Women's Liberation Part 1
This is a chapter from “The Manipulated Man” There are many good chapter but I won’t cover them all but since right now I have time on my hands I will go ahead and type this one up since it’s a very powerful one.
The exploitation of the American male by the American female would be a purely American affair were it not a model for women all over the world. Unfortunately, the economic hegemony of the United States influences not just the politics, science, research and culture of all other capitalist countries but, to a great extent, the social behavior of their populations. Through the mass media, which have been relentlessly perfected, this influence spreads to all areas of life more rapidly. The old maxim about American consciousness becoming the consciousness of the world after a five-year lag no longer holds true. Modern techniques of communication have flooded over the boundaries separating place and time. If the United States develops a new treatment for heart attacks, hospitals in Latin America will be using that very treatment a few weeks later. If the performance of American school children is improved by teaching machines, these same machines will be hooked up within a short time in the classrooms of Japan. The moment a hit like Jesus Christ Superstar opens on Broadway, students in West Germany start praying. As soon as the American female compares her situation with that of American blacks, women in England, France and Scandinavia scream, “We are the blacks of the Nation.”
While American influence has its benefits in other spheres (for example, in research), in the social sphere, as far as the social position of men in these countries is concerned, surely there is none. There is no country in which men are worse off than in the United States. They are worse off by comparison with their female partners and this is what we are discussing here: the differing living condition of a man and woman within one and the same social class of a given country, within one and the same family.
Nobody will deny that the struggle of a poor white-collar worker to survive is more difficult in Portugal than in Sweden and that in the some country a factory worker’s wife has a harder life than the wife of an engineer. These injustices are the subject of many other books; here we can discard them entirely. By comparison with her husband not by comparison with the engineer’s wife – the factory worker’s wife leads a luxurious life.
America’s high standard of living, combined with its permanent threat of unemployment, is enough to make any man’s life miserable. In no country with a comparable standard of living are jobs so tenuous; in no other country with a comparable rate of unemployment are the demands made by the standard of living as high. The difference between a “success” and a “failure” is no where so clearly defined as in the US. Added to these external difficulties is the fact that no other man is so thoroughly manipulated as the American male. The adult American male is manipulated so expertly that there appears to be nothing he would not willingly endure. And, indeed, he is exploited without scruple. In no other country do mothers so pitilessly train the male infant to perform. No other society exists where the male sexual drive is exploited for money so unscrupulously. Nobody except the American woman so shamelessly profess a creed of profit under the guise of love.
