A guest post by the Bray of Fundie

While many might challenge the entire notion of innate differences, a new controversial book seems to point to the fact that having differences, in this case between the genders, IS innate. True egalitarian equality is a pipe dream. If one gender is up then the other, perforce, is down.



Kay Hymowitz advances an argument, encapsulated in her books title, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys , that the strides made over the last several decades by the Feminist / Womens Rights movement have been the cause of a concurrent unmanning of men. Compared to men a quarter of a century ago todays males have protracted adolescences, flights from responsibility and an aversion to commitment. Not surprisingly (for anyone with even a scintilla of Havdala Consciousness) todays accomplished, precociously adult women find such males unattractive if not downright repellent and completely unsuitable as husband, ahem, life partner, material.

If Ms. Hymowitz' theory is correct it would seem that, taking a page out of Korakhs playbook, while purporting to want nothing more than an even-ing of the playing field, parity and equality, what the feminist movement really strove for was role reversal, assuming the preeminent position of power and responsibility formerly occupied by males and pushing men into the inferior and subservient role that they had traditionally filled. And while I am a certifiably paranoid insecure male for the time being I am satisfied that this was an unforeseen consequence of Feminism rather than it's goal or objective. At most if this was the motivation underpinning the movement it was a subconscious one. I leave it to conspiracy theorists and/ or historians of Womans Suffrage and Feminism to say otherwise. There is more than a little bit of irony to the fact that while feminism has brought about concrete gains for women it seems to have cost them things that they traditionally had.

I would take Ms. Hymowitz' argument a step further: In days of yore when someone was described as "A Man" it implied that he was neither childish nor effeminate. IMO the Feminist movement has not only made boys out of men but girls out of boys. I don't believe that it is purely coincidental that the same decades that gave us overgrown boys also gave us a huge spike in the percentage of homosexuals, especially of the overtly effeminate type, transvestites, transsexuals and a veritable משלחת מלאכי רעים of gender confusion. Nor do I belive that the percentages have not really grown but that the closet was merely emptied.

The Creator informed His creation with and innate Havdala בין זכר לנקיבה and this thirst for Havdala demands satisfaction. If the female gender will not provide creation with women then, by Golly, the male gender will. And while I lack Ms. Heimowitz scholarship and can't back up this assertion with hard statistics, pie charts or flow charts to prove empirically that Feminism has made girls out of boys, I do have a gut-feeling, call it the בינה יתירה= feminine intuition granted to emasculated males, that this is indeed the case.

I find it mighty interesting that the brouhaha over a book exploding the myth of gender equality and arguing that the best we have engineered as a society is gender-role-reversal should break out on the scene in the weeks leading up to Purim, the Festival of ונהפוך הוא turnabouts that celebrates the Jewish peoples triumph over Amalek, the quintessence of Esav with whom our Nations shares a see-saw relationship wherein whenever one is up the other is down:

קסרי וירושלים אם יאמר לך אדם חרבו שתיהן אל תאמן ישבו שתיהן אל תאמן חרבה קסרי וישבה ירושלים חרבה ירושלים וישבה קסרי תאמן שנאמר (יחזקאל כו) אמלאה החרבה ... Of equal interest (and mildly corroborative of my own theory) is that the original Amalekim were infamous for being hellbent on unmanning their Jewish victims by both defiling/im-purifying them with משכב זכר, and in a perverse twist of Apache style scalping, excising their Jewish victims male genitalia and throwing them mockingly heavenward, shouting הא לך מה שבחרת.

Coincidence??? I don't think so, because if Purim teaches us one thing it's that there are NO coincidences.

Finally, I think all this has a cultural osmosis effect on Jewry, because ultimately as that old piece of Yiddish Folk-wisdom teaches ווי עס קריסטעלט זיך אזוי אידעלט זיך.