Thursday, February 14, 2013

The Ecological Nature of the Difficulty

There is a male social ecology. Likewise, there is a female social ecology. But prior to both there is a social ecology plain and simple, a big round one that embraces men and women equally and flows back and forth between them. Face it: men and women live on the same planet, their physiologies are overwhelmingly the same, they drink the same water and breathe the same air, they are indispensable to each other as a species, and their well-being is interwoven in a multitude of ways that we needn't ever hope to unravel .

And yes, feminists love to trumpet the idea that women are the "ecological" sex, the ones who incarnate the virtues of relatedness, interdependence, intuition, holistic feeling and the like. I'll omit "women" from the discussion here, but I cannot miss the monumental irony that there is nothing ecological about feminism, which in its holistic praxis has been female-solipsistic right through, to say nothing of supremacist. For all of its green rhetoric, the women's movement has persistently acted oblivious to the sexually interdependent nature of human well-being.

For you see, women's well-being is not some 4X monster truck which you can drive anywhere you please, flattening the fences and flowerbeds and running over men's well-being as if no such thing existed. No, you cannot wreck half of a social ecology without repercussions upon the other half. Forgive me for belaboring the obvious, but you cannot poison just half of a well. The poison will spread quickly to the other half, and when it does, you cannot blame that half for the consequences.  If you threw the poison in the well, then YOU are the one to blame.

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