth and how to rear children

A high-class Brahmin woman from India, who will remain unnamed, wrote to me:

{quote} I was born by C-section as were all my cousins. ...

Natural birthing came to an end in my mom's family with my grandma's generation. My mother's generation including the daughters-in-law gave birth the 'C' way and my neices and nephew were all born by C-section. My mother has put the fear of natural birth into my mind. Though it sounds marvellously close to nature and to the animal world's way of doing things, I'm dead scared of labour pains. I don't intend to ever experience them and will be opting for a C-section.
{endquote}

How amazing!

So many Western women are following the same path.

When I had an operation (to remove a hydrocele from one testicle) at Bundaberg Regional Hospital in mid-2008, the Surgeon was a beautiful young woman from Singapore, about 30 years old. She looked mixed-race.

During the operation (I only had local anaesthetic), we talked about the incidence of Cesareans. The Surgeon said that about one in three births are done that way now, and seemed to think it too high. The Anaesthetist agreed that Cesareans may impair bonding between mother & child, but said that hospitals do them commonly now to avoid being sued. One doctor or nurse said that that medical staff are losing their skills at handling complications in birth, except by Cesarean.

During a home birth, decisions have to be made. It's best if the woman does not have to take that burden on herself. Preferably, she can turn for advice to an experienced, trusted person. That's the advantage of having a homebirth midwife present. The important thing is to have a person with the right values doing that recommending.

However, the medical and legal establishments have made it so difficult for homebirth midwives and doctors to practice (having put the fear of litigation into them), that some women are choosing to have their babies at home without a midwife or a homebirth doctor. It is still advisable to have an experienced person present, but one with the right values.

Giving birth is an athletic event like running a marathon. Hence the importance of exercise during pregnancy - it's like an athlete training for the event. Overeating of fatty foods only makes the baby bigger and the birth harder.

Birth should ideally be at home, and non-interventionist. A homebirth midwife should be attending, and she will ring the homebirth doctor she works with, if she needs to; but this is rare. The woman will have visited her several times, and she will have already visited the woman's house before.

During the first stage of birth, the woman's pelvis is dialating. At this time she should walk around. When the baby comes - this is second stage - she kneels down and holds onto something. If the man is present, he should sit on the bed, and she should hold his knees. Behind her is the midwife - this is the business end.

On the floor are placed first newspapers and then old sheets, because some blood and mess will be present, especially when the placenta emerges (third stage).

Giving birth this way is the easiest, the most relaxed, the quickest, the most enjoyable, and the most miraculous.

Immediately after having given birth this way, the woman will pick up the baby and cuddle it, with the cord still attached. A flush of love for the baby will overwhelm her, and she will feel immense pride in her accomplishment. This is what made the Goddess a figure of Awe in the old religions, but Feminist America believes in Cesareans, Drugs and Episiotomy instead - passive birth, birth as an operation.

That sudden flush is hormonal bonding - it happens with all mammalian mothers, unless intervention, drugs or the wrong birth techniques interfere with it.

In the case of farm animals - sheep and goats for example - if you touch the newborn baby before the mother has bonded, she may reject it and refuse to suckle it. That's how sensitive bonding is, but hospitals place little importance on it. They are so scared of being sued, that they do all the interventions they can, and lose their skills at handling natural, active birth, because they never practise them.

After the birth, the midwife will ring the homebirth doctor, who will come and stitch up the woman's perineum if it tore.

When the head is out, the midwife will put her hand around the baby's neck, to feel if the cord is stretched around it. If so she will manoevre it over the head. The cord should not be cut for 10 minutes or so after the birth, because it supplies blood which contains oxygen.

Before cutting, it is clamped or tied (e.g. with a sterile shoelace, tied in a reef knot) about 1" from the baby's navel, and again further up. The cut is made between these two, and antiseptic applied to the two cut ends.

One reason for not taking pain-killing drugs during the birth is that they can sedate the baby. Such a baby, on being born, may not breathe those first few gulps of air as deeply, decreasing the supply of oxygen to the brain. If the baby cries heartily, this is good news, because plenty of oxygen is being supplied to the brain.

A bottle should not be given to the baby, because this will diminish its sucking, and as a result the mother will produce less milk. Mixed feeding will lead to the cessation of breast-feeding.

The homebirth midwife will call on the mother every day for the next ten days, to see how she's going.

Experienced homebirth midwives can handle breech births (feet first), but hospital staff freak out and routinely do Cesareans in such cases. They no longer know any other way.

Apart from the books of Michel Odent (a French obstetrician who favours natural birth and warns of the epidemic of Cesareans) and Sheila Kitzinger, two classics on homebirth are Spiritual Midwifery, by Ina May Gaskin (buy second-hand at http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&sortby=2&sts=t&tn=spiritual+midwifery&x=0&y=0), and The Five Standards for Safe Childbearing, by David Stewart (buy second-hand at http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&sortby=2&sts=t&tn=five+standards+for+safe+childbearing&x=0&y=0).

The mother should sleep with the baby, and the man move to another bed.

Breast-feeding can continue for two or three years. At three, the infant needs the company of other children, and is ready for intellectual development. This should be done at a Montessori-type preschool, half a day five days a week.

Children learn naturally, without inducements or rewards such as lollies, praise etc. Don't take a Behaviourist approach to try to "condition" the child to learn. Rather, children are naturally curious. They want to learn, and the trick is to provide the education at the time the child is ready.

Babies several weeks overdue are induced chemically, in hospitals, with multiple interventions following. At home, Castor Oil is sometimes used as a herbal substitute. A dose of one or two tablespoons, taken early in the morning, makes the bowel contract, causing diarrhea, but it also makes the uterus contract. Must not be taken late in the day, or the patient will be up all night! One teaspoon taken early each morning might work more slowly and gently over several days. The pros and cons are discussed at https://trimestertalk.com/castor-oil-induction-taste-measures-information/ and at https://www.babycenter.com/400_castor-oil-to-induce-labor_2725551_162.bc.

(19) Sex and Marriage

Contrary to the song, love and marriage don't always go together. You don't need a licence to have sex; but it's best to make a formal arrangement if you hope to have children.

When I lived in rural Tasmania, I moved in hippy circles. I myself was never into the drugs or New Age raves, but I did the home births, and I learned how to build a house (in the bush) from them. I was intellectual, whereas they were hostile to intellectual things, but the locals branded us all "hippies".

Hippies were easy-going about sex, and I am too. I believe in marriage, but not as ownership of the other person. Occasional (but rare) infidelity might be permissible. And I think society should allow two women to share a man, or two men a woman.

Bronislaw Malinowski, the Social Anthropologist, is best known for his book The Sexual Life of Savages, a study of the sex and marital life of the Trobriand Islands people, who recognise descent in the female line (i.e. matrilineal). He showed that although they are as "sexually liberated" as anyone could be, yet they insist that every child have a father. Girls are allowed to have sex freely until marriage, but not allowed to become mothers without having a husband.

I myself visited, as an Anthropology student, a village of the Aroma area in East Papua, in 1971/2, which seems similar to the Trobriands.

Their culture was quite different from the Patriarchal culture of the New Guinea Highlands.

Here is the debate between Bronislaw Malinowski and Robert Briffault on Marriage. Briffault puts a Marxist view; Malinowski shows the errors of the Marxist/Feminist experiment in doing away with Marriage and the Family. He argues that this is disastrous: marriage-malinowski.html.

Many women today, products of Feminism, find themselves in the early 30s, wanting a child yet with no male partner in sight. Some, having no alternative way, are choosing to become single mothers. As long as this is not done in the spirit of political lesbianism (rejecting males per se), I accept it. In the past, some such children were said to be fathered by a god.

I think of marriage as two coins, on top of one another. The coins however are a liitle offset relative to each other - each protrudes a little at one side. The area where they overlap represents their common life together, whereas the protruding bits represent a little bit of private life that each must retain.

Of the books on sex around, one excels - The Tao of Love and Sex: The Ancient Chinese Way to Ecstasy, by Jolan Chang. It's for men, showing them how to understand women. The insights are from China, from the time of the Yellow Emperor thousands of years ago. Much of the advice is from women of that time.

Its unusual topics include 'May-September Relationships', between partners of widely different ages.

The advice on overcoming temporary impotence problems is ingenious. The lessons are given not by an academic but by a Taoist master, who explains that every man - including himself - faces such problems from time to time. No need for drugs.

The Postscript to the book is by Joseph Needham.

To buy The Tao of Love and Sex: http://www3.addall.com/New/submitNew.cgi?query=Tao+Love+Sex.

A follow-up book is The Tao of the Loving Couple. Its back cover reads, "Jolan Chang's The Tao of Love and Sex initiated Western readers into a secret the Chinese had known for centuries: a way of loving that was at once more playful and more spiritual than any we had previously known. ... While it addresses the familar problems of sexual dysfunction, frustration, and birth control, The Tao of the Loving Couple poses a welcome relief to performance-oriented guides. Instead, this sane and comforting book teaches us how to view sex - and practice it - as an intimate connection between a man and a woman, human and cosmos ...".

To buy The Tao of the Loving Couple: http://www3.addall.com/New/submitNew.cgi?query=Tao+Loving+Couple.

{end}

(20) Caesarean birth and Mother-Infant Bonding

20. 1 Women who have Caesarean birth 'less likely to bond' - Obstetrician Michel Odent

Women who have Caesarean's 'less likely to bond'

By EMILY COOK, Daily Mail - 13th July 2006

C-sections interfere with the hormones crucial to bonding, Dr Odent says

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/womenfamily.html?in_article_id=395218&in_page_id=1774

Women who choose to have Caesarean sections may be jeopardising their chances of bonding properly with their babies, a leading childbirth expert has claimed.

Obstetrician Michel Odent said that undergoing the planned procedure prevents the release of hormones that cause a woman to 'fall in love' with her child.

Speaking at a conference in Cambridge, Dr Odent warned that both C-sections and artificial inductions with drugs somehow interfere with the natural production of the hormone oxytocin.

The French expert said: "Oxytocin is the hormone of love, and to give birth without releasing this complex cocktail of love chemicals disturbs the first contact between the mother and the baby.

"The hormone is produced during sex and breastfeeding, as well as birth, but in the moments after birth, a woman's oxytocin level is the highest it will ever be in her life, and this peak is vital.

"It is this hormone flood that enables a woman to fall in love with her newborn and forget the pain of birth."

He added: "What we can say for sure is that when a woman gives birth with a pre-labour Caesarean section she does not release this flow of love hormones, so she is a different woman than if she had given birth naturally and the first contact between mother and baby is different."

More than 130,000 Caesarean sections were carried out at NHS hospitals in England last year. One in five births is now a surgical procedure and in some units the rate is 30 per cent - twice as high as recommended by the World Health Organisation. That compares to only three in 100 births in the 1950s.

Today, more women are planning so-called designer births in which they pre-book surgery. About 7 per cent of NHS surgical births - about 10,000 babies a year - follow a request from the mother for no medical reason, leading to speculation about a trend among women 'too posh to push' who choose a Caesarean for lifestyle reasons.

Britney Spears, who had a Caesarean when she had her first son last September, said in advance she was worried about the pain of a natural delivery.

According to Dr Odent, problems with bonding can occur after planned operations - or elective Caesareans - which take place before a woman goes into labour. Women who have been in labour and then have an emergency section will have already set the hormone flood in motion, he said.

He also believes that taking painkillers such as general anaesthetic or an epidural can negatively affect bonding in the first crucial hours. Inducing labour with artificial hormones could also be equally damaging.

Early bonding

Previous studies have suggested that talking painkillers can damage a mother's chance of bonding with her baby. Earlier this year experts from the Royal College of Midwives said that taking drugs during labour can leave new mothers feeling they have 'missed out' in some way on a satisfying experience.

As a result, they can find it harder to bond with their babies straight after the birth. Belinda Phipps, chief executive of the National Childbirth Trust said last night: "We know that oxytocin levels are lower in women who have had Caesareans but we do not know what effect it has.

"Women should not be worried about this as there are lots of factors which affect how they bond with their baby.

"However we do believe that more should be done to support women in having natural births."

Dr Odent was speaking at a conference organised by the Birthlight Trust, an educational charity promoting a holistic approach to pregnancy, birth and babyhood.

20.2 Do c-sections effect the bond between mother and child? Mothers tell their stories

http://www.minti.com/groups/36921/Cesarean-vs-natural-birth/blog/263289/

20.3 Mother-child bonding: comparative study of mothers after normal delivery and cesarean section

http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:14692273

20.4 Cesarean newborn is often made to spend the first 24 hours Ñ bonding time! Ñ alone

Where Medicine Fails - Google Books Result by Carolyn L. Wiener, Anselm L. Strauss - 1997 - Medical - 407 pages

books.google.com/books?isbn=1560008695

The cesarean newborn is still required by too many hospitals to spend the first twenty-four hoursÑbonding time!Ñin a special-care nursery, in an artificial warmer, alone and apart from the one person who knows his needs best ...

20.5 What is the future of a civilisation born by caesarean? - Michel Odent

http://www.michelodent.com/book.php?id=381

20.6 Farming and Childbirth have been industrialised side by side - Michel Odent

http://www.michelodent.com/book.php?id=31

Title: The Farmer and the Obstetrician (hardback) Published: 1st June 2002 ISBN: 1 85343 5651 Price: £13.95 | $29.95

In The Farmer and the Obstetrician Michel Odent shows how farming and childbirth have been industrialised side by side during the twentieth century - with dramatic and disturbing consequences.

The similarities are striking. In both cases innovations have been presented as the long awaited solution to an old problem:

- The advent of powerful synthetic insecticides has overnight dramatically reduced the costs and increased agricultural productivity.

- Similarly, the advent of the modern safe technique of caesarean section has offered serious new reasons to create gigantic obstetrics departments.

- In both speres a small number of sceptics voiced doubts and fears concerning the negative long-term consequences of the widespread use of novel, little tested practices.

- Although these repeated warnings initially went unheeded, they have motivated the development of \'alternative\' approaches and movements.

At the turn of the new century the history of industrialised farming has suddenly speeded up. A collective global awareness has been sparked by a series of disasters, particularly mad cow and foot and mouth diseases. Industrialised childbirth has not - yet - reached the same phase of its history, but the parallels between these two industries suggest that there is more to link the farmer and the obstetrician than we had all realised...

{end}

(21) Michael Jackson a Role-Model for Androgyny - Brother Nathanael Kapner

The Jews Behind Michael Jackson's Life And Death

By Brother Nathanael Kapner, Copyright 2009

http://www.realzionistnews.com/?p=415

Articles May Be Reproduced Only With Authorship of Br Nathanael Kapner & Link To Real Zionist News

IN PROMOTING A ROLE-MODEL who expressed the confused sexual values of the alternative life-style culture rather than that of traditional sexual mores, the slew of Jews behind Michael Jackson's career could be said to have advanced the plan of corrupting today's youth as laid out by the renown Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion.

From his record label moguls to his business manager, from his lawyers to his personal confidants, and even to his dermatologist, Michael Jackson chose to surround himself with a crowd of money-hungry Jews who viewed Michael, not as a human being, but as a piece of merchandise to be used for financial gain.

For if a role-model who presented himself as an androgynous 'boy-girl' symbol could generate millions of dollars, then Michael Jackson's Jewish handlers would not scruple to forego warning him of his 'artistic' persona's destructive path which led to his ignoble death on June 25, 2009, by a drug overdose.

WITH THE HOLLYWOOD RECORD INDUSTRY dominated by Jews, Michael Jackson's career accelerated to new heights when he left Detroit's black conservative Motown Records and signed on with the Jewish mega-media conglomerate, CBS Records in 1975. CBS Records was later renamed Sony Music Entertainment in 1991, (still under Jewish control), with a host of subsidiaries, including Epic Records, Jackson's label.

Leaving Motown founder Berry Gordy and singer Smokey Robinson, who were his conservative black mentors in Detroit, Michael Jackson was now under the influence of Hollywood Jews and the slew of Jewish serviles attached to the Hollywood record industry.

These serviles included Jewish business & music managers, Jewish lawyers, Jewish television & concert impresarios, Jewish fashion designers, and Jewish video magnates such as MTV's Murray Rothstein aka Sumner Redstone.

MANY ARE OF THE OPINION that due to the decadence and perversity that the Jews of Hollywood promote, Michael Jackson's life took a turn for the worse. For it was after his move from Detroit to Hollywood that Michael Jackson changed his appearance into a 'boy-girl' image through plastic surgery.

Soon following his new 'androgynous look,' Jackson was charged in 1993 with sexual abuse by Evan Chandler on behalf of his 13-year-old child, Jordan Chandler. (Jackson and Jordan had become friends in May 1992, much to the father's disapproval and concern.) ...

{end}

If Radical Feminism is pro-women, why does it encourage masculine traits in women - orientation to career rather than birth or child rearing, assertiveness, work-outs at the gym, putting baby in a child-care centre?

The Goddess religions were based on the miracle of active birth; I have witnesseed it, and instant mother-child bonding (elicited soon after the birth, by hormones), at several home-births. Yet in the Feminist era, birth has never been more passive: the caesarean rate is soaring, induction is common, drug intervention assumed normal.

Are Radical Feminists the real Female Eunuchs?

Henry Makow's website is called Save the Males: http://www.savethemales.ca.

Makow writes: {quote} The equation of homosexual marriage with heterosexual marriage is a brazen denial of the /uniqueness/ of heterosexuality. ... By denying healthy natural heterosexual roles, women usurp the place of men as providers and have fewer or no children, often as single parents dependent on government. Men become redundant or "wives." {endquote} http://www.savethemales.ca/000504.html.

Freud as Jewish Avenger: freud.html.

Freud and the Bolsheviks: freud-bolsheviks.html.

Sex in the Soviet Union: sex-soviet.html.

Ferdinand Mount's book The Subversive Family, about the Marxist-Feminist attack on Marriage and the Family: mount.html.

More on Kibbutzes: talmon2.html.

Write to me at contact.html.