Why American Women Are Becoming More Like Men!

Cultural Factors that Are Reversing
the Male-Female Roles

Boyé Lafayette De Mente

It is common knowledge [not accepted by everybody] that males and females have a number of genetic traits that make them think and behave differently.

While the strength of these genetic attributes varies in individuals—sometimes to such a degree that neither the male nor female concerned behaves within the range that is typical and expected of their gender—the two sexes are usually different enough that they have traditionally thought and lived in two different worlds.

From the beginning of human history there was both figuratively and literally a man’s world and a woman’s world, and in most societies these two worlds were separated by barriers that were natural as well as those that were created by men to control women.

This latter factor—the creation of artificial barriers by men to control women—apparently came about for the simple reason that human males, like their lower-order animals relatives, were driven by instinct to control the females in their group so they would have guaranteed sexual access to them.

At first this male rationale was no doubt an individual thing. But as time passed and spirits and gods were created, men made their dominance over women a spiritual thing mandated by their godly creations—so they could attribute their superiority to the divinities and not have to take any guff from females.

Of course, there have been a number of known societies that were ruled over by women but these women did not become rulers as a result of their own abilities or actions. They invariably inherited their exalted positions because they were members of a ruling family that failed to produce a male heir.

Why Women Were Created as an After-Thought by “God”
In short, the obvious animal origins of the human race resulted in females automatically being treated as inferior by larger, stronger males, and then when males got around to creating gods they made sure that their gods “created women” as an after-thought to serve men, sexually and otherwise.

This situation has existed virtually unchanged until recent times—and still today exists to varying degrees in a number of societies, with the largest and most obvious of these being Islamic and Christian. Both Christianity and Islam have traditionally based one of the rationales for their existence on keeping women in their place—meaning uneducated and subservient to men.

The first colonists who came to America had, of course, been programmed in the rigid, anti-feminine and inhumane sexual taboos that prevailed in England and elsewhere in Europe at that time. These religious-oriented concepts continued to make a travesty of the sexual lives of both men and women—but especially women—throughout the early history of the United States.

The same outmoded concepts of the proper role of women in all areas of life continued to prevail until the mid-1900s. It may seem unimaginable now but American men who had long regarded themselves as the most enlightened people on the planet, did not permit women to vote until well into the 20th century.

And still today there are many areas of life in the United States that are either totally forbidden to women, or they are discouraged from attempting to enter these areas. But this long practice of holding women down and denying them the chance to develop their potential, sexually and otherwise, is now having astounding and unanticipated consequences.

Beginning in the last half of the 19th century a few women began to poke tiny holes in the barriers that men had erected against the entire female race…to keep them in their place. As the years passed, these holes gradually grew bigger and bigger as more and more women joined this earliest group of female pioneers who were determined to break down the male-made barriers that had penned them in and down since the dawn of human history.

How World Wars I and II Resulted in Women Acting Like Men
Finally in the 1920s—after the upheaval of World War I had resulted in hundreds of thousands of women joining the workforce and doing jobs previously done only by men—the female revolution in the United States began in earnest.

Large numbers of women began to frequent speakeasy nightclubs, to drink and dance with what for the times was wild abandon. A short-lived but spectacular economic boom spurred the appearance of hundreds of thousands of cars that contributed to both more frequent and more intimate relations with men as well as helping to provide upper middleclass and upper class women with more independence than females had ever had before.

The advent of movies in the 1920s was soon to be a boon to the growing freedom of females in the United States—a technological advance that, like the automobile, was to have a fundamental influence on American society.

This female revolution was considerably muted by the depression of the 1930s but the entry of the United States into World War II in 1941 put it back on track—and it has been racing forward at full speed ever since.

Once again millions of American women entered the wartime workforce, and by the end of the war the economy of the country had grown so large with so many new “female-type” occupations that most of these millions never left the workforce when the war ended.

The war that took millions of young men away from home and resulted in so many women working out of the home changed the traditional family lifestyle and child-raising in fundamental ways. Women of all ages, including teenage girls, had a degree of personal freedom unprecedented in history—and once they had it there was no way they were going to let it go.

Girls and young women by the millions began to do the things that in the past only boys and men had done. Ordinary girls and women became more fashion conscious and more conscious of their personal appearance. They began to dress and to wear makeup designed to attract the attention of males. They became both more aggressive and more receptive in their relations with men.

The rapid increase in the number of motion pictures depicting the glamour and sex-filled lives of movie stars became a major influence on the attitudes and behavior of young females. The widespread proliferation of television from the mid-1950s added to the economic and social revolution that was remaking the mindset of American females.

Girls and women began to compete with males in school, in the workplace and in all forms of recreation. In this new environment, the idea that sexual passivity was the natural lot of females began to fade—something that many young men applauded but they had no inkling about where this fundamental change in male-female relations could lead.

The Smashing of Sexual Restraints on Women
The 1960s saw the blooming of the Hippie movement—a kind of social protest created by the young who were outraged by the faults they saw in the prevailing culture. A big part of this movement was doing away with virtually all sexual restraints—a movement that resulted in many young women being able to explore and exercise their sexuality in ways that had not been available to females before.

From that period, the female revolution in the United States, promoted by movies, television, magazines and feminist books, became an overwhelming force that could not be slowed down, much less stopped. However, most of the impetus and power that the revolution gained was not specifically related to the aspirations of feminists or the self-motivated expressions of female frustration.

Much of the power of the movement came from the built-in male lust for profits that fueled the American economy. In short, publishers of magazines and books and producers of movies and television shows discovered that sex sells—and the one area of human sexuality that had never been really talked about, much less economically exploited, was female sexuality.

By the 1970s the whole entertainment industry was into selling soft-core pornography. By the 1990s soft and hard-core pornography based on female sexuality was one of the largest and most profitable industries in the United States.

In fact, it can be said that by the last decades of the 20th century virtually the entire American economy rested on sexual titillation—ostensibly aimed at men but also appealing to females.

Today, probably as much as 90 percent of all advertising and marketing programs in the United States are based on exploiting the sexual appeal of women. Teenage girls and young women in various stages of nudity make up a big percentage of all television fare. Most male as well as female pop singers are backed up by teams of semi-nude girls and women who hump and pump and gyrate in simulated sex orgies.

Destruction of the Female Mystique
This so-called entertainment has destroyed most of the mystery, most of the mystique, of feminine sexuality—ripping it away like the proverbial fiction-novel bodice. The subtlety that is a major part of male-female romance has also been dramatically diminished.

All of the positive attributes that have traditionally distinguished women—their mystery, their subtlety, that indescribable essence of femininity that made them so special—not to mention their importance and prowess in nurturing—have been diminished…more by the actions of money-addicted men than by the legitimate aspirations of women themselves.

Women are now far more sexually exposed and exploited than men, thanks to the over-reaction that has resulted from religious-oriented attempts to conceal and control the sexuality of women—and this is a subject I explored in detail in my novel Eros’ Revenge—Brave New World of American Sex. In Greek mythology Eros was the god of love.

At first, Eros represented the cosmic principle of harmony in all things. Later he degenerated into a powerful wanton, capable of carrying his victims to the peak of sensual ecstasy, or causing them to suffer the punishment of the damned.

The sexual restraints and taboos that misguided religious leaders placed on women in the early history of civilization condemned them to suffer the punishment of the damned—and still today makes the world of many women a Hell on earth. The rapidly growing sexual emancipation of American women is both good and bad. The good part is obvious. The bad part is that it is diminishing the fundamental feminine factor in their character and personality, and turning them into quasi-males.

As I noted in my essay on the diminishing of the stud factor in American males, there are now female boxers, female wrestlers, female weight-lifters, female body-builders (some with muscles that are grotesque), females who play football on mostly male teams…and female soldiers who are actually called upon to fight and kill.

I also pointed out that the more masculine the behavior of women, the more nature compensates by making the behavior of men more feminine. And vice-versa: the more feminine the attitudes and behavior of men, the more masculine females become in their thinking and behavior.

So as incredible as it is, men themselves have set the stage for American women to become more masculine—a phenomenon that has already changed the dynamics of male-female relations in the U.S. and will go much further before it reaches some kind of equilibrium…which could be that women will be permanently on top.

They are, after all, the most sexually potent of the human species—a fact that men have feared and fought against since before our ancestors climbed down out of the trees.

There is extraordinary irony in the fact that the few powerful men who have ruled the Christian churches and Islamic mosques since the inception of these cults have unwittingly played the role of Eros, and particularly in the United States and other so-called Christian societies, the former god of love is now having his revenge.

The day will also come, inevitably, when Moslem women will also escape from the clutches of the Islamic clergy and be able to live normal lives.
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Copyright © 2007 by Boye Lafayette De Mente.

EROS’ REVENGE—Brave New World of American Sex is available as an ebook. To go to the “buy page” please click on the title. To see a list of 60-plus other books by the author, go to http://www.phoenixbookspublishers.com/.