It's pretty easy to look around the world and find things invented by men. Fred Reed makes the point that pretty much everything, everywhere, was invented by men. Most public institutions (both the bad ones and the good ones) were created by men, even if they are no longer run by men. Slowly, women are beginning to do research and invent a few things; slowly, women are starting to create large, successful companies and organizations. However, the numbers are still dwarfed by men's achievements. Why?
If you ask women, they'll tell you it's because women were oppressed and held back. They'll tell you that men hogged all of the power and that's why they created most of what makes modern society work. If they're feminists they'll also tell you that women are still oppressed and that men still hold all the power. They'll also tell you that men did a lousy job of creating the modern world and that the environment and the fabric of human society are going to hell in a hand basket because men didn't know what they were doing. They'll say that if women had been running things, the world would be a cleaner and safer place in which everyone would have enough to eat and nobody would fight.
Some women who do make it into power smugly declare that the world has taken a step toward bettering itself by electing or appointing a woman to some such post or other. This is normally said with a wide smile, oblivious to the gross sexism inherent in such a statement. Witness Adrienne Clarkson's (Canada's Governor General's) reaction to the appointment of Beverley McLachlin as Canada's new Chief Justice. What Clarkson was really saying is that women are morally superior and much more capable than men, so any replacement of a man by a woman is cause for celebration.
Right.
What I would like to know is why, with all of the female policy-makers we now have we are not seeing a dramatic Renaissance of clean living and planetary revival. If the leaders at the helms of our political parties are not female, then this is certainly balanced by the fact that most of the committees, commissions, and other government machinery are dominated by women and male feminists. With all of this femininity flowing through the halls of power, you would think that some concrete and immediate benefits would result, particularly on issues of concern to women.
Take, for example, the issue of universal daycare. Feminists are solidly behind universal daycare, both because it helps single moms, feminism's poster girls, and because it makes men even more redundant than they already are, which is an attractive proposition. NACSW spends a lot of time and energy lobbying, bullying, and whining to the Canadian government about establishing a universal daycare policy. What I want to know is why, given that NACSW has all of this money and time to lobby, bully, and whine, do they not take some of that money and some of that time and open their own daycare? It wouldn't be National Daycare, but it would help, and it would show the government what was possible.
This is what men would do. This is what men would have to do to get any kind of funding at all (and even then they would probably be turned down). Men would roll up their sleeves and start pouring concrete. Why don't the feminists do the same?
My answer is a simple one: accountabiliphobia. They've probably thought of creating their own daycare, for a few seconds, but the idea most likely died on the vine. Why? Well, what if something went wrong? What if some child was molested by the workers at the day care? Or what if one of the children attending the day care was murdered by a mother and nobody had seen the signs? What if any number of things, for which feminists regularly beat up "the establishment" and "the government" were to happen in a NACSW sponsored daycare? What if there were no men to blame?
What organizations like NACSW in particular and feminists in general gain by lobbying rather than doing is deniability. Feminists can come up with completely hare-brained schemes but so long as those schemes are implemented by someone else the feminists are left in an enviable position: if the scheme succeeds then the feminists claim credit, because it was their idea to start with; if the scheme fails, then the feminists blame the men who implemented the scheme, because obviously they screwed up the implementation. Anyone who dares try to pin the blame on the original idea and thus the feminists will be crucified in the name of women everywhere. It works like a charm.
Throughout history, women have not had to get their hands dirty with the kinds of ugly compromises that are necessary in politics and business. As such they could claim to be morally superior, if incapable of direct action. So long as women were behind the scenes dictating policy, they could always blame someone else for failure and thus remain morally pure.
In these transitional times, feminists are walking a clever tightrope. While complaining that they have no direct power over society and maintaining the appearance that they want such power, they nonetheless strive to remain just behind the scenes and thus preserve their traditional right of deniability.
Real power, the power to make change and affect the world, involves the messy business of convincing people to cooperate with your plans, which in turn involves the messy business of compromise. What may have started off as a pure, brilliant concept may crumble into an ugly mess under the harsh light of reality and the obstacle of uncooperative opponents. Feminists claim that women could have done it all better, but they are thinking of the morally pure person who pulls the strings from the background, not the person who is down below, making deals with the devil.
Feminists like Adrienne Clarkson believe that women can make the messy compromises, get their hands dirty, and still remain morally superior to men. No amount of ranting will convince Clarkson otherwise, but I think that we should all be suspicious of her and her ilk. Whereas the men who came before were familiar with the corruption that comes with power, these women believe themselves immune to it, and that could make them far more dangerous.
This observation is not limited to Clarkson. All of the small-l liberals who attempt to change school curriculum, correctional services, welfare laws, and community standards are capable of inflicting immense damage but consider themselves cut from better cloth than the rest of us. They think that their ideas and philosophies are the shining light of the new millennium, and that they can see what all of those who came before them missed. Clarkson and those like her consider themselves smarter and more morally correct than any other powerful people in history. As such, they're poised to make more and bigger mistakes than anyone who came before them, because they don't believe in learning from the past. The only saving grace is their built-in urge to avoid accountability. If you think they're making a mess now, just imagine how bad it would be if they were willing to take real risks.
