Milling on Mill

At home over the break I had an interesting discussion with Maddie concerning equality among the sexes in the Mormon church. Within the Mormon church, if I understand this properly, the highest levels of power are not available to women. It's a boys club up at the very top, and like many who have come before them the Mormons have justified this arrangement by declaring this the Will of God.

(In this particular case, the Mormons site that Jesus was a man, and his twelve disciples were all men. Thus, as is obvious to anyone with half a brain, if God had Wanted women in charge, He Would Have Chosen A Women...apparently, God voted for Barack. Booya!)

The discussion circled around and around for a while, but what disturbed me most was that Maddie did not seem to feel that this state of affairs placed her in any unfair position. She had merely accepted what the men of her church had told her, which was that her place, As A Woman, was not at the top, but rather in the home. The fact that attaining a position at the top is barred to her didn't seem to strike her as unjust or as a sign of a lack of freedom.

I remember at one point scoffing at her arguments for why Women Have Their Place, and telling her specifically that everything she was saying were the very lies men had created to keep women where they wanted them. It was rather hard to explain, but her arguments were obvious to me, as a man, because I understood them as the arguments I knew a woman would listen to and believe.

I want to try and be clear, because what I'm saying is something men almost never admit to women. Men have lies we tell women (most of them so second nature now we actually believe them ourselves). And the lies we tell are for a specific purpose: to get what we want. Further, we tell these specific lies because we know they work.

I'll circle back to this, but the reason I bring it up here is that I came across a reading which actually made the very point I was trying to make to Maddie. Roughly 150 years ago the philosopher John Stuart Mill (one of the originators of utilitarianism) wrote an essay called The Subjection of Women. And in this essay Mill lays out his thoughts about how women have become unequal in society and why their eventual equality will be good for all mankind.

Mill's influence on Western thought is huge, as he was one of the original writers trying to form a theoretical basis for the ideas and applications of democracy. The very concepts we have today about freedom, liberty and individuality come largely from a small group of writers, and Mill was one of them. Often, today, reading Mill's work we find nothing considerably reactionary, and it is hard to remember that at the time Mill was writing of individual freedom and the right of the individual to be independent of his nation state no one had ever claimed such a thing before.

As to Mill's thoughts on women's equality, they were largely lambasted and attacked at the time. But they serve my purpose here, so I will quote at length:

“All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments.

All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose.

All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of the other. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man...

And, this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness.”

Mill's argument is more than saying that women ought to be equal to men because they can do anything a man can. His argument is rather more radical. Mill is directly stating the fact that men have been lying to women for so long and so completely and totally, that they have shaped female character into exactly what they wanted it to be.

Mill identifies what is the greatest danger in slavery. Not in enslaving someone physically, through force, but in enslaving their mind. Mill sees this quite clearly, and it is worth pointing out that Negro slaves in America eventually understood the same thing, which is why they worked tirelessly to educate themselves, because only through their minds could they become truly free.

While much of the inequality of Mill's time has disappeared on the march to our own day, the pernicious effects of men's lies to women are still pervasive, and they are still powerful, and not just within the Mormon church.

It is worth asking how much of the feminine character is truly a natural quality of womanhood, and how much of it is simply what men want women to be, and thus have trained them to be.

For example (an argument Maddie made to me): do women truly have a more natural bond to their children than men, and thus are better at raising children? Is this a truism?

Or is it possible that the concept of a woman's “natural” ability is simply the end result of a package of lies men have sold to women for centuries, thus allowing the man to go about his business and leave the children to the woman?

Already I hear the women hollering: But I DO feel more connected to my children! I AM the more natural caregiver! It IS in my nature!

And yet is this not the very belief you have been told to hold dear all of your life? Is this not what you have been told for so many years is what defines you as a woman?

I will tell you here and now, as a man, that this is without question a wonderful lie we men want you to believe. Hell, we men want to believe it ourselves, and indeed we do. We've been saying it for so long no one even questions it any longer. It is considered truth.

But I know many men who are the equals of their wives at parenting. And I know a considerable number of single fathers who are excellent parents, as good as any woman. And, in spite of the common saying, exceptions do not prove the rule, they show that the rule is false.

Women, I find, tend to have a hard time digesting this argument. I imagine this arises because they do not wish to fathom the extent of the lies they have been told, and, in many cases, they do not wish to believe such dishonesty can be found in the men they love. Women know so many “nice” men, who would never tell such lies.

Sadly, this line of thinking is wrong. Much like telling a fifteen year old girl that the boy she is in love with thinks about her naked (no, he's a nice boy!) and wants to have sex with her (nice boys don't have such dirty thoughts), I will tell you that yes, good and decent men lie to women (although I'll extend the caveat that they often don't even realize their doing so, if that makes you feel any better).

But women need to get over their squeamishness about recognizing that they've been lied to, and that the lies are effective. Very, very effective. Because the final thing I told Maddie is perhaps the most true.

Men will not give up power.

Power, as history shows us, is not willingly relinquished. Women, if they want equality, must take power from men. We will not give it up without a fight, and we will not turn it over simply because you ask nicely. We will not, in fact, turn it over even if you demand it. You must take it.

Until women do, they will continue to be the unequal citizens they are.