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Infantry officer, American Civil War
There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic have always resorted to guns.
Human males operating in groups — talking, planning strategies, devising traps, improving weapons, sharing the spoils — became the most successful biological phenomenon on earth. In the process, the male-grouping became an essential evolutionary element in human nature Group loyalties and powerful bonds of attachment went beyond mere cultural influences... misguided but vociferous minority is campaigning to conceal human gender differences and to obscure the evolutionary truth about our species.
Anthropologist Desmond Morris in his foreword to the
1984 edition of Lionel Tiger's book Men in Groups
Lets be up front about it, the human male is far and away the most dangerous animal on the planet. Nor do human males sit on top of the food chain because of their sensitivity. However, men often attempt to be fair and reasonable. As a result, the physical advantage most men have over women has been widely exploited by the feminist movement in passing legislation to control males in domestic violence situations. That serves to fix the blame on men but does nothing to solve the problem. Our objective is to fix the problem, not the blame.
Controlled, disciplined violence is essential to the maintenance and preservation of any human society. That truth operates on such a fundamental level that human evolution selects for aggression and endurance, physical force, and for the protection of an individual's blood relations. Force today is typically expressed by military and police, but that is only true in a civilized society. In a democracy one of the major problems faced by civil authorities is the control of evolutionary forces. Military and police must be allowed the use of sufficient force, including necessary violence, to maintain civil order and fend off external enemies. Conversely, these forces must, in turn, be prevented from controlling, or dominating the society they are formed to protect. The balance is never perfect and is always under attack from one side or the other.
Before it is assumed that every man is a potential murderer and everyone in the military is a “trained killer” as feminist dogma insists we should keep in mind the findings of General S.L.A. Marshall. During WW II he found, after he and his staff interviewed thousands of soldiers and Marines in both the European and Pacific theaters of that war, that more than 80% of the troops in the front lines never fired their weapons at the enemy despite direct risk to their own lives. From this General Marshall concluded that: “the average and healthy individual...has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility...At that vital point [the soldier] becomes a conscientious objector.” To overcome this innate inhibition against killing requires either rigorous training and discipline or the lack of morality inherent in a psychopath. For more on this subject the book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman is highly recommended.
A microcosm of society is a man, a woman, and their children. The “father figure” must enforce sufficient discipline, including controlled violence, to keep the “mother” and the children safe from external dangers and internal strife. If the authority of the “father figure” is undermined in either a government or a family, chaos ensues, often with death and destruction following. Current “domestic violence” laws have that net effect for many men. Continued to its logical conclusion, not families, not marriages, and certainly not our society can survive the destruction of the delicate balance that must be kept if domestic tranquility is to prevail.
Scorning these truisms, feminists, as exemplified by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), state that “...the risk factor for battering is being born female.” The classical dilemma of “When did you stop beating your wife?” has been reworked to “When did you last beat your wife?” and violence is exclusively the result of actions by males in feminist dogma. As Sally Satel, M.D., puts it, writing in The Women's Quarterly: It's always his fault. She then cogently explains why it probably isn't always the male who should be blamed.
The risk factor isn't in being born a woman and common sense dictates that for any given couple both parties are likely contributing to the problems. It takes two to tangle and the risk is in a woman living with a very dangerous animal, the human male. Provoking a human male, at any time or any place is always risky, as any man will tell you. In a June 27, 1999, article Kathleen Parker makes the point that research shows: “...women, contrary to the DV party line, do not strike out only in response to men's violence but often initiate the violence that leads to their injury or death.” In an essay on woman trouble, Cathy Young cites a case where a woman she knew complained a man they had both dated had backhanded her. When Ms. Young confronted the man, he pointed out, and the woman confirmed, that the woman had physically attacked him several times until he finally slapped her.
Consider the example of putting a woman in a house with a grizzly bear. At some point she starts treating the bear like she might treat her husband, screeching at it, poking it with sharp objects, maybe waps it up alongside the head with a frying pan or rolling pin. Do we blame the bear for mauling her? That would seem kind of stupid. Now put her in the same situation with a much more dangerous animal. If she keeps the animal fed, a little nookie now and again for him, gently scratches his back and chin, and talks nicely to him, then things tend to go along pretty well in most cases.
Straus (1993), in an article on physical assaults by wives phrases this more elegantly when he states in the first paragraph that:
“...to end 'wife beating' it is essential for women also to end the seemingly 'harmless' pattern of slapping, kicking, or throwing things at male partners who persist in some outrageous behavior and 'won't listen to reason.'”
Put a man in the same house with that bear, same weapons. Pretty soon he is likely to be looking for new uses for bearskin, finding the claws of Ursus horriblus make a nice necklace, bear grease helps keep him warm, and he is out hunting for more bears in his spare time. Today we call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) and throw him in jail for that kind of behavior. The male is left wondering why?
Note that the analogy above deals with biological factors that have helped homo sapiens evolve to be the dominant species on our planet. There is no relation in this analogy to factors such as a male patriarchy that might be found in some human cultures. Male aggression is, and has always been, a necessary survival characteristic of our species. As is shown in our discussion of the frequency of domestic violence, human females are equally, or more violent than males. The principal difference seems to be that females are violent primarily within the context of their domicile while men wage war globally.
You can preach and practice all the non-violence you want while you are safely sheltered behind the ramparts of America's Armed Forces. But you had best be sure that the Marines are the roughest, toughest, nastiest, most aggressive, and violent men you can find, or those ramparts evaporate. You had also best be sure that such men support your cause because rape and pillage have been a way of life throughout history, and continue today in much of the world as the press is fond of reminding us. Take away the freedom and liberty those men put their lives on the line to maintain and establish and they tend to turn on you, as on any tyrant.
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| Chapter 9 — The Male Perspective |
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