Should Women Rule the World?

I Could Rule the World if I Could only Get the Parts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The attack on the “supremacy” of men has been underway since the dawn of history.  Yet men never seem to fail to dominate.  However, in many developed nations this is rapidly changing.  Women have been endowed with more rights and protections that ever.  It is come so far as to reach the tipping point, in my estimation.  I believe that the next generation could see the domination of women.  But as gender roles continue to reverse, one has to ask if the world would really be better off if women ruled.   I don’t believe that is the case, or it would have happened a long time ago.

As much as it will pain some, I’m going to have to begin my argument with the Bible.  In the Bible, God created man to run the world. He purposely created man first, without women, so that the man could understand the nature of things on this new planet.  He brought all the animals to the man (Ha’adam, meaning the groundling, the one made out of the ground, from which we get the name “Adam”), and the man named them all.  Lots of things to glean from this story, among them the fact that the original man was intelligent enough to name every living creature, something no modern biologist could hope to begin to do.  He was far from neanderthal.  But, more to the point, we learn that the man could do his job just fine.  However, God also impressed upon the man that  all the creatures beside the man had mates.  He impressed upon him the order of things, and that, as part of God’s design for man to have companionship and to be fruitful and multiply, it would be good to also have a mate.  So God made a woman from part of the man.  Adam, upon waking and being presented with his wife, made it clear that he appreciated that the woman was made from himself.  This woman, who he now took as a wife, was one flesh with him.  And so he decreed that all men who took a woman as a wife would become one flesh with them.

Well, things didn’t turn out too well for Adam and his wife.  The short of it is that Adam didn’t protect his wife when she was attacked by the Devil, and Eve thought she could handle it.  She couldn’t.  And the story has been pretty much the same for the last 6000 years.  Whenever men abdicate their responsibility to women, the world has trouble.  That’s not to put all the blame on the women.  There are lots of good women who wouldn’t mind having a strong man to lead them.  But the never-ending battle by the militant women activists have left most men without their proverbial testicles.  The result is a plan of nature turned upside down, and it’s destroying everything.   To be fair, a lot of what frustrates women is that so many men who rule the world are evil.  Power corrupts. The more the power, the more the corruption.  Many women believe that men have had their chance, and now it’s time for women to fix the problems.  But having women run everything isn’t going to eliminate the problems of greed and avarice.  It’s only going to change the nature of the problems.

I always get a kick out of having so many women tell me that they just want a sensitive man who will listen to them and not be so domineering.  Well, for thirty years, I was that man.  For this I  was eternally consigned to the friend zone.  Meanwhile, my “girlfriends” continue to be attracted to the risk-takers, the “bad boys”, the dangerous men.  That’s not hard for me to understand, though.  Because, in reality, it is the men who take risks, who put work ahead of relationships, who boss others around, who are the ones who have gotten things done in this world.  Women don’t really need sensitive men.  They do, on the other hand, need successful men, men who can bring home the bacon, provide, be responsible.   And this is their dilemma.  Every women wants to be able to parade her man to the world, to show him off and be proud of him.  Every woman wants a strong emotional connection to her man, too.  Unfortunately, the best men are usually the busiest and don’t have time to be eternally doting on a woman.  This little catch 22 is a source of much contention.

Why women really want to lead is because someone told them it would make them happy and content.  This, of course, was implying that they couldn’t be happy and content doing something else, which was being a domestic engineer.  This, as it turns out, is a job for which they are uniquely suited.  Men can learn to be homemakers, but it’s not what they are usually best at doing.  Women in contrast, can work most jobs that men can do, but it turns out that men are usually much better at it.   Men are genetically stronger and have more stamina that women.  Men also tend to much better at concentrating on a single task, while women are  better at multitasking.  This would seem to favor a women in the modern crazy workplace, but it actually favors men, because they don’t get so distracted with details that they can’t complete job one, whatever that happens to be.  As more women become business owners, office work is being geared toward women.  But, construction jobs, military, police, fire, and other such jobs requiring strength and stamina are still dominated by men.

In contrast, the job of homemaker is not usually a good place for a man.   A homemaker has to be a secretary, organizer, cook, bottle washer, child care provider and teacher all rolled into one.  It’s what women do, and do well.  It’s a good thing, too. Because study after study is confirming that the most important determinant of the future success of society is the stability of the home in which children are raised.  There is no day care worker, teacher, school program or social worker in the whole world who will ever be more important to a child’s development than the dedication and care of a good mother.  Yes, once again, the father’s role cannot be diminished.  But his contribution to well-developed children is to show the example of a strong leader.  In this way, he models for the boys what they should strive to become, and he models for the girls the kind of strong, assertive husband they should be looking for in order to created their own strong families.

I used to work at a day care center.  Every day I would watch all the busy working moms drop their children off and then head to work.  Most of the mothers who dropped their children at our center had husbands with very high paying jobs at local high tech industries.  They could have stayed home and raised their own children.  But the lure of an extra paycheck convinced them that they “needed” to work.  (I am not saying that there are not many women who need to work.)  So, they left care of their children to other women who were in charge of up to 12 children at a time, who receive a minimal amount of training (most of which is in how to meet government regulations), who are among the lowest paid care-givers.  All of these children exhibit fear and anxiety when they first come to the center.  Many of the children adapt very well.   But many others never get over their insecurities.  (Recent studies now show that many of these children become adults who never got over the feelings of abandonment.)  All of the children share things like colds, flu, skin infections.  (Studies show that children in daycare of much more likely to be ill.)  There is no doubt that the childcare industry is a women-oriented profession (Men are extremely rare.) that creates a lot of jobs.  But they are not jobs that raise the economic status of women.  And it doesn’t free them for homemaking duties. Beside taking care of more children, many of them also have their own children who must be watched at the same time.

Beside the stress on the children, having so many women in the workplace is causing stress to the economy.  More women working leaves fewer jobs for men.  This means more unemployment.  This means more families on welfare, and more fathers forced to become mothers.  I liken it to what happened under Mao Tse Dung during China’s Great Leap Forward.  ( I was a kid at the time, and I remember that I was told to appreciate my food and be thankful I wasn’t like those starving kids in China.)   Mao’s plan was to have the peasant farmers also become industrial producers.  So he instructed each collective farm to build a small foundry, then to gather up all the metal they could find and melt it down to make steel for industry.  The incentives to do this we so great that most farmers stopped farming and spent all day finding steel to melt down.  When harvest came, China had collected a lot of metal.  But the quality was so bad that none of it could be used for industry.  (After all, peasant farmers are not steel workers.)  In the meantime, no one had planted and tended the crops.  The result was severe famine and the deaths of up to 50 million people.

No children in America are starving to death from lack of food.  But many of the are starving emotionally.  Many are emotionally dead because they didn’t have the security of a loving mother who stayed home to take care of them.  We now believe that we have a village that can replace the absence of the mothers.  But what is the cost to our children and to our society?  How much of our welfare state is geared toward trying to raise children or to deal with the adults that result from children who weren’t properly raised?  How many millions of social workers and specialists now exist to try to do the jobs that used to be the priorities of mothers who stayed at home with their children?   Most of these workers are women.  Isn’t it ironic that, when a mother stays home and takes care of the kids (and does a good job), we say she is under-appreciated and demeaned.  When the same women do a lousy job of helping children as social workers (mostly because their workloads are overwhelming), we call them the backbone of society.  Even though these women have impressive titles, they are taking care of the same children.  And they are usually asked to do more with less than the stay-at-home mother.  How is that any less “demeaning”?  Since the stay-at-home mother can do a better job at a fraction of the cost, wouldn’t it be better to encourage mothers to stay home and do their job?

The truth is, women can rule the world without ever stepping out of their homes.  “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”  Just like in Mao’s China, everyone has a role to play.  Mao destroyed his country’s intellectual base by making them all farm pigs.  At the same time he tried to run the country with peasant farmers.  He  thought everyone should be equal, but he made the mistake of equating sameness of work with equality, instead of understanding that the goal was to recognize the equal importance of different jobs.  In America, we have been playing Mao’s game for fifty years.  How is that working for us?  Sure, we are still the superpower, because we built up such a great prosperity momentum before 1960 that we are still living off the momentum.  But not for long–the economic engine is quickly winding down. Moral decay is rampant, civility has disappeared.  Is is because we have become a society more concerned about status than about production.  We all want to be American Idols and stock market gurus and slick TV pundits.  No one wants to harvest food, or work in the assembly line or raise children.  These are below us, even though they were the foundation on which America became the richest country the world has ever seen.

Women must be able to rule the world, but it must be by rocking the cradle.  So it’s up to the men of the world to respect them for what they are.  They are the producers of the next generation.  If men teach their children that women are to be demeaned, treated like chattel, bought and sold, degraded to second class citizens, then they will raise children who perpetuate this idea.  By doing so, what these men are really accomplishing is weakening their countries by 50%.  Women do need to be empowered.  But it’s an empowerment that allows them to be what they should be and to be highly respected for it.   The Bible says it very clearly:  “The man who loves his wife loves himself.”  In this world, wherever we see expressions of hatred for women, we can be sure we will find a country of self-loathing men.

Yes, women should rule the world–by standing next to men who rule the world.  Women should rule the world by raising children who will be happy, healthy and well-educated and ready to assumed their roles of leadership.  Women should rule the world by being the constant support for their husbands.  Women should rule the world by making sure that the family unit is protected and preserved from all outside attacks.  But women should not try to be men.  And women should not try to emasculate men.  Because men are stronger.  Men are the heavy lifters.  Just as the world is in trouble without strong women, women who know their role and do it well, so the world would be equally in trouble without strong men.  If a man doesn’t lead the family, then he has no role.  Then he becomes a sperm donor. He becomes very good at donating, and that is not helping anything.  Such men become self-loathing.  That doesn’t end well.

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