Friends, the intent of this page is to recap some of the highlights I’ve pulled from the titled book. These are not my own words, however, I do fully support the concept and truths George Gilder has outlined for us in the mid 1900’s which is still prevalent in our days and age.
Enjoy, and do get the book!
Men & Marriage (George Gilder)
To me, these beautiful women from some of the nations most eminent families, seemed to be the most fortunate female generation in all human history. Yet, to my increasing amazement as a petitioning male, they claimed to be “victims”. Rebelling against their fathers, they deemed even their familiar wealth and privilege a burden, hard to bear because of the envy it incurred.
All human civilization reposes on a set of rules and facts of life embodied in what I termed the sexual constitution. Sexual law ordains that the differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human life and society and that the effort to deny them is the most quixotic claim in human history. It constituted “sexual suicide” of the race, which depends on procreation of new generations for its very survival.
This scarcity means that the male role is procreation is inexorably dependent on the willingness of women to devote some of their young years to bearing and raising children while recognizing the paternity of the father.
In the end, the breakdown of families victimizes women as well and leaves children to make their own way without ties to the only people with a deep genetic stake in their survival and success. The result is a sexual suicide society that cannot reproduce itself and soon declines and deteriorates
It is predictable that men will suffer the vast majority of on-the-job injuries and deaths. Also predictable that married men will earn the bulk family incomes and will be the central providers and protectors of society.
Feminist social interventions have been associated around the globe with a collapse of birth rates in developed countries. Western European populations are growing roughly at half the rate needed to maintain themselves. US rate is now facing below replacement levels.
Ultimately these trends reflect am increasing disdain for the “Word (of God)”. “When people stop believing in God, they dot start believing in nothing. They will believe in anything!”
I believe that all these sexual fantasies will ultimately succumb to a religious awakening to the Word, which ordains only two sexes and exalts the primacy of motherhood and the leading role of male providers, which ordains and sanctifies marriage and fatherhood, and which affirms human family as the cradle of liberty and truth.
As the absurd extremes of the revolution against truth becomes increasingly manifest, the truth increasingly prevails and its momentum grows. We can be sure of ultimate triumph as creative men and women seek the prayerful guidance of their creator.
CH 1: The Facts of Life
The crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality. It is male behavior that must be changed to create a civilized order. Men lust but they know not what for; they wander and lose track of the goal; they fight and compete but forget the prize; they spread seed but spurn (despise, reject) the seasons of growth; they chase power and glory but miss the meaning of life.
In creating civilization, women transform male lust into love; channel male wanderlust into jobs; rear children into citizens; change hunters into fathers; divert male ‘will to power’ into a ‘drive to create’. Women conceive the future that men tend to flee; they feed the children that men ignore.
The central roles are mother and father, husband and wife. In most of these key sexual events, the male role is trivial, even easily dispensable. It is the woman who conceives, bears, and suckles the child. Those activities that are most deeply sexual are most female; they comprise the mother’s role, a role that is defined biologically.
In some societies, paternity is not even acknowledged. In one way or another, the man must be made equal by society. Males are the sexual outsiders and inferiors; their rudimentary sexual drive leads only toward copulation (intercourse). The woman’s sexual fulfillment passes through the months of pregnancy unto the tumult of childbirth and on into the suckling of her baby.
Man thus counterbalances female sexual superiority by playing a crucial role as provider and achiever; money replaces muscle. If society devalues this male role by pressing women to provide for themselves, prove their “independence” and compete with men for money and status, there is only one way equality between sexes can be maintained: women must be reduced to sexual parity (equivalence). They must relinquish their sexual superiority, psychologically disconnect heir wombs, and adopt the “short-circuited copulatory sexuality of males (intercourse)”; women must renounce all the larger procreative dimensions of their sexual impulse. This is precisely what sexual liberals advocate.
Only the woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child – a tie society can rely on. There is no way a man can share in the “mothering hormone” that many authorities believe the woman secretes at childbirth. Therefore the man’s dependance on women begins in his earliest years. His later happiness is found in part on a physiological memory. He moves away into a new world, into a sometimes frightening psychic space between his parents; and he must then attach his evolving identity to a man, his father. Almost from the start, the boy’s sexual identity is dependent on acts of exploration and initiative.
Throughout the lives of men we find echoes of this image, of a boy stranded in transition from his first tie to a woman – whom he discovers to be different, and perhaps even subtly dangerous to him – toward identification with a man, who will always deny him the closeness his mother once provided. At an early age he is, in a sense, set at large. Before he can return to a woman, he must asset his manhood in action: the American male must ‘find a stable job’.
Women treat girls and boys differently from the time of birth, fondling and caressing the girls more and making them feel more a part of their initial environment. The pattern these earliest events might be expected to create – of a more stable and secure femininity and a more insecure and questing masculinity – is later enforced by the radically contrasting ways in which men and women emerge into their sexuality.
Men must define and defend the larger dimensions of their sexuality by external activity. As a physical reality, the male sexual repertory is very limited as we have only one sex organ and one sex act: erection and ejaculation. Other male roles, other styles of masculine identity, must be learned or created. The most important and productive roles – husband and father in a durable marriage – are a cultural invention, necessary to civilized life but ultimately fragile.
A woman is not so exclusively dependent on intercourse for sexual identity as a man is. For her, intercourse is only one of many sex acts or experiences. Her breasts symbolize a sex role that extends, at least as a potentiality, through pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, suckling, and long-term nurture. Rather than brief performance, female sexuality is a long, unfolding process! And this is the point where the sexes do not understand each other; women taking their sexual identity for granted and are puzzled by male unease, of men’s continual attempts to prove their manhood or ritualistically affirm it.
An average woman is more at ease with her own body than is the average man. Her body makes sense to her as one of the prime means to become what she wants to become. Manhood however, at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action. A man’s body is full of undefined energies – and all these energies need the guidance of culture. He is therefore deeply dependent on the structure of the society to define his role. Manhood is made, not born!
Man is constantly “doing something” which is a reaction to insecurity rather than a creative exercise of their humanity. Men must perform as there is no shortcut to human fulfillment for men – just the short circuit of impotence (incapability, weakness, helplessness). Men can be creatively human only when they are confidently male and overcome their sexual insecurity by action.
This inferior sexuality, this relatively greater sexual insecurity, is the reason intercourse plays such an important role in the lives of males, that is different from its role in the lives of females, as females are not usually so reliant on intercourse/sex. Whatever other problems a woman may have, her identity as a woman is not so much at stake in intercourse. She has other specifically female experiences and does not have to perform intercourse in the same sense as her partner; she can relax and usually please her man.
The man on the other hand, has just one sex act and he is exposed to conscious failure in it. His erection is mysterious endowment that he can never fully understand or control: if it goes, he often will not know exactly why, and there will be little he or his partner can do to retrieve it. The man’s physical endowment – his phallic size and endurance – is crucial to the success of intercourse. And if he is impotent, it will subvert all the other aspects of his relationship and will undermine his entire personality, as his most masculine part is also the most easily intimidated!
The man is less secure sexually than the woman because his sexuality is dependent on action, and he can act sexually only through a precarious process difficult to control, as for men, their desire for sex is not simply a quest for pleasure! It is an indispensable test of identityand in itself it is always ultimately temporary and inadequate! Unless therefore, his maleness is confirmed by his culture, he must enact it repeatedly, and perhaps destructively for himself and his society, as they feel a compulsive desire to perform the one unquestionable male role.
It is only when men are engaged in a relentless round of masculine activities in the company of males (ie: marine corps training, etc) that their sense of manhood allows them to avoid sex without great strain. Under most conditions young men are subject to nearly unremitting sexual desires/drives, involving their very identities as males. Unless they have an enduring relationship with a woman (a relationship that affords them sexual confidence) men will accept almost any convenient sexual offer. This drive arises early in their lives, and if it is not appeased by women it is slaked (quenched) via masturbation and pornography.
Women lack the kind of importunate undifferentiated lust that infects almost all men. Over the whole range of human societies, men are overwhelmingly more prone to masturbation, homosexuality, voyeurism, gratuitous sexual aggression, and other shallow and indiscriminate erotic activity. Male sexuality is a physical drive and psychological compulsion. This voracious need demands nothing but an available body.
Therefore a greater sexual control and discretion is displayed by women in all societies, thus has a superior position in most sexual encounters. The man may push and posture, but the woman must decide. He is driven; she must set the terms and conditions, goals and destinations of the journey. Managing the sexual nature of a healthy society, women impose the disciplines, make the choices, and summon the male efforts that support it; women domesticate and civilize male nature. They can jeopardize male discipline and identity, and civilizations as well, merely by giving up the role.
The female responsibility for civilization cannot be granted or assigned to men. A child can never become his unless a woman allows him to claim it with her or unless he can be sure that he is the father (via controlled and restricted sexual activities, such as in marriage, with one partner). He cannot merely come back in 9 months and claim – he must make a durable commitment – even then he is dependent on the woman to love and nurture his child.
His position must be maintained by continuous performances, sexual and worldly, with the woman to judge. The man’s role in the family is thus reversible as the woman’s is unimpeachable and continues even if the man departs. The man’s participation in the chain of nature, his access to social immortality, the very meaning of his potency, of his life energy, are all inevitably contingent on a woman’s durable love and on her sexual discipline. Only she can free the man of his exile from the chain of nature; only she can give significance to his most powerful drives!
The essential pattern is clear: women manipulate male sexual desire in order to teach men the long-term cycles of female sexuality and biology on which civilization is based. When a man learns, his view of the woman as ab object of his own sexuality succumbs to am image of her as the bearer of a richer and more extended eroticism, and as the keeper of the portals of social immortality. She becomes a way to lend continuity and meaning to his limited erotic compulsions.
This intuition of mysterious new realms of sexual and social experience, evoked by the body and spirit of woman, is the source of male love and ultimately of marriage. This vision imposes severe social conditions, however: only if he performs his role by offering an external realm of meaning, sustenance, and protection in which a child could be safely born and raised in, will she then impart the intense inner sexual meaning a man desperately needs.
In the man’s desire (conscious or not) to identify and keep his offspring, is the beginning of “love”. He must choose a particular woman and submit to her sexual rhythms and social demands if he is to have offspring of his own. His love define his choice, and his need to choose evokes (conjures, arouses) his love. His sexual drive lends energy to his love and his love gives shape, meaning and continuity to his sexuality. When he selects a specific woman he in essence defines himself both to himself and society. Every sex act thereafter celebrates that definition and social engagement.
Without a durable relationship with a woman, a man’s sexual life is a series of brief and temporary exchanges, impelled by a desire to affirm his most rudimentary masculinity. But with love, sex becomes refined by selectivity, and other dimensions of personality are engaged and developed.
The man himself is refined, and his sexuality becomes not a mere impulse but a commitment in society. His sex life then can be conceived and experienced as having specific long-term importance like a woman’s. The most obvious and enduring way to make this commitment is through marriage – which carries a central truth: that marriage is built on sex roles!
In many cultures, the wife and husband share very few on-to-one opportunities. Ties with others (friends, etc) often offer deeper companionship. The most intimate connections are between mothers and their children. In all societies, male groups provide men with some of their most emotionally gratifying associations. Man’s innate need for structure can be satisfied through an arrangement of marriage, which is the most prevalent and alone is a consecrated religious ceremony and entails a permanent commitment.
The male role in marriage is to provide for women and children. In almost every society, in order to marry, men must first “prove his capacity to maintain/provide for the woman”. Regardless of what reasons particular couples may give for getting married, the deeper evolutionary and sexual propensities explain the persistence of the institution of marriage.
A man without a woman has a deep inner sense of dispensability; he is sexually optional. This weakens the male ability to care deeply and long, and stunts young men’s sense of the preciousness of human beings. Once a man marries, he can and must change, for his wife will not long have him if he remains in spirit a “single man”. He must settle his life and commit it to the needs of raising a family He must exchange the moral and spiritual rhythms of a hunt for a higher, more extended mode of sexual life. He must submit, ethically and sexually, to the values of material morality and futurity.
When a man submits to female sexuality, therefore, he not only adopts an ethic of long-term responsibility for the life and death matters of his own children’s upbringing, but he also adopts a new perspective on life and death itself. His life is no longer so optional, because his wife and children now depend on him.
The health of a society, its collective vitality, ultimately resides in its concerns for the future and its sense of a connection with generations to come. A community preoccupied with the present, obsessed with an immediate threat or pleasure, is enfevered. Just as a human body can run a very high fever for short periods of time in order to repel a specific threat or meet with an emergency (ie: war, domestic crisis, etc); but if it finds itself enfevered perpetually, it begins to run down and can no longer provide for the future.
A society, apparently working well, can stand impotent before its most important domestics and external threats, and opportunities. In civilized conditions it is love, marriage, and the nurture of children that project society into the future and make it responsible for posterity. In general, it is only through love for specific children that a society evokes long-term commitments from its members. That is why the social temperature of single men is so high – why we end up so often being sent to war, jail, or other institutions, and why men burn out so young. The public philosophy of unmarried male focuses on immediate gratification, and a society that widely adopts this attitude is in trouble.
The power of a woman springs from her role in overcoming these socially and personally self-defeating ways of men. She can grant to the man a sexual affirmation that he needs more than she does; she can offer him offspring/legacy otherwise permanently denied him; and she can give him a way of living happily and productively in a civilized society that is otherwise oppressive to male nature. In exchange modern man gives his external achievement and his reluctant faithfulness. It is on these terms that marriage – and male socialization – is based and can continue on.
It is female power, organic and constitutional, that is real, holding sway over the deepest levels of consciousness, sources of happiness, and processes of social survival, inducing men t support rather than disrupting society.
Thus, any consideration of equality focusing on employment and income will miss the real sources of equilibrium between the sexes. These deeper female strengths and male weaknesses are more important than any superficial male dominance because they control the ultimate motives and rewards of our existence.
Women control not the economy of the marketplace but the economy of eros: the life force in our society and our lives. What happens in the inner realm of women finally shapes what happens on our social surfaces, determining the level of. Happiness, energy, creativity, morality, and solidarity in the nation.
..more to come soon…
WRITER – FATHER – SON