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The Privileged Sex
Ever since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique back in 1963, all of us have been told that women are discriminated against, oppressed, exploited, and abused by men. The barrage of accusations is intense, relentless, and seems to have neither beginning nor end. But are the charges true? Do women really have a worse time of it than men? This volume, one of the very few in any language, takes on these questions head on. Roaming far and wide, it examines many aspects of the problem as it has presented itself from the time of ancient Egypt right down to today’s most advanced Western societies. To anyone accustomed to the tsunami of feminist claims and complaints, the answers will come as a surprise.
157 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2003
24 people are currently reading
285 people want to read
About the author
Martin van Creveld
65 books128 followersMartin Levi van Creveld is an Israeli military historian and theorist.
Van Creveld was born in the Netherlands in the city of Rotterdam, and has lived in Israel since shortly after his birth. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has been on the faculty since 1971. He is the author of seventeen books on military history and strategy, of which Command in War (1985), Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (1977, 2nd edition 2004), The Transformation of War (1991), The Sword and the Olive (1998) and The Rise and Decline of the State (1999) are among the best known. Van Creveld has lectured or taught at many strategic institutes in the Western world, including the U.S. Naval War College.
- wikipedia.org
Van Creveld was born in the Netherlands in the city of Rotterdam, and has lived in Israel since shortly after his birth. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has been on the faculty since 1971. He is the author of seventeen books on military history and strategy, of which Command in War (1985), Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (1977, 2nd edition 2004), The Transformation of War (1991), The Sword and the Olive (1998) and The Rise and Decline of the State (1999) are among the best known. Van Creveld has lectured or taught at many strategic institutes in the Western world, including the U.S. Naval War College.
- wikipedia.org
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February 15, 2016
In my days as an undergraduate, I submitted myself to medical experiments for money. It was a low point in a life dominated by low points, but there were no substantial risks. Being part of a treatment group, I occasionally stayed overnight with other members in accommodation close to a laboratory. One thing I observed in this group was that there were no females. There was not one in the group of about 20 people I stayed with. I never saw any around the facilities, apart from staff. When I put this to a researcher, I was informed that the use of women in clinical trials is discouraged, and has been for decades. The impetus for this was the Thalidomide scandal in the late 1950′s, when pregnant women in a clinical drug trial ended up giving birth to children with fin-like arms or legs. Non-approved drugs and treatments can harm males as well, but that doesn’t seem to matter as much.
Visiting Dublin’s woefully-named Mountjoy Prison as a law student, I could not help get taken aback by the radically different conditions male and female prisoners have to endure. The men of Mountjoy are confined to an actual prison. The women live in self-contained apartments superior to what many people live in at university.
Thus, women get the benefit of medicine once its safety has been verified using male guinea pigs. Much like how they benefit from the safety that requires the sacrifice of men and boys in combat. Much like how they benefit from welfare programs penned by mostly male legislators, or the easier justice of mostly male jurists. Examples of female privilege are abundant, now and throughout history. Why the notion that women have a tougher time of it than men has so thrived in face of these facts is quite the mystery.
Its a problem that’s recently been tackled by my one of my favorite historians, and my favorite military theorist, Israel’s Martin Van Creveld. Van Creveld’s The Privileged Sex has just been published in English, being previously only available in German. His is a thesis well worth reading.
Van Creveld contends that for every disadvantage women have endured, whether man-made or as a result of biology, they enjoy a privilege that that is equally or more important to their lives. These range from being spared the obligation to fight in wartime, to the hardest of labors in general. Too many female writers, inclined to see oppression in all places and times, ever mention these privileges (guilty males, even less so). Our perceptions of gender relations have also been incredibly skewed by popular stories concerning the alleged historical exploitation and oppression of women. Many of these are without foundation, and if seriously scrutinized turn out to be invented for political-ideological reasons. Examples of this include the portrayal of witch-hunts as part of the male oppression of females. Yet how could these have been anti-woman, when in some countries just as many or more men were executed for witchcraft? In nearly all places men accused of witchcraft were more likely to be executed or face stiffer penalties than their female peers? Not to mention that it was overwhelmingly women accusing other women of being witches. Prosecutions for witchcraft also often reached their height under female rulers like Margaret of Austria, Mary of Hungary, Catherina De Medici, Mary Queen of Scots, and ‘Good Queen Bess’ herself. Indeed, some authorities, like James VI of Scotland, had to abolish the general commission against witchcraft because it had merely become a vehicle to settle scores among mostly female rivals.
Similarly, we are told that women do not thrive in the fields of science and engineering because males have kept them out of these vocations. But not even Stalin was able to force females to study technical subjects. Today, officialdom is most satisfied that girls vastly outnumber boys in our medical schools. Yet very few have addressed the disastrous consequences of this. After their expensive training, in most places covered or heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, only a lamentable percentage of female graduates remain full-time doctors. They largely avoid the most stressful work in hospitals. A huge proportion quickly leave the profession entirely. In Ireland, only 10% of female GPs intend to pursue full-time practice in the long-term. Some, like the journalist Kevin Myers, have estimated the figure at even less than that, remarking that this is “not a health system; it is a first day on the Somme”. Thus, we in the developed world have to make up the difference by importing doctors from poor countries that need them most.
Discourse on domestic violence is similarly dominated by a presumption that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators. For a long time, studies have been casting doubt on this perception. Erin Pizzey, the founder of the UK charity today known as Refuge, has been subjected to death threats and boycotts because of her claims that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally as capable of violence as men. Reciprocal violence is indeed the most common pattern, and a study of 55,000 US military personnel found that women are just as likely to physically assault their partners. We also know from the US Dept. of Justice’s Survey of State Prison Inmates that women are 24% more likely to kill their children than men, and 32% more likely to kill relatives, children included.
So why does the myth of the oppressed female continue?
Fans of Richard Dawkins might say it is the result of a mental gene, or meme, that predisposes people to believe in certain things. It does seem that we have a natural distaste for seeing women harmed or treated harshly. You are 200 times more likely to see a man die on screen than a woman. It is telling that Hector says to his wife in The Iliad that men would rather die than watch women dying. Its one of the reasons that even in Israel, where women are conscripted, very few serve in combat units and they are exempt from reserve duty. Van Creveld says that in his decades of teaching at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, not one female student has ever had to miss one of his classes for this obligation that affects many of the young men. Its hard to quantify all the ways women are treated more gently and paternalistically in the sphere of law and order. When police respond to an incident, women are much more likely to get off with a warning than men. This applies to every single category of offence, and is even true when factors like prior arrest records are controlled for. In Britain, women are six times as likely to be acquitted of manslaughter, and have an easier time convincing juries that they acted under provocation in cases of murder. Their charms work on male cops, jurors, and judges as much as female ones.
The love does not appear to be reciprocal, if only from the amount of fictional works by female authors imagining a future utopia without men, from Mary Bradley’s 1890 novel Mizora to more recent works like Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) or Dorris Lessing’s The Cleft (2008). Are there any males fantasizing of a world without women? Nonsense. We like them too much.
This brings us to something in the nature of women. Of course, feminism as an ideology should never be synonymous with being female. But there are forms of feminism that give political expression to something almost inherent in the gender. Women are the complaining sex; they seek attention and seethe with a mysterious resentment. Freud might have put this resentment down to penis envy. Coupled with male deference, we have a prescription for disaster. Now, not all women possess the traits just described. History is replete with examples of women with nothing but contempt for those living on the privileges of their gender. The first known female commander, Queen Artemisia of Caria, Van Creveld tells us, told Xerxes that Greeks were as superior to Persians as men are to women. Queen Elizabeth I was fond of cracking what would be called today misogynist jokes.
Yet the grievances of woman appear to be as endless as they often are baseless. In the medical sphere, Florence Nightingale was perceptive enough to admit in Cassandra that many female patients are merely seeking attention. Patterns of suicide (a supreme form of complaint) in the sexes are a good indicator. Men are significantly more likely to kill themselves than women. But worldwide, women are four times as likely to attempt suicide. Perhaps they are remarkable incompetent. Perhaps they are practicing the fine art of appearing vulnerable.
Is feminism related to this dynamic? Just as female patients, such as Freud’s Dora, have based their lives around imagined illnesses and relished the attention, so others find a purpose in grievances, real or imagined.
Some insight may come from the anorgasmic woman, or female frigidity. This has caused no end of anguish in men, who are expected to bear the blame. Yet frigidity is quite a often a ruse; a way to lash out at a male partner. Simone de Beauvoir was quite candid about the subject, finding the courage to address this aspect of womanhood after being ‘cured’ of her frigidity by the American writer Nelson Algreen. What de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex on the subject of frigidity could well describe the mindset of the extreme feminist. Replace the word ‘frigidity’ with ‘feminism’ and you get the point:
Resentment is the most common cause of feminine frigidity; in bed the woman punishes the man for all the wrongs she feels she has endured, by offering him an insulting coldness. There is often an aggressive inferiority complex apparent in her attitudes… She is thus revenged at once upon him and upon herself if he has humiliated her by neglect, if he has made her jealous, if he was slow in declaring her intentions, if he took her as a mistress while she wanted marriage. The grievance can flare up suddenly and set off this reaction even in a liaison that began happily… Frigidity… would appear to be a punishment that woman imposes as much upon herself as upon her partner; wounded in her vanity, she feels resentment against him and against herself, and she denies herself the pleasure.
I will end with another quote, from Van Creveld himself, the final chapter of The Privileged Sex: “It would be nice… if from time to time, amid the torrents of invective feminists spew at us, we occasionally heard a pleasant female voice saying “thank you, Mate”.”
Visiting Dublin’s woefully-named Mountjoy Prison as a law student, I could not help get taken aback by the radically different conditions male and female prisoners have to endure. The men of Mountjoy are confined to an actual prison. The women live in self-contained apartments superior to what many people live in at university.
Thus, women get the benefit of medicine once its safety has been verified using male guinea pigs. Much like how they benefit from the safety that requires the sacrifice of men and boys in combat. Much like how they benefit from welfare programs penned by mostly male legislators, or the easier justice of mostly male jurists. Examples of female privilege are abundant, now and throughout history. Why the notion that women have a tougher time of it than men has so thrived in face of these facts is quite the mystery.
Its a problem that’s recently been tackled by my one of my favorite historians, and my favorite military theorist, Israel’s Martin Van Creveld. Van Creveld’s The Privileged Sex has just been published in English, being previously only available in German. His is a thesis well worth reading.
Van Creveld contends that for every disadvantage women have endured, whether man-made or as a result of biology, they enjoy a privilege that that is equally or more important to their lives. These range from being spared the obligation to fight in wartime, to the hardest of labors in general. Too many female writers, inclined to see oppression in all places and times, ever mention these privileges (guilty males, even less so). Our perceptions of gender relations have also been incredibly skewed by popular stories concerning the alleged historical exploitation and oppression of women. Many of these are without foundation, and if seriously scrutinized turn out to be invented for political-ideological reasons. Examples of this include the portrayal of witch-hunts as part of the male oppression of females. Yet how could these have been anti-woman, when in some countries just as many or more men were executed for witchcraft? In nearly all places men accused of witchcraft were more likely to be executed or face stiffer penalties than their female peers? Not to mention that it was overwhelmingly women accusing other women of being witches. Prosecutions for witchcraft also often reached their height under female rulers like Margaret of Austria, Mary of Hungary, Catherina De Medici, Mary Queen of Scots, and ‘Good Queen Bess’ herself. Indeed, some authorities, like James VI of Scotland, had to abolish the general commission against witchcraft because it had merely become a vehicle to settle scores among mostly female rivals.
Similarly, we are told that women do not thrive in the fields of science and engineering because males have kept them out of these vocations. But not even Stalin was able to force females to study technical subjects. Today, officialdom is most satisfied that girls vastly outnumber boys in our medical schools. Yet very few have addressed the disastrous consequences of this. After their expensive training, in most places covered or heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, only a lamentable percentage of female graduates remain full-time doctors. They largely avoid the most stressful work in hospitals. A huge proportion quickly leave the profession entirely. In Ireland, only 10% of female GPs intend to pursue full-time practice in the long-term. Some, like the journalist Kevin Myers, have estimated the figure at even less than that, remarking that this is “not a health system; it is a first day on the Somme”. Thus, we in the developed world have to make up the difference by importing doctors from poor countries that need them most.
Discourse on domestic violence is similarly dominated by a presumption that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators. For a long time, studies have been casting doubt on this perception. Erin Pizzey, the founder of the UK charity today known as Refuge, has been subjected to death threats and boycotts because of her claims that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally as capable of violence as men. Reciprocal violence is indeed the most common pattern, and a study of 55,000 US military personnel found that women are just as likely to physically assault their partners. We also know from the US Dept. of Justice’s Survey of State Prison Inmates that women are 24% more likely to kill their children than men, and 32% more likely to kill relatives, children included.
So why does the myth of the oppressed female continue?
Fans of Richard Dawkins might say it is the result of a mental gene, or meme, that predisposes people to believe in certain things. It does seem that we have a natural distaste for seeing women harmed or treated harshly. You are 200 times more likely to see a man die on screen than a woman. It is telling that Hector says to his wife in The Iliad that men would rather die than watch women dying. Its one of the reasons that even in Israel, where women are conscripted, very few serve in combat units and they are exempt from reserve duty. Van Creveld says that in his decades of teaching at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, not one female student has ever had to miss one of his classes for this obligation that affects many of the young men. Its hard to quantify all the ways women are treated more gently and paternalistically in the sphere of law and order. When police respond to an incident, women are much more likely to get off with a warning than men. This applies to every single category of offence, and is even true when factors like prior arrest records are controlled for. In Britain, women are six times as likely to be acquitted of manslaughter, and have an easier time convincing juries that they acted under provocation in cases of murder. Their charms work on male cops, jurors, and judges as much as female ones.
The love does not appear to be reciprocal, if only from the amount of fictional works by female authors imagining a future utopia without men, from Mary Bradley’s 1890 novel Mizora to more recent works like Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) or Dorris Lessing’s The Cleft (2008). Are there any males fantasizing of a world without women? Nonsense. We like them too much.
This brings us to something in the nature of women. Of course, feminism as an ideology should never be synonymous with being female. But there are forms of feminism that give political expression to something almost inherent in the gender. Women are the complaining sex; they seek attention and seethe with a mysterious resentment. Freud might have put this resentment down to penis envy. Coupled with male deference, we have a prescription for disaster. Now, not all women possess the traits just described. History is replete with examples of women with nothing but contempt for those living on the privileges of their gender. The first known female commander, Queen Artemisia of Caria, Van Creveld tells us, told Xerxes that Greeks were as superior to Persians as men are to women. Queen Elizabeth I was fond of cracking what would be called today misogynist jokes.
Yet the grievances of woman appear to be as endless as they often are baseless. In the medical sphere, Florence Nightingale was perceptive enough to admit in Cassandra that many female patients are merely seeking attention. Patterns of suicide (a supreme form of complaint) in the sexes are a good indicator. Men are significantly more likely to kill themselves than women. But worldwide, women are four times as likely to attempt suicide. Perhaps they are remarkable incompetent. Perhaps they are practicing the fine art of appearing vulnerable.
Is feminism related to this dynamic? Just as female patients, such as Freud’s Dora, have based their lives around imagined illnesses and relished the attention, so others find a purpose in grievances, real or imagined.
Some insight may come from the anorgasmic woman, or female frigidity. This has caused no end of anguish in men, who are expected to bear the blame. Yet frigidity is quite a often a ruse; a way to lash out at a male partner. Simone de Beauvoir was quite candid about the subject, finding the courage to address this aspect of womanhood after being ‘cured’ of her frigidity by the American writer Nelson Algreen. What de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex on the subject of frigidity could well describe the mindset of the extreme feminist. Replace the word ‘frigidity’ with ‘feminism’ and you get the point:
Resentment is the most common cause of feminine frigidity; in bed the woman punishes the man for all the wrongs she feels she has endured, by offering him an insulting coldness. There is often an aggressive inferiority complex apparent in her attitudes… She is thus revenged at once upon him and upon herself if he has humiliated her by neglect, if he has made her jealous, if he was slow in declaring her intentions, if he took her as a mistress while she wanted marriage. The grievance can flare up suddenly and set off this reaction even in a liaison that began happily… Frigidity… would appear to be a punishment that woman imposes as much upon herself as upon her partner; wounded in her vanity, she feels resentment against him and against herself, and she denies herself the pleasure.
I will end with another quote, from Van Creveld himself, the final chapter of The Privileged Sex: “It would be nice… if from time to time, amid the torrents of invective feminists spew at us, we occasionally heard a pleasant female voice saying “thank you, Mate”.”
November 8, 2020
Do not read this. It is a load of misogynistic bs written by a man with no idea what he is talking about. There are no actual facts or any sort of real information to be found in this book. Just the demented ravings of a sexist idiot.
March 10, 2020
Very good in its review as to how women are often supported financially, legally, by society. How men continue to do the hard and dangerous work, not many feminists on board deep sea trawlers, or down mines. And whilst women are active in some armed forces what is less well known is how easily they can avoid combat by going AWOL or deserting, with little or no penalty. At the start of the Chechnya war 14% of the Russian Officer Corps was female. They all refused to go. The State did nothing. Equality when it suits ? I couldn't possibly comment !... and don't let me start on Family Courts and Contact with children.
You may well realise about gender equality, and it's not the way around you think it is !
You may well realise about gender equality, and it's not the way around you think it is !
January 21, 2023
absolute shit, this man does not understand what feminism is actually working towards. All the reasons for why women are ‘priviledged’ are centered around the idea that women do not have to work and are not send to die on battlefields and like attention so they complain. This book is not only insulting, but poorly researched (many of the sources were untraceable) and clearly written by a man who hates women and has not done any real time trying to understand why a woman might feel the need or draw towards liberation and feminism.
July 26, 2021
This book took me ages to finish not because it's particularly long nor is it extremely complicated. It was just a frustrating read for me.
As a little bit of background: I like challenging mainstream narratives, so I was intrigued by "The Privileged Sex" when I stumbled upon it. The main thesis of the book, after all, is that the modern gender debate and feminism have it backwards and it's actually the females who are privileged. Whether that premise makes your blood boil or not, it is controversial and, to me, interesting.
Many of Van Creveld's points are undisputably valid. Men live more dangerous lifes and thus have a lower life expectancy. Women are starting to outnumber men in academia. Men outnumber women in deaths by suicide. All of these points, I would say, are quite widely accepted. The root causes, however, aren't. In Van Creveld's opinion, women have it better or at least easier.
While that is certainly an argument one could make (or refute), what was frustrating to me wasn't so much the content. The issue I had was that the arguments weren't made well. Throughout the book, the author relies on anecdotal evidence. I appreciate that statistical evidence is hard to come by but it often seemed like the author didn't even try. Also, at many instances, Van Creveld made his statements too absolute and thus easily falsifiable. There just wasn't enough nuance in the book. Finally, typos and linguistic mistakes could be found throughout.
So all in all I would say "The Privileged Sex" is an interesting read if you are open to have your opinions and assumptions challenged. But the quality of the arguments, the writing, the editing and the book in general just isn't up to par. Weirdly, I have to rate this book very low and still recommend it.
As a little bit of background: I like challenging mainstream narratives, so I was intrigued by "The Privileged Sex" when I stumbled upon it. The main thesis of the book, after all, is that the modern gender debate and feminism have it backwards and it's actually the females who are privileged. Whether that premise makes your blood boil or not, it is controversial and, to me, interesting.
Many of Van Creveld's points are undisputably valid. Men live more dangerous lifes and thus have a lower life expectancy. Women are starting to outnumber men in academia. Men outnumber women in deaths by suicide. All of these points, I would say, are quite widely accepted. The root causes, however, aren't. In Van Creveld's opinion, women have it better or at least easier.
While that is certainly an argument one could make (or refute), what was frustrating to me wasn't so much the content. The issue I had was that the arguments weren't made well. Throughout the book, the author relies on anecdotal evidence. I appreciate that statistical evidence is hard to come by but it often seemed like the author didn't even try. Also, at many instances, Van Creveld made his statements too absolute and thus easily falsifiable. There just wasn't enough nuance in the book. Finally, typos and linguistic mistakes could be found throughout.
So all in all I would say "The Privileged Sex" is an interesting read if you are open to have your opinions and assumptions challenged. But the quality of the arguments, the writing, the editing and the book in general just isn't up to par. Weirdly, I have to rate this book very low and still recommend it.
April 17, 2023
If any claim enjoys even more universal assent than that women are oppressed in the West today, it is that women were even more oppressed in the past. Van Creveld’s book turns the conventional wisdom on its head:
This is most obvious in his first chapter, where he discusses ‘Three Legends’.
Only one of these legends retains currency today.
The alleged seclusion of women in ancient Athens is a controversy restricted to classicists. Moreover, as van Creveld later explains “housing provides comfort as well as shelter” (p211).
In fact, van Creveld shows, accusers were mostly women and many victims were men. Including other spiritual offences like blasphemy, apostasy and heresy, men represent most victims of religious persecution at the time and “women accounted for only 10 percent of… those executed” (p13).
This is common to most times and places, and explains the feminist fixation with witch hunts even today:
Female privilege begins with biology. “Biologically speaking becoming female is taking the path of least resistance” (p31) and “simply becoming male is a risky enterprise” (p37).
A girl automatically becomes a woman; a boy must prove himself a man:
At the book’s end, he concludes:
Work
Men function for Van Creveld as “humanity’s beasts of burden” (p41); women “represent the leisure class” (p105).
Thus, “men’s lot in life is endless hard work whose fruits will be enjoyed largely by others” (p46). Should they fail in this endeavor, “the first to desert them are their wives” (p64), such that they “lose both what they made and those to whom they gave it” (p46).
“During most of history,” Van Creveld reports, “work tended to be seen as something unpleasant, hard and even dangerous” (p66)—as it often was.
Work was “a burden imposed on man as a punishment—one which, monks and protestants apart, most people tried to avoid” (p88-9).
The privileged were those exempt from work—the ‘idle rich’ and ‘leisure class’. The oppressed those who worked—slaves, serfs and the working-classes.
Work is, by definition, something one does, not because one enjoys it, but because of the remuneration offered in recompense.
Most people work because they are forced to do so—whether literally as slaves or by circumstance as wage-slaves.
Only with Protestantism did the idea emerge that work was liberating. But what is forgotten is that:
Van Creveld cynically dismisses the notion that work is liberating:
Expecting women to work is, for van Creveld, hopelessly utopian. Women are unsuited to work as a matter of basic biology.
In China, he claims, “the attempt to make women do agricultural work… led to mass starvation” (p77); in the USSR, making women work “led literally to the country’s collapse” (p104) because “making them work on equal terms with men caused their very will to… give life to be extinguished” (p93).
The link between increased female workforce activity and reduced fertility is plausible. But Van Creveld exaggerates.
The idea that women are unsuited to work was tenable when most work involved hard physical labor. But today even most men work in offices.
This proves that feminists got one thing right: Men do use an ideology of ‘biological determinism’ and ‘male supremacy’ to justify the status quo—but male supremacism is used to justify, not women’s oppression, but rather imposing greater burdens on men, who, being superior, are able to bear them, while women, being weak, are, like children, to be protected and provided for.
Being biologically inferior seems like a good deal!
Redistributing Wealth
If women don’t work, how do they survive?
If the marriage dissolves, the husband’s burden continues:
But today, once earnings in the sex industry are included, women’s earning capacity exceeds men’s.
Van Creveld has his causation backwards. Instead of divorce law compensating women for their lesser earnings, women’s reduced earnings are themselves a response to divorce laws.
Why bother earning money when you can marry it?
Yet, if men earn more; women spend more. Even in the Victorian era, advertisers targeted women (p116). In Britain and France:
Thus, in the first attempt to create a welfare system after the French Revolution
Like modern child benefits, the “Aid to Dependent Children program” involved payments to mothers, not children—in all states but one, fathers got nothing (p132).
Social Security also favored women.
The situation was the same in other jurisdictions (p134).
In the US, these inequities were remedied only in 1975. Then the benefits were scaled back under Reagan.
Van Creveld concludes:
While charitable donations and marriage are voluntary, taxes are mandatory.
Thus, we have gone from the traditional family to what Warren Farrell calls “Government as a Substitute Husband” and “a new nuclear family: woman, government and child”.
Unequal Before the Law
Today, the bias against men in the criminal courts is well-documented.
Van Creveld shows that this is no new thing. Under Salic Law, a person was fined thrice as much for assaulting or killing a woman as they would be for the same offence against men, while “in Yemen the blood money demanded for the death of a woman was 11 times that demanded for a man” (p141)
In the UK and US, husbands were punished for their wives’ crimes (p142). In one case:
War
The next chapter deals with war and repeats much of the material from Van Creveld’s earlier Men, Women & War which I have reviewed here.
Lifespan
Chapter 7 is titled “Quality of Life”, but is mostly concerned with its duration.
Women’s greater lifespan is assumed to be natural. Yet Van Creveld shows that, until the last few centuries, men outlived women.
Rejecting the paradoxical but popular claim that women are somehow stronger, Van Creveld attributes men’s greater longevity under premodern conditions to “greater robustness” and “the fact they did not have to bear children” (p205).
Women’s greater longevity today is attributed to new technologies, yet “from the forceps to the condom to the pill… all these… inventions were made by men” (p207).
Also, since construction workers are invariably male, “the most important amenity men have provided for women is housing” (p211).
In addition, “women’s longevity… reflected their privileged economic position” (p217).
Today, if men outlive women in a few of the poorest countries (e.g. Afghanistan), this is taken as proof of oppression, but:
Historically, inmates of psychiatric hospitals were treated brutally and were mostly men; today mental patients are treated sympathetically and mostly women.
Skeptical of the scientific status of psychiatry, van Creveld contrasts the sympathetic treatment of women diagnosed with hysteria or ME/CFS with the treatment of men with ‘shell shock’ in WWI.
Van Creveld suggests that women are “The Complaining Sex” and “feminism itself may be just a manifestation, writ large, of this particular predisposition” (p237).
As to why, he cites Nietzsche:
Conclusion
Van Creveld concludes the best cure for feminism is war:
Yet it was after WWI that the vote was extended to women in both Britain and America.
At any rate, women’s privileges will continue—“So it has always been, and so… it will always be” (p279). Neither, he suggests, “in our heart of hearts, would we like the situation to change” (p287).
He is right. Men are naturally protective of women.
As to why men feel this way, he ventures:
If any debt exists, then it is clear from van Creveld’s book in what direction it is owing.
“Judged by almost any criterion, women are, and always have been, the privileged sex” (p238)Of course, van Creveld can hardly survey the position of women in every society that has every existed. Thus, he is necessarily selective.
This is most obvious in his first chapter, where he discusses ‘Three Legends’.
Only one of these legends retains currency today.
The alleged seclusion of women in ancient Athens is a controversy restricted to classicists. Moreover, as van Creveld later explains “housing provides comfort as well as shelter” (p211).
“Concern for women’s health, and not oppression, explains why they usually stayed at home” (p215)Yet the belief that witch hunts evince women’s oppression remains widespread.
In fact, van Creveld shows, accusers were mostly women and many victims were men. Including other spiritual offences like blasphemy, apostasy and heresy, men represent most victims of religious persecution at the time and “women accounted for only 10 percent of… those executed” (p13).
This is common to most times and places, and explains the feminist fixation with witch hunts even today:
“It is perhaps the only time in history when more women than men were charged with a serious crime and executed for it” (p152).Explaining Privilege
Female privilege begins with biology. “Biologically speaking becoming female is taking the path of least resistance” (p31) and “simply becoming male is a risky enterprise” (p37).
A girl automatically becomes a woman; a boy must prove himself a man:
“Like an erection, manhood cannot be taken for granted” (p47).Van Creveld is a historian not a biologist, so he fails to identify any ultimate cause for female privilege. The closest he comes is in suggesting that “the lesser efforts demanded of women may have something to do with the psychology of mating” and that “to gain access to women [a man] has to perform and pay” (p62)—i.e. what biologists call sexual selection.
At the book’s end, he concludes:
“Nature having made [men], as Nietzsche put it, the ‘unfruitful animal’, and forced us to compete for women, has turned us into the superfluous sex” (p287).This echoes Bateman's principle.
Work
Men function for Van Creveld as “humanity’s beasts of burden” (p41); women “represent the leisure class” (p105).
Thus, “men’s lot in life is endless hard work whose fruits will be enjoyed largely by others” (p46). Should they fail in this endeavor, “the first to desert them are their wives” (p64), such that they “lose both what they made and those to whom they gave it” (p46).
“Throughout history, wherever immigrants are numerous or conditions are hard and life difficult [e.g. the American frontier], women tend to be few and far between” (p211).Moreover, the fewer the women, “the more precious and exalted they became in the eyes of the men” (p209).
“Women have been all but absent from miners’ and loggers’ camps, construction sites and garbage dumps” (p208).
“In California mining camps during the middle of the 19th century men would pay large sums just to watch a (fully dressed) woman walk around” (p208).Even today, when working wives are the norm:
“Men normally stay in the labor force throughout their adult lives… [whereas] two-thirds of [women] are constantly drifting in and out of employment… over a lifetime career women… work 40 percent fewer hours” (p102-3).Double-standards still apply:
“A man who does not work for a living will probably be called a playboy or a parasite, while such a woman will be called a socialite or a housewife” (p66).Even in the Bible:
“When God drove the first human couple out of Eden, it was Adam and not Eve whom he punished by decreeing that ‘by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread’” (p69).Is Work Fun?
“The biblical term eved, ‘slave’ has only a male form” (p70)
“During most of history,” Van Creveld reports, “work tended to be seen as something unpleasant, hard and even dangerous” (p66)—as it often was.
Work was “a burden imposed on man as a punishment—one which, monks and protestants apart, most people tried to avoid” (p88-9).
The privileged were those exempt from work—the ‘idle rich’ and ‘leisure class’. The oppressed those who worked—slaves, serfs and the working-classes.
Work is, by definition, something one does, not because one enjoys it, but because of the remuneration offered in recompense.
Most people work because they are forced to do so—whether literally as slaves or by circumstance as wage-slaves.
Only with Protestantism did the idea emerge that work was liberating. But what is forgotten is that:
“Protestantism glorified work precisely because it was unpleasant and therefore well suited to doing penance” (p69).The Protestant work ethic is analogous then to practices such as fasting and flagellation.
Van Creveld cynically dismisses the notion that work is liberating:
“The same claims were made by the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ signs that stand at the entrance to Auschwitz” (p69).Too Weak to Work?
Expecting women to work is, for van Creveld, hopelessly utopian. Women are unsuited to work as a matter of basic biology.
In China, he claims, “the attempt to make women do agricultural work… led to mass starvation” (p77); in the USSR, making women work “led literally to the country’s collapse” (p104) because “making them work on equal terms with men caused their very will to… give life to be extinguished” (p93).
The link between increased female workforce activity and reduced fertility is plausible. But Van Creveld exaggerates.
The idea that women are unsuited to work was tenable when most work involved hard physical labor. But today even most men work in offices.
This proves that feminists got one thing right: Men do use an ideology of ‘biological determinism’ and ‘male supremacy’ to justify the status quo—but male supremacism is used to justify, not women’s oppression, but rather imposing greater burdens on men, who, being superior, are able to bear them, while women, being weak, are, like children, to be protected and provided for.
Being biologically inferior seems like a good deal!
Redistributing Wealth
If women don’t work, how do they survive?
“Because they were fed, clothed, housed and looked after by men… A society in which this was not the case has yet to be discovered” (p106).Van Creveld identifies 3 institutions that enable this:
1) MarriageFor van Creveld:
2) Charity
3) Welfare
“The family is an economic institution [whose] purpose is to guarantee that… women will be provided for” (p107).He reports, “the duty of husbands to provide for their wives… is universal” (p110). For example, “a French royal decree of 1214 gave a wife the rights to half her husbands’ property” (p108); while “the husband’s duty to support his wife was… written into… Roman wedding charters” (p110).
If the marriage dissolves, the husband’s burden continues:
“In ancient Egypt, divorce entailed heavy financial penalties for the husband, but none for the wife”Van Creveld rationalizes these arrangements as “compensating women for their lesser earning capacity” (p121).
“Both Hindu and Muslim law oblige husbands to support their divorced wives” (p118).
But today, once earnings in the sex industry are included, women’s earning capacity exceeds men’s.
Van Creveld has his causation backwards. Instead of divorce law compensating women for their lesser earnings, women’s reduced earnings are themselves a response to divorce laws.
Why bother earning money when you can marry it?
Yet, if men earn more; women spend more. Even in the Victorian era, advertisers targeted women (p116). In Britain and France:
“Most of the earnings of working-class married men ended up in the hands of their wives. Many surrendered their pay packet without even opening it, receiving back only what they needed to buy their daily ration of wine and tobacco” (p116)If no husband was available, charity stepped in. Beneficiaries included widows, ex-prostitutes, orphans without dowries, spinsters, unmarried girls—in short, any woman lacking a husband.
“Today, too, women buy 80 percent of everything” (p116-7).
“The mere fact that a person is female may entitle her to benefits which, had she been male, she could have only gotten if she were sick or incapacitated” (p122).Yet men were eligible only if they were married and hence obliged to support a wife, such that the wife was an indirect recipient.
“A poor man received assistance if he had a woman, while a poor woman received assistance if she did not have a man” (p128)In New York in 1820 there were:
“A whole series of relief organizations specifically designed to assist women… [yet] no similar organizations for men; even the largest ‘co-ed’ charitable organization… aided 27 percent more women than men” (p129).Sixty years later, “the Charitable Organization Society… the largest of its kind in New York… assisted four times as many women as men” (p129). Likewise, today, many charities (e.g. women’s shelters) serve only women (p130).
“Whereas women are always entitled to share in any… charity provided to men, men are not permitted to share in many forms of charity provided to women… even if they are … divorced, deserted, widowed, and… have a brood of young children” (p129)Yet increasingly the function of both charity and marriage is usurped by the state.
Thus, in the first attempt to create a welfare system after the French Revolution
“Women, particularly single mothers occupied an important place… on a par with wounded or disabled war veterans” (p126-7).In the US, the first social benefits were mothers’ pensions, which, unlike most pensions, “neither required an investment of capital nor… contributions” (p131).
Like modern child benefits, the “Aid to Dependent Children program” involved payments to mothers, not children—in all states but one, fathers got nothing (p132).
Social Security also favored women.
“Men only got benefits if they worked and contributed… married women received benefits irrespective of work… A widow past retirement age would be entitled to receive benefits. A man past retirement age whose wife had died would get… nothing” (p133).When their husbands died, wives receive the benefits their husbands had earnt—“having supported their wives during their entire lives, [men] were now expected to continue doing so after their deaths” (p134).
The situation was the same in other jurisdictions (p134).
In the US, these inequities were remedied only in 1975. Then the benefits were scaled back under Reagan.
“As soon as women’s benefits were extended to men, those benefits came to be regarded as unnecessary” (p134).Similarly, in Britain, women were long eligible for state pensions at 60, men not until they were 65, despite men both dying earlier and paying more into the system. Now, the age of entitlement has been equalized, but is scheduled to be raised to 70, and has been reduced to a pittance.
Van Creveld concludes:
“On the face of it, a husband, a charitable institution and a modern welfare state are entirely different. In fact, though the details differ, the principle is the same. All are designed partly—and some would say primarily—to transfer resources from men… to women” (p137).One thing remains constant—the burden on men. Thus, in Sweden, men pay 61.5% of tax revenue, but women had 50% greater taxable wealth, received more allowances and received more of their income as state welfare (p135).
While charitable donations and marriage are voluntary, taxes are mandatory.
Thus, we have gone from the traditional family to what Warren Farrell calls “Government as a Substitute Husband” and “a new nuclear family: woman, government and child”.
Unequal Before the Law
Today, the bias against men in the criminal courts is well-documented.
Van Creveld shows that this is no new thing. Under Salic Law, a person was fined thrice as much for assaulting or killing a woman as they would be for the same offence against men, while “in Yemen the blood money demanded for the death of a woman was 11 times that demanded for a man” (p141)
“Medieval German even had a special term, frauenfrevel, or ‘women’s trifle’ for reducing the penalty levied against women [that] amounted to 50% of the fines imposed on men… There existed a whole class of sanctions which, regarded as light, were known as ‘women’s punishments’” (p148).Van Creveld concedes:
“A famous 18th century English law ordained that a husband beating his wife should use a rod… no thicker than the base of his right thumb” (p162)In fact, the famous law is a feminist invention, and wife beating has been illegal in the UK since at least Anglo-Saxon times (see Who Stole Feminism?: p203-7).
In the UK and US, husbands were punished for their wives’ crimes (p142). In one case:
“The jury was asked to consider whether a crippled and bedridden husband should be held responsible for a murder his wife committed in his presence” (p155).Despite so called double-standards, men were also punished more for sexual behavior.
“In republican Rome, the law permitted a husband to kill his wife’s lover but not the woman herself” (p144).Similarly, Leviticus 20:17 prescribes that only the male party be punished for sibling incest (p145). In the Bible, male homosexuality is condemned but lesbianism ignored, just as the Nazis sent only gay men to concentration camps and, as recently as 1993, 22 US states prohibited gay male sex, but none criminalized lesbianism (p146-7).
War
The next chapter deals with war and repeats much of the material from Van Creveld’s earlier Men, Women & War which I have reviewed here.
Lifespan
Chapter 7 is titled “Quality of Life”, but is mostly concerned with its duration.
Women’s greater lifespan is assumed to be natural. Yet Van Creveld shows that, until the last few centuries, men outlived women.
Rejecting the paradoxical but popular claim that women are somehow stronger, Van Creveld attributes men’s greater longevity under premodern conditions to “greater robustness” and “the fact they did not have to bear children” (p205).
Women’s greater longevity today is attributed to new technologies, yet “from the forceps to the condom to the pill… all these… inventions were made by men” (p207).
Also, since construction workers are invariably male, “the most important amenity men have provided for women is housing” (p211).
In addition, “women’s longevity… reflected their privileged economic position” (p217).
Today, if men outlive women in a few of the poorest countries (e.g. Afghanistan), this is taken as proof of oppression, but:
“What is usually regarded as the ‘normal’ sex ratio… is the result of men providing women with all the amenities of civilized life… To do so… they had to go into the wilderness first… they had to engage in backbreaking labor and often they paid the price by dying a lonely death… [without even] a sign to mark their grave” (p211)Why Women Whine
Historically, inmates of psychiatric hospitals were treated brutally and were mostly men; today mental patients are treated sympathetically and mostly women.
Skeptical of the scientific status of psychiatry, van Creveld contrasts the sympathetic treatment of women diagnosed with hysteria or ME/CFS with the treatment of men with ‘shell shock’ in WWI.
Van Creveld suggests that women are “The Complaining Sex” and “feminism itself may be just a manifestation, writ large, of this particular predisposition” (p237).
As to why, he cites Nietzsche:
“Everything about women… is a complaint, and the complaint has one cause: namely the plain fact that a woman stands a much better chance of getting her way by complaining” (p274)This explains why women are more likely to attempt suicide as a cry for help, but men are more likely to succeed (p278).
Conclusion
Van Creveld concludes the best cure for feminism is war:
“War is an unfavorable breeding ground for feminism because, as long as it lasts, women desperately need men to defend them… [and] because… while men are away on campaign women do exactly as they please” (p281)This is plausible. If men have to fight, no woman could envy the male role.
Yet it was after WWI that the vote was extended to women in both Britain and America.
At any rate, women’s privileges will continue—“So it has always been, and so… it will always be” (p279). Neither, he suggests, “in our heart of hearts, would we like the situation to change” (p287).
He is right. Men are naturally protective of women.
As to why men feel this way, he ventures:
“After all, it was women who gave us life. In a way, all we are doing is returning a debt” (p287).Yet if men do owe a debt, it is not to womankind as a whole, but only to our own mother. Yet fathers also play a vital role in the conception of offspring, and the pain of childbirth is hardly equal to the hardship men endure to protect and provide for women.
If any debt exists, then it is clear from van Creveld’s book in what direction it is owing.
June 26, 2015
Martin van Creveld's "The Privileged Sex" is an academic look at the rapidly changing way that women interact and participate in the world by an expert military historian and analyst.
I saw this book as Dr Van Creveld's search for his own and personal answer to the question. The book is written as an a fairly low-key academic review rather than as a document directed at convincing the reader of the author's conclusions. Additionally, the book is one of several written by the Dr Van Creveld in his effort to understand the rapidly changing ways that women participate in the world.
Van Creveld's conclusions might be considered revisionist to some. Frankly, I had the feeling in reading him, that he was looking for the best argument, and not interested arriving at some predetermined conclusion.
I would recommend this book to those interested in reading the account of a well respected and well known academic who has studied and written about many aspects of history for many decades.
I saw this book as Dr Van Creveld's search for his own and personal answer to the question. The book is written as an a fairly low-key academic review rather than as a document directed at convincing the reader of the author's conclusions. Additionally, the book is one of several written by the Dr Van Creveld in his effort to understand the rapidly changing ways that women participate in the world.
Van Creveld's conclusions might be considered revisionist to some. Frankly, I had the feeling in reading him, that he was looking for the best argument, and not interested arriving at some predetermined conclusion.
I would recommend this book to those interested in reading the account of a well respected and well known academic who has studied and written about many aspects of history for many decades.
April 16, 2021
Best book I have read in a long time. It was absolutely refreshing to read this. Amidst all the complaints and modern extreem feminism, I thank God for this book.
November 26, 2024
Ages ago someone asked me to read a book called Invisible Women. And so I did. And I got very upset about it and wrote an upset review. I think that review has more likes then any other review I’ve ever written. There are also lots of comments under it. A couple are from men who invariably say I only wrote the review to either impress a girlfriend or because I like it when women praise me. It couldn’t just be that the book documents how the taken-for-granted gender is male and how females are too often after-thoughts, if even that. And that, despite decades and decades of women pointing out that this problem exists, it never seems to go away.
Once, when I heard about that test they have for films where they see if there is a scene where two women speak to each other about something other than one of the male characters, I assumed that would improve too – just by being pointed out to people. But it never has. It is not that there is a conspiracy to make men the central characters of films, where it is almost impossible that women could think of anything else to talk about other than these men, it is that our culture normalises this to the extent that even when it is pointed out, we still can’t think outside of the constraints of these gendered stereotypes.
A couple of days ago a man sort of recommended that I read this book as a kind of curative for how I had been betraying my sex. He said, and at least he was honest, that this book was neither subtle nor unbiased. The book is written by an academic – it really ought to be both subtle and unbiased, or nuanced maybe, but his proved to be a remarkably accurate description of the book.
The whole idea can be boiled down to a couple of points. In the battle of the sexes, men get the worst deal. Women are lazy and neurotic. They are self-obsessed and spoilt rotten. Men are prone to die young, get injured at work, forced to pay for the raising of children – whether or not they are their own – and suffer endless other indignities. Women generally either lie about being raped or exaggerate. Some of them only complain years after and do so either to get attention or revenge or both. Women are looked after by men, men have to put up with women’s shit. There is barely a line from mensphere that doesn’t get a run in this book.
I can’t pretend that I can recommend the book. Nothing said here really addresses the issues that feminism is concerned with. If you want to read a better book on feminism and masculinity – particularly Black masculinity – I would suggest bell hooks We Real Cool. This author seems to think that feminists do not believe there are any benefits for women under patriarchy – but only a fool would say such a thing. As Foucault says – if all power did was to repress it would not last long. It needs to also, and mostly, provide pleasure and rewards, and that is the best way for it to achieve its ends. The book ends by saying all of this is partly biological and partly social – but the book itself spends so little time considering the social reasons for the differences in the tastes of the sexes that he might as well have not mentioned this at all. This is really an aggressively biologically deterministic book. Even when he is describing the social benefits and pleasures of gendered differences he hardly scratches the surface. Often he will say that it is women themselves who encourage women’s subservience, but says this as if it was a lay down misère, rather than something that needs to be explained in social terms. He also thinks that because something has happened for a long time it must be how it must always have happen. But humans are cultural animals, not merely biological ones – and complex social behaviours need more than simplistic biological explanations. Frequently, his only explanation is that women are inexplicable or prone to being neurotic. Hardly satisfying explanations in a book that is surely about explaining the differences between the sexes and why women ‘have it so good’.
At one point he says men are much more likely to be killed in wars. This is ironic at the moment, given he is an Israeli academic and where his nation’s army is killing so many women and children – at least 70% of all people who have died in Gaza have been women and children.
I don’t intend to check his figures – some of them seem a bit iffy. But even if they are all true, it hardly matters. To argue that masculine domination of society has costs to males, as well as females, is hardly a startling revelation. And that is ultimately the point of feminism. It is why so many conservatives get so upset about Trans people. They may be a tiny minority, but their very existence is a fundamental challenge to the strict gender divide – Trans people can’t be ignored because they pose a direct threat to the fundamental division in our society and show there are alternatives. He could also have said that many of the most rabid anti-trans rights people are women. What any of this is meant to prove is beyond me. You could certainly have found Black people before the abolition of slavery who could not conceive of being anything but slaves. One of the great truths in life is that we respond to stereotypes society imposes upon us, even the most negative, frequently by adopting the characterisations those stereotypes present.
I can’t recommend this book. It is rather dull and the ‘evidence’ it presents is almost laughable. The patriarchy harms everyone – male and female alike. I’m a feminist not because I want women to dominate the world – he could just as well have said that female leaders rarely prove to be more peace loving than male ones – and this is undoubtedly true – again, he could have relied on an example from his own country to prove this. Having more female leaders is, as they say in the classics, a necessary, but not sufficient way to make the world a better place. What we really need are leaders who seek to fundamentally change the structure of our society to allow us all to become more fully human beyond the dichotomy of hyper male and female. The extent to which women are given equal rights with men is clear indication of how advanced a society is. That he can list a series of ‘benefits’ women derive from our current social relationships is almost beside the point. The point is that power too often sits in the hands of men. Ignoring this social fact ignores too much and makes his arguments hollow and without substance.
Once, when I heard about that test they have for films where they see if there is a scene where two women speak to each other about something other than one of the male characters, I assumed that would improve too – just by being pointed out to people. But it never has. It is not that there is a conspiracy to make men the central characters of films, where it is almost impossible that women could think of anything else to talk about other than these men, it is that our culture normalises this to the extent that even when it is pointed out, we still can’t think outside of the constraints of these gendered stereotypes.
A couple of days ago a man sort of recommended that I read this book as a kind of curative for how I had been betraying my sex. He said, and at least he was honest, that this book was neither subtle nor unbiased. The book is written by an academic – it really ought to be both subtle and unbiased, or nuanced maybe, but his proved to be a remarkably accurate description of the book.
The whole idea can be boiled down to a couple of points. In the battle of the sexes, men get the worst deal. Women are lazy and neurotic. They are self-obsessed and spoilt rotten. Men are prone to die young, get injured at work, forced to pay for the raising of children – whether or not they are their own – and suffer endless other indignities. Women generally either lie about being raped or exaggerate. Some of them only complain years after and do so either to get attention or revenge or both. Women are looked after by men, men have to put up with women’s shit. There is barely a line from mensphere that doesn’t get a run in this book.
I can’t pretend that I can recommend the book. Nothing said here really addresses the issues that feminism is concerned with. If you want to read a better book on feminism and masculinity – particularly Black masculinity – I would suggest bell hooks We Real Cool. This author seems to think that feminists do not believe there are any benefits for women under patriarchy – but only a fool would say such a thing. As Foucault says – if all power did was to repress it would not last long. It needs to also, and mostly, provide pleasure and rewards, and that is the best way for it to achieve its ends. The book ends by saying all of this is partly biological and partly social – but the book itself spends so little time considering the social reasons for the differences in the tastes of the sexes that he might as well have not mentioned this at all. This is really an aggressively biologically deterministic book. Even when he is describing the social benefits and pleasures of gendered differences he hardly scratches the surface. Often he will say that it is women themselves who encourage women’s subservience, but says this as if it was a lay down misère, rather than something that needs to be explained in social terms. He also thinks that because something has happened for a long time it must be how it must always have happen. But humans are cultural animals, not merely biological ones – and complex social behaviours need more than simplistic biological explanations. Frequently, his only explanation is that women are inexplicable or prone to being neurotic. Hardly satisfying explanations in a book that is surely about explaining the differences between the sexes and why women ‘have it so good’.
At one point he says men are much more likely to be killed in wars. This is ironic at the moment, given he is an Israeli academic and where his nation’s army is killing so many women and children – at least 70% of all people who have died in Gaza have been women and children.
I don’t intend to check his figures – some of them seem a bit iffy. But even if they are all true, it hardly matters. To argue that masculine domination of society has costs to males, as well as females, is hardly a startling revelation. And that is ultimately the point of feminism. It is why so many conservatives get so upset about Trans people. They may be a tiny minority, but their very existence is a fundamental challenge to the strict gender divide – Trans people can’t be ignored because they pose a direct threat to the fundamental division in our society and show there are alternatives. He could also have said that many of the most rabid anti-trans rights people are women. What any of this is meant to prove is beyond me. You could certainly have found Black people before the abolition of slavery who could not conceive of being anything but slaves. One of the great truths in life is that we respond to stereotypes society imposes upon us, even the most negative, frequently by adopting the characterisations those stereotypes present.
I can’t recommend this book. It is rather dull and the ‘evidence’ it presents is almost laughable. The patriarchy harms everyone – male and female alike. I’m a feminist not because I want women to dominate the world – he could just as well have said that female leaders rarely prove to be more peace loving than male ones – and this is undoubtedly true – again, he could have relied on an example from his own country to prove this. Having more female leaders is, as they say in the classics, a necessary, but not sufficient way to make the world a better place. What we really need are leaders who seek to fundamentally change the structure of our society to allow us all to become more fully human beyond the dichotomy of hyper male and female. The extent to which women are given equal rights with men is clear indication of how advanced a society is. That he can list a series of ‘benefits’ women derive from our current social relationships is almost beside the point. The point is that power too often sits in the hands of men. Ignoring this social fact ignores too much and makes his arguments hollow and without substance.
October 25, 2025
A brilliant, in-depth examination of the human condition through a gendered lens.
Great erudition expressed in bracing, lucid and occasionally edgy prose by a superior intellect in full command of his massive trove of material, every assertion supported by evidence plucked from a wide range of historical and scholarly sources. Van Creveld shoves the flimsy curtains of feminist “theory” aside, revealing the plain, unvarnished and immutable truths about the nature of men and women that we need to understand, acknowledge and respect if a healthy society is what we want.
Great erudition expressed in bracing, lucid and occasionally edgy prose by a superior intellect in full command of his massive trove of material, every assertion supported by evidence plucked from a wide range of historical and scholarly sources. Van Creveld shoves the flimsy curtains of feminist “theory” aside, revealing the plain, unvarnished and immutable truths about the nature of men and women that we need to understand, acknowledge and respect if a healthy society is what we want.
May 30, 2025
Very important book on the truth of men - women relations in modern society.
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