A bit rich

“What most men want to know is: How come we live in a society that appears to be run by men, but feels like it’s run by women? The answer is pretty simple. The men who run modern society – the politicians, businessmen, educators and priests – are men who think like women… Why do they do this? Because women have more purchasing power, more voting power and more cultural power than men. Women control the marketplace, the polling place and the content of our schools, churches and media...”

That’s from Rich Zubaty. He goes on: “Ten thousand years ago, when a man woke up in the morning, he grabbed his spear and walked out into the forests and prairies. There he listened to the bird calls, smelled the air, touched animal tracks. He sat in itchy bushes waiting for game, scanning the treetops hoping to spot bees returning to their hives full of honey... And he prayed.

“He prayed to the Deer God to sacrifice one of its own to feed the human tribe. He prayed to the Monarch of Pheasants and the Father of Fish. And most of all he prayed to the Great Mystery, the Great Spirit, that secreted all these forms...”

Zubaty’s praises are regularly hymned by Magill editor and Irish Times columnist John Waters. Zubaty’s book, What Men Know That Women Don’t was hailed, again, as “brilliant” in Waters’ IT column on August 27th. Zubaty, says Waters, is an insightful analyst and explicator of gender relations. It is not putting it too strongly to say that Waters offers Zubaty as a font of golden wisdom, a gender guru for all men.

The man praying to the Great Mystery, the Great Spirit, continues Zubaty, “was humble and vulnerable and dependent on the awesome power of nature, and he prayed to be in harmony with these incomprehensible forces. He was not in the business of sitting at a desk counting beans, naming feelings, labeling or sorting things. He couldn’t even talk out loud to the other guys he was with for fear of scaring off wary prey. He was operating from a deep intuitive well, trying to seduce nature, trying to coax a livelihood from it. This wasn’t about killing. It was about praying. Praying to the Deer God – preying on deer. Does this sound at all rational to you?”

The quotes are taken from Zubaty’s own explanation (on www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/ 5225/) of the philosophy behind What Men Know That Women Don’t.

What were women doing at this formative stage in the development of human society while the reverent menfolk were accessing the Great Spirit?

“Meanwhile, back at the tent, his wife was five months pregnant. She was manufacturing garments out of animal and/or vegetable fibres to be ready when the baby arrived in four months. She had solidified her position in the hierarchy, the pecking order, the bureaucracy, the de facto government of the tribe... She was dominating and controlling everything she possibly could within her restricted domain. That was her nature, her approach to life. And that is precisely what women and government try to do today.

“The highly touted Great Earth Mother of recent popular rediscovery and adulation was a control freak – the prototype of modern government, especially modern European government – an anal retentive, female, control mindscape.

“It is known that on the 21st of June and the 21st of December virgin boys were castrated and bled to death for her edification and honour. They were fed to the Mother, sacrificed to her, their blood poured onto the dirt of the fields to enrich the anticipated harvest. This was the cult of the Great Earth Mother that pushed out the Deer God and accompanied the emergence of agriculture. She was brutal. She was an odious witch”.

Naturally, soulful men sought to shrug off the brutal rule of the odious coven.

“And that’s why men took religion back. That’s how the so-called Patriarchy began. Men were sick and tired of having their balls cut off. Literally! Abraham had to be willing to sacrifice his son Isaac before God could be satisfied of his loyalty. That was the mindscape of that era – the feminist, Astartian mindscape. Then Jesus came along and said, ‘I am the sacrifice. You don’t have to sacrifice flesh – the boy or the ram who represents the boy – anymore.’ And through his crucifixion he both fulfilled and put an end to the cult of Astarte, the Great Earth Mother...”

But, laments Zubaty, although Jesus, through his death, put an end to the cult, the practices and assumptions built upon it still prevail. There is an echo here of the Christian fundamentalists’ belief that the triumph of Jesus over the powers of darkness still goes unacknowledged in godless society.

There is no indication in Zubaty’s account of his beliefs that it is meant to be taken other than literally, or anything in Waters’ writing to suggest that he takes it as metaphor or parable or poetical allusion. Both men – Zubaty explicitly, Waters implicitly – present the thesis as a factual account of a catastrophic historical defeat of men by women: it’s as a result of this defeat, the thesis runs, that men today still groan under gender oppression.

The fact that a prominent Irish commentator holds such a comical charlatan in awe and believes in such risible tosh is neither here nor there. What makes the Waters/Zubaty thesis worth taking seriously is that Waters’ has erected upon it a view of the contemporary world in which all the ills that afflict him, as he believes they afflict all men, flow from the cruel oppression of men by women.

This view intersects with the real world in Waters’ frequent polemics against “the horrors of feminised education” and so forth. He is particularly passionate about the mainstream media’s allegedly unbalanced and unjust presentation of the issue of domestic violence. Waters returns to this theme again and again. Campaigns against violence against women, he argues, are at best wrong-headed, at worst consciously calculated to exculpate women and excoriate men through the suppression or misrepresentation of the true facts. In a typical piece some months ago (February 26th), he declared: “As I have written many times, the evidence of every reputable independent, gender-neutral study in the Western world has found that such violence is a 50-50 phenomenon, i.e., it is perpetrated to a roughly equal extent by men and women.

“Whenever I write this, there follows a rash of missives to the letters page opposite, demanding to know my sources. I will mention one survey in particular. British Home Office survey 191 (1999), the biggest in the world, canvassed the experiences of over 16,000 people, asking the same questions of men and women. The core finding was that 4.2 percent of women and 4.2 percent of men had been assaulted by a current or former partner in the previous year”.

The key phrase here is “core finding”, suggesting that this – ”such violence is a 50-50 phenomenon” – is the main conclusion of the survey. In fact, nowhere in the report is any such thing offered as “the core finding”.

The paragraph after the one recording that equal numbers of women and men said they had been assaulted by a partner in the previous year reads: “Women were twice as likely as men to have been injured by a partner in the last year, and three times as likely to have suffered frightening threats. They were also more likely to have been assaulted three or more times”.

It is difficult to understand how Waters can have missed this paragraph, and even more difficult in light of it to understand how he can have come away from the report of the survey believing that it sustains the conclusion that inter-gender violence is “a 50-50 phenomenon”.

Moving beyond last-year experience to live-time experience, the survey found that, “Women were far more likely to say that they had experienced domestic assault at some time in their lives”; that, “Women were more likely to be injured than men”; and that, “Three quarters of the chronic (as opposed to intermittent) victims were women”.

This, clearly, directly contradicts what Waters presented to Irish Times readers as the “core finding”.

While the official Summary of the report doesn’t highlight any of its conclusions as “the core finding”, it does offer a precis of its findings in a final paragraph. This reads: “Within the twelve months previous to the survey, 4.2 percent of both women and men aged 16 to 59 said they had been assaulted by a current or former partner. Last-year victims of assault were asked whether they had been injured, even slightly, on any occasion within the year. Women were twice as likely to say they had: 2.2 percent said they had suffered injury at the hands of a partner compared to 1.1 percent of men. As with the life-time estimates, women were far more likely to say they had been on the receiving end of frightening threats: 3.8 percent said they had, compared to 1.2 percent of men. These finding suggest that the experiences of female victims are qualitatively different from that of most male victims. Not only are they more likely to be injured in assaults, they are also far more likely to be living in fear of their partners”.

That’s the concluding passage in a document which Waters told Irish Times readers led to the conclusion that “such violence is... perpetrated to a roughly equal extent by men and women.”