The gamecock. (Columbia, S.C.) 1908-2006, December 01, 1971, Page Page 3, Image 3
Men s
liberation
movement
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CokMnt
Vindication should be sweet. But
one is always embarrassed to
write, "Well, now, weren't we
saying precisely that just the other
day?"
That sort of thing always strikes
me as a bit too smirky and self
preening. Nevertheless, I cannot
help remembering all the
scurrilous letters that came in last
winter when I referred to the
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militants of Women's Lib as
"castrating females." They
wanted my head on a platter. Tbey
were so vexed and so anxious to
proclaim the delights of their'
teeming beds that I was sorry I
ever used that clinical phrase.
But recently my eye fell upon a'
newspaper headline: "Links
Women's Lib and Impotence." In
brief, doctors are reporting a
significant rise in impotency
among young men. And the booted,
braless girls on the barricades are
being held responsible.
A normally aggressive male can
stand up to the challenge of women
who take karate lessons and spit
our four-letter words to men who
doff their hats in elevators. "But
the more passive male eventually
becomes impotent because of
unconscious fear or hostility
toward women," says Dr. B.
Lyman Stewart of Los Angeles.
The melancholy fallout from
female aggression gets further
documentation from an article in a
recent Harper's Bazaar. Dotson
Rader writes in "The Feminization
of the American Male" that
authoritarian women are causing
men to become passive and hostile.
"This hostility," he notes,
"prevents a man fr9m becoming
whole and results in anti-social and
self-destructive behavior."
I know little of Mr. Radar's
background save that he's a free
lance writer disenchanted with the
radical movement. (One of his
books is "I Ain't Marchin' Any
More.") Harper's Bazaar
establishes him as quirky and
immature with one statement: "At
29 he is single and wants to be a
cowboy actor."
Well, this would-be cowboy actor
believes the American male could
do with a lot of toughening. But
he's as inconsistent in his way as
some of the Women's Lib
polemicists.
"What we must do is decrease
the pressure on men to compete
and master; increase their
freedom of spontaneous action and
healthy aggression; and end their
captivity to women in the early
years . ."
In short, women have
emasculated men by demanding
too much of them. It is enormously
difficult, Mr. Rader says, "for
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young men even to survive
manhood in the United States."
Student rebellion, crime, family
abandonment, school and Job
failures are all, in Mr. Rader's
view, the fault of castrating.
females.
It's a thesis stated in more
scholarly fashion by Dr. Patricia
Sexton, a sociologist, in her book,
"The Feminized Male." The
schools play a decisive role in
taming the rough beast in every
boy, she believes. Boys are
rewarded for the passive, feminine
qualities: obedience, conformity,
neatness. Mr. Rader suggests that,
co-education be deferred until the
last year of high school. Both agree
that we should have more male
teachers. Women tend to force
boys into attitudes of docility.
But Mama is only half the
problem, Mrs. Sexton reminds us.
The other half is Papa. The ab
sentee father, the ineffectqal
father who says, "That's your
mother's problem," and, of course,
the brutal father against who the
dutiful son will take up arms if
necessary, all work against the
boy's self-fulfillment as a man.
No doubt I shall be hearing from
Women's Lib again, this time,
reminding me the impotency was a
problem in our society long before,
Ti-Grace Atkinson denounced
heterosexual love as demeaning to'
women. And there are elements in
this masculine failure that have
little to do with the current mode in
"sexual politics."
Psychiatry stresses that im
potency may be caused by man's
primitive fear of being "damaged"
by the all-devouring earth mother.
It is also pointed out that im
potency frequently has elements of)
simple revenge. So has female
frigidity.
If men are damaged in their self
esteem, if they are made to feel
responsible for all that ails
womanhood today, naturally they
are not going to fall easily into the,
role of tender, ardent lovers.
"Give the girls on the baricades
another five years and there may
be a parade up Fifth Avenue by the'
Men's Liberation Movement," we
wrote last February. 'Tat may
have been a rash statement then.
Today I'm not so sure.
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