This is my first “father’s day” without a father; my own father died last November. It is no big issue, really: he was one of many billion fathers, as the world goes on; and besides, no one ever took father’s day very seriously. It is one of those throwaway “secular” holidays, invented for the sake of symmetry with “mother’s day,” and assigned arbitrarily to the third Sunday in June in a few dozen countries. It isn’t a real holiday: nobody gets off work because of it.
The celebration of it is equally throw away. We “give dad a tie,” or some workshop bauble, as we might (with ideological hesitation these days) give mom something for the kitchen. Perhaps, natter at him a little less than on other days, or let him off his “share” of the housework. The deeper, or at least more contemplative, sort of souls will devote some passing thought to what fathers are and do. People like me will be stabbed by the thought of what we have lost.
Through the last few years, I, and many others who are themselves fathers, have dreaded the approach of the day and feared it will be noticed in our broken families. I am fortunate still to enjoy the love of my children, or think I do. But I am vividly aware of so many fathers who do not—whether through their own fault, or from the fact that their children were turned against them by a calculating mother, working the family law system. So many fathers have been exchanged for cash, and now live alone and in squalor, their income impounded to top up the account of their worst enemy in the world.
Needless to say, I also know women who have been viciously abused by evil men. Some of these men have even used that skewed and dysfunctional family law system to settle scores, and wreak vengeance. But the system was designed by feminists, and so these cases are comparatively rare.
I mention these things because hardly anyone else will. Three years ago, on father’s day, I called attention to the remarkable studies of Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young on the progress of “misandry” (the depreciation of males) in North America. The full titles of the two volumes already published—courageously, by McGill/ Queen’s University Press—are worth recalling:
1. Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture
2. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men
A third volume is still in the works, perhaps the most interesting because it will document the twisting of received religious notions into the radical feminist fantasia in which “the fall of man” becomes “the fall of men.” That title is provisionally: Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Ideology and the Fall of Man.
The books already published are a massive and devastating exposure of what we all experience from day to day as the key component of “political correctness.” They are a huge compendium of carefully documented, and often shocking facts. But such is the power of taboo, in contemporary intellectual life, that the books have gone nearly unreviewed in the media, and academic attention has been confined to ostracizing their authors.
This is a great pity, for women as well as men, for a society in which one of the sexes is casually and consistently depreciated—men in the West, often women in the East—becomes a sick and unbalanced society. What has been quietly observed about radical Islam—the psychopathic cave culture that has emerged in environments where women are not merely reduced to chattels, but made emblematic of sin and corruption—now has its counterpart here.
We have a society in North America that is, thanks to the triumph of feminism, progressively shedding the masculine qualities that any society needs to survive. Women themselves are progressively “freed” from masculine protection at many levels; men, raised to be wimps, progressively abandon all sense of duty.
Indeed, I would argue that men suffer most under Islamist regimes, that women suffer most under feminized ones. Outwardly, the “superior sex” obtains a tyrannical power, but inwardly, their souls are stripped of the moderation, and imaginative empathy, that can come only from respectful interaction between the sexes.
As William Wilberforce noticed, the institution of slave-holding has even worse moral consequences for the master than for the slave; and it was in the masters’ ultimate interest that the Royal Navy went to work, putting an end to the obscene trade. But bonded slavery is a mere aside, in a society, compared to the scale of psychic carnage when one of the sexes is methodically depreciated.
I would further argue that dealing with the fallout from the feminist revolution is the most important domestic “issue” in North American society today—for its effects spread thickly across every other domestic issue. And this necessarily requires an attack on the very premise of feminism: its demonization of “patriarchy.”
If fathers cannot be paternal, we have no men.
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